The issue of production function estimation has received recent attention, particularly in agricultural economics with the advent of precision farming. Yet, the evidence to date is far from unanimous on the proper form of the production function. This paper reexamines the use of the primal production function framework using nonparametric regression techniques. Speci cally, the paper demonstrat...

This paper presents a new procedure to improve the quality of triangular meshes defined on surfaces. The improvement is obtained by an iterative process in which each node of the mesh is moved to a new position that minimizes certain objective function. This objective function is derived from an algebraic quality measures of the local mesh (the set of triangles connected to the adjustable or fr...

A Review of Decomposition of Income Inequality This paper is a review of recent developments of parametric and non-parametric approaches to decompose inequality by subgroups, income sources, causal factors and other unit characteristics. Different methods of decomposing changes in poverty into growth, redistribution, poverty standard and residual components are described. In parametric approach...

Explicit expressions are derived for parametric and nonparametric estimators (NPEs) of two measures of financial risk, value-atrisk (VaR) and conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), under random sampling from the asymmetric Laplace (AL) distribution.Asymptotic distributions are established under very general conditions. Finite sample distributions are investigated by means of saddlepoint approximatio...

Image warping is a transformation which maps all positions in one image plane to positions in a second plane. It arises in many image analysis problems, whether in order to remove optical distortions introduced by a camera or a particular viewing perspective, to register an image with a map or template, or to align two or more images. The choice of warp is a compromise between a smooth distorti...

We propose a new approach to the correspondence prob lem that makes use of non parametric local transforms as the basis for correlation Non parametric local transforms rely on the relative order ing of local intensity values and not on the intensity values themselves Correlation using such transforms can tolerate a signi cant number of outliers This can result in improved performance near objec...

This paper uses a semi-parametric Poisson-gamma model to estimate the relationships between crash counts and various roadway characteristics, including curvature, traffic levels, speed limit and surface width. A Bayesian nonparametric estimation procedure is employed for the model’s link function, substantially reducing the risk of a mis-specified model. It is shown via simulation that little i...

In practice, both testable and untestable assumptions are generally required to draw inference about the mean outcome measured at the final scheduled visit in a repeated measures study with drop-out. Scharfstein et al. (2014) proposed a sensitivity analysis methodology to determine the robustness of conclusions within a class of untestable assumptions. In their approach, the untestable and test...

Improvement of the quality of surface meshes is important for mesh generation and numerical simulation. The challenge with surface mesh improvement is to improve element quality while preserving the surface characteristics as much as possible. A procedure is presented here to optimize the quality of elements in surface meshes by node repositioning while keeping the nodes on the original mesh fa...