Macroeconomic Effects of Short-Term Training Measures on the Matching Process in Western Germany This paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of short term training measures on the matching processes in West Germany. The empirical analysis is based on regional data for local employment office districts for the period from January 2003 to December 2004. The empirical model relies on a dynam...

The Gaussian mixture model (GMM) has been widely used in pattern recognition problems for clustering and probability density estimation. For pattern classification, however, the GMM has to consider two issues: model structure in high-dimensional space and discriminative training for optimizing the decision boundary. In this paper, we propose a classification method using subspace GMM density mo...

This paper focuses on the automatic determination of the age of children in preschool and primary school age. For each child a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is trained. As training method the Maximum A Posteriori adaptation (MAP) is used. MAP derives the speaker models from a Universal Background Model (UBM) and does not perform an independent parameter estimation. The means of each GMM are extr...

The IEEE-ASSP Scene Classification challenge on user-generated content (UGC) aims to classify an audio recording that belongs to a specific scene such as busystreet, office or supermarket. The difficulty of scene content analysis on UGC lies in the lack of structure and acoustic variability of the data. The i-vector system is state-ofthe-art in Speaker Verification and Scene Detection, and is o...

Quantifying how the spectral content of speech relates to changes in mental state may be crucial in building an objective speech-based depression classification system with clinical utility. This paper investigates the hypothesis that important depression based information can be captured within the covariance structure of a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) of recorded speech. Significant negative ...

Social Spending Generosity and Income Inequality: A Dynamic Panel Approach This paper explores if more generous social spending polices in fact lead to less income inequality, or if redistributive outcomes are offset by behavioral disincentive effects. To account for the inherent endogeneity of social policies with regard to inequality levels, I apply the System GMM estimator and use the presum...

Several rounds of banking reforms in China have aimed to increase the competitive condition and further enhance stability in the Chinese banking sector, while the joint effects of competition and risk-taking behaviour on the profitability in the banking sector have not been studied well enough so far in the literature. The current study contributes to the empirical literature by testing the imp...

This paper investigates the evolution of expenditure inequality in Indonesia during 1999-2008, a period that coincides greatly with the implementation of fiscal decentralisation policy. In general, the results show increasing expenditure inequality evident in a decreasing share of income in the bottom 10 percent, and an increasing share in the top 10 percent. Further examination employing the t...

In this paper, a discriminative training procedure for a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) language identification system is described. The proposal is based on the Generalized Probabilistic Descent (GPD) algorithm and Minimum Classification Error Rates formulated to estimate the GMM parameters. The evaluation is conducted using the OGI multi-language telephone speech corpus. The experimental result...