The problem of estimating a Markov transition matrix to statistically describe the dynamics underlying an observed process is frequently found in the physical and economical sciences. However, little attention has been paid to the fact that such an estimation is associated with statistical uncertainty, which depends on the number of observed transitions between metastable states. In turn, this ...

Coal-mine owners are required to measure miner exposures to respirable dust so that compliance with Federal health regulations can be monitored. This study analyzes the problem of possible underreporting of dust exposures. Using two statistical approaches, data for three mining occupations in 54 large underground coal mines during 1976-1978 are examined for evidence of underreporting. First, re...

Long-time limit distributions are key quantities for understanding the asymptotic dynamics of quantum walks, and they are known for most forms of one-dimensional quantum walks using two-state coin systems. For two-dimensional quantum walks using a four-state coin system, however, the only known limit distribution is for a walk using a parameterized Grover coin operation and analytical complexit...

A nonparametric upper tolerance limit (UTL) bounds a specified percentage of the population distribution with specified confidence. The most common UTL is based on the largest order statistic (the maximum) where the number of samples required for a given confidence and coverage is easily derived for an infinitely large population. However, for other order statistics such as the second largest, ...

New data are available in the field of risk assessment: the biomonitoring data which is measurement of the chemical dose in a human tissue (e.g. blood or urine). These data are original because they represent direct measurements of the dose of chemical substances really taken up from the environment, whereas exposure is usually assessed from contamination levels of the different exposure media ...

Wilson et al. propose a measure of flexibility in project scheduling problems and propose several ways of distributing flexibility over tasks without overrunning the deadline. These schedules prove quite robust: delays of some tasks do not necessarily lead to delays of subsequent tasks. The number of tasks that finish late depends, among others, on the way of distributing flexibility. In this p...

Infants' perception of speech sound contrasts is modulated by their language environment, for example by the statistical distributions of the speech sounds they hear. Infants learn to discriminate speech sounds better when their input contains a two-peaked frequency distribution of those speech sounds than when their input contains a one-peaked frequency distribution. Effects of frequency distr...

Electromigration is an important failure phenomenon in ULSI. There are several underlying physical mechanisms in an electromigration process depending on the stress conditions. In this work, we use various statistical techniques to investigate the number of such mechanisms for a given set of electromigration data. The statistical distribution of each mechanism can be found and the failure units...

The magnetic properties of molecule-based magnets are commonly rationalized by considering only a single nuclear configuration of the system under study (usually an X-ray crystal structure). Here, by means of a computational study, we compare the results obtained using such a static approach with those obtained by explicitly accounting for thermal fluctuations, and uncover the serious limitatio...

This paper suggests a method of evaluation of uncertainties in calculated transition probabilities by randomly varying parameters of an atomic code and comparing the results. A control code has been written to randomly vary the input parameters with a normal statistical distribution around initial values with a certain standard deviation. For this particular implementation, Cowan's suite of ato...