We consider the case 1 interval censorship model in which the survival time has an arbitrary distribution function F 0 and the inspection time has a discrete distribution function G. In such a model one is only able to observe the inspection time and whether the value of the survival time lies before or after the inspection time. We prove the strong consistency of the generalized maximum likeli...

We consider the estimation of the number of hidden states (the order) of a discrete-time finite-alphabet hidden Markov model (HMM). The estimators we investigate are related to code-based order estimators: penalized maximum-likelihood (ML) estimators and penalized versions of the mixture estimator introduced by Liu and Narayan. We prove strong consistency of those estimators without assuming an...

Modelling, and in particular the construction of conceptual models, is an essential activity in the designing of information systems. Experience has shown the limits of conceptual models as a support in communicating and in the transmission of knowledge. The purpose of this article is to bring up some elements which can explain these difficulties. After a restatement about the object of concept...

The view that metaphor plays a fundamental structural role in organizing our conceptual systems, rather than serving a deviant rhetorical effect, is now generally accepted. Indeed, this idea drives many recent computational models (Weiner , 1984; Martin, 1990; Way, 1991;Veale & Keane, 1992a, 1992b). However, these analyses are based on the de-contextualised "contents" of the metaphor and ignore...

This paper addresses the problem of the engineering divergence phenomenon in ABS. This problem is related to the fact that a particular conceptual model may give different outputs according to its implementation. Through two experiments, the paper shows that the implementation of the agents’ interaction is one of the factors that are involved in this phenomenon. The underlying idea of this pape...

The transfer of organic material from one coastal environment to another can increase production in recipient habitats in a process known as spatial subsidy. Microorganisms drive the generation, transformation, and uptake of organic material in shallow coastal environments, but their significance in connecting coastal habitats through spatial subsidies has received limited attention. We address...

Model transformation is a key technology in modeldriven engineering. Unfortunately, transformations are typically written manually and thus they are likely to contain errors and to produce incorrect or undesired output. Safe transformation is the guarantee that for every possible source model, the transformed target model is valid with respect to user-definable wellformedness criteria. This pap...

For assessing conceptual data model quality it is useful to have quantitative and objective measurement instruments. The scarcity of such measurement instruments leaded us to define a set of measures for structural complexity, an internal quality attribute of conceptual data models, with the idea that it is related to the external quality of such models. In order to gather empirical evidence th...

We propose a set of operations for inquiring about the properties of individual objects and classes in an object-oriented database. The operations are closely related to the constructs introduced by our formalisa-tion of the object-oriented data model, through which we unify the representation of the intensional and the extensional portions of the object-oriented database. As a consequence, the...

In this paper, we present a conceptual data model for multimedia database applications based on ExIFO2 model. The ExIFO2 data model is chosen as the conceptual model since it handles both complex objects along with their uncertain and imprecise properties. We enhanced this conceptual model in order to meet the multimedia data requirements. In addition to uncertain and imprecise information, we ...