Some of the history of soccer/world football in China is presented. Then consideration turns to the 2008 Chinese Super League. It has 16 teams. The results from the first half of the season, i.e. 15 rounds, are studied. The response of interest for a specific game is whether the home team won, tied or lost, who the home team was, and who the opponent was. The response is ordinal-valued. A gener...

Consider a generalized linear model with response Y and scalar predictor X. Instead of observing X, a surrogate W = X + Z is observed where Z represents measurement error and is independent of X and Y. The efficient score test for the absence of association depends on m(w) = E(XIW = w) which is generally unknown (Tosteson and Tsiatis, 1988). Assuming that the distribution of Z is known, asympto...

We study the estimation error of constrained M -estimators, and derive explicit upper bounds on the expected estimation error determined by the Gaussian width of the constraint set. Both of the cases where the true parameter is on the boundary of the constraint set (matched constraint), and where the true parameter is strictly in the constraint set (mismatched constraint) are considered. For bo...

In many situations, data follow a generalized linear model in which the mean of the responses is modelled, through a link function, linearly on the covariates. In this paper, robust estimators for the regression parameter are considered in order to build test statistics for this parameter when missing data occur in the responses. We derive the asymptotic behaviour of the robust estimators for t...

Background There is increasing interest in deploying Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) practices in emergency departments (ED). However, the current literature is inconclusive on whether or not SBIRT practices are cost effective and cost beneficial. In order to answer this question, new analytical methods need to be developed. The objective of the following study ...

We consider the problem of claims reserving and estimating run-off triangles. We generalize the gamma cell distributions model which leads to Tweedie’s compound Poisson model. Choosing a suitable parametrization, we estimate the parameters of our model within the framework of generalized linear models (see Jørgensen-de Souza [2] and Smyth-Jørgensen [8]). We show that these methods lead to reaso...

Timely effective cost management requires reliable cost estimates at every stage of project development. While underestimation of transportation costs seems to be a global trend, improving early cost prediction accuracy in estimates is difficult. This paper presents a parametric estimating technique applied to Texas highway projects using a set of project characteristics. Generalized linear mod...

Future pension liabilities depend critically on the life expectancy of the members of a pension scheme. This remark applies equally to public and private schemes, and to defined-benefit and defined-contribution schemes. Some pension providers use the age-period-cohort model to forecast mortality. We examine some of the pitfalls in this approach. Our methods are based on the theory of constraine...

In C. Reading (Ed.), Data and context in statistics education: Towards an evidence-based society. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS8, July, 2010), Ljubljana, Slovenia. Voorburg, The Netherlands: International Statistical Institute. www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~iase/publications.php [© 2010 ISI/IASE] ELECTRONIC SPREADSHEETS AS A TEACHING AID TO A GENERA...