Previous studies have demonstrated that river-based surveys can provide an inexpensive source of information for neotropical zoologists, yet little information is available to inform the application of this technique for the long term monitoring of neotropical turtle species. We aimed to fill this gap by presenting an assessment of data collected during 333 river surveys over 50 months along ri...

Logistic Regression has been widely used in the financial service industry for credit scoring models. Despite its advantages in easy interpretation and low computing cost, Logistic Regression is under the criticism of failure to model the nonlinear features of the predictors effect on the dependent variable and therefore might lead to unsatisfactory results. Modern statistical techniques such a...

This article describes how to use statistical data analysis to obtain models directly from data. The focus is put on finding nonlinearities within a generalized additive model. These models are found by means of backfitting or more general algorithms, like the alternating conditional expectation value one. The method is illustrated by numerically generated data. As an application, the example o...

We present a growing dimension asymptotic formalism. The perspective in this paper is classification theory and we show that it can accommodate probabilistic networks classi­ fiers, including naive Bayes model and its augmented version. When represented as a Bayesian network these classifiers have an im­ portant advantage: The corresponding dis­ criminant function turns out to be a spe­ cialize...

The subject of discussion is health care production functions. The parametric two-factor Cobb–Douglas and transcendental logarithmic (translog) production functions are frequently used. However, empirical and theoretical work has often questioned the validity of the parametric Cobb–Douglas and translog as a model for the production of health care. The aim of this study is to propose a new flexi...

This paper describes an estimator of the additive components of a nonparametric additive model with an unknown link function. When the additive components and link function are twice differentiable with sufficiently smooth second derivatives, the estimator is asymptotically normally distributed with a rate of convergence in probability of . This is true regardless of the (finite) dimension of t...

Nano-microplankton biomass, mesozooplankton biomass and hydrographic features were measured with mesoscale spatial resolution during 3 surveys in the Bay of Biscay between March and June 2004. Regions of high plankton biomass were associated with mesoscale physical structures. Generalized additive models (GAMs) based upon surface salinity, surface temperature and stratification of the water col...

In the past, ecologists have been debating about the relative importance of density-dependent versus density-independent factors in determining population dynamics. Between 1989 and 1992, an experiment was conducted at the University of Reading for studying how both densityindependent and density-dependent factors affect greenbottle blowfly population dynamic structure. See Daniels (1994). Taki...

This paper describes the use of the GAM procedure for fitting generalized additive models (Hastie and Tibshirani, 1990). PROC GAM, production in Release 8.2, provides an array of powerful tools for data analysis, incorporating nonparametric regression and smoothing techniques as well as generalized distributional modeling. Compared with other regression procedures such as PROC REG and PROC GLM,...