The world's population is predicted to exceed nine billion by 2050 and there is increasing concern about the capability of agriculture to feed such a large population. Foresight studies on food security are frequently based on crop yield trends estimated from yield time series provided by national and regional statistical agencies. Various types of statistical models have been proposed for the ...

The impact of social influence causes people to adopt the behaviour of others when interacting with other individuals. The effects of social influence can be direct or indirect. Direct social influence is the result of an individual directly influencing the opinion of another, while indirect social influence is a process taking place when an individual's opinion and behaviour is affected by the...

In this paper, we investigate the dynamical properties of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals of humans in sleep. By using a modified random walk method, we demonstrate that scale-invariance is embedded in EEG signals after a detrending procedure is applied. Furthermore, we study the dynamical evolution of the probability density function (PDF) of the detrended EEG signals by nonextensive statis...

We describe a quantitative methodology to characterize the vulnerability of U.S. urban centers to terrorist attack, using a place-based vulnerability index and a database of terrorist incidents and related human casualties. Via generalized linear statistical models, we study the relationships between vulnerability and terrorist events, and find that our place-based vulnerability metric signific...

In the last decades, the use of the epidemiological prevalence ratio (PR) instead of the odds ratio has been debated as a measure of association in cross-sectional studies. This article addresses the main difficulties in the use of statistical models for the calculation of PR: convergence problems, availability of tools and inappropriate assumptions. We implement the direct approach to estimate...

Maximum likelihood estimation of mixed effect baseline category logit models for multinomial longitudinal data can be prohibitive due to the integral dimension of the random effects distribution. We propose to use multidimensional unfolding methodology to reduce the dimensionality of the problem. As a by-product, readily interpretable graphical displays representing change are obtained. The met...

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Co-occurrence in food requirements of offspring and food availability is a key factor determining breeding success. Prey availability is typically dependent on environmental conditions that are different from those influencing the predator's decision regarding whether or not to initiate breeding, and is not always optimal at the peak of reproduction requirements. We investigated this relationsh...

A Confounder is a variable whose presence affects the variables being studied so that the results do not reflect the actual relationship. There are various ways to exclude or control confounding variables including Randomization, Restriction and Matching. But all these methods are applicable at the time of study design. When experimental designs are premature, impractical, or impossible, resear...

Animals learn both whether and when a reward will occur. Neural models of timing posit that animals learn the mean time until reward perturbed by a fixed relative uncertainty. Nonetheless, animals can learn to perform actions for reward even in highly variable natural environments. Optimal inference in the presence of variable information requires probabilistic models, yet it is unclear whether...