BACKGROUND Much of the developing world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, exhibits high levels of morbidity and mortality associated with infectious diseases. The incidence of Schistosoma sp.-which are neglected tropical diseases exposing and infecting more than 500 and 200 million individuals in 77 countries, respectively-is rising because of 1) numerous irrigation and hydro-electric projects,...

An exponential smoothing procedure applied to a homogeneous Markovian observation sequence generates an inhomogeneous Markov process as sequence of smoothed values. If the underlying observation sequence is moreover ergodic then for two classes of smoothing functions the strong ergodicity of the sequence of smoothed values is proved. As a consequence a central limit theorem and a law of large n...

Like many other economic time series, US aggregate retail sales have strong trend and seasonal patterns. How to best model and forecast these patterns has been a long-standing issue in time-series analysis. This article compares arti"cial neural networks and traditional methods including Winters exponential smoothing, Box}Jenkins ARIMA model, and multivariate regression. The results indicate th...

Control chart is the most important Statistical Process Control (SPC) tool used to monitor reliability and performance of manufacturing processes. Variability EWMA charts are widely used for the detection of small shifts in process dispersion. For ease in computation all the variability EWMA charts proposed so far are based on asymptotic nature of control limits. It has been shown in this study...

Abstract—The aim of this paper is to select the most accurate forecasting method for predicting the future values of the unemployment rate in selected European countries. In order to do so, several forecasting techniques adequate for forecasting time series with trend component, were selected, namely: double exponential smoothing (also known as Holt`s method) and Holt-Winters` method which acco...

Abstract—The aim of this paper is to select the most accurate forecasting method for predicting the future values of the unemployment rate in selected European countries. In order to do so, several forecasting techniques adequate for forecasting time series with trend component, were selected, namely: double exponential smoothing (also known as Holt`s method) and Holt-Winters` method which acco...

To reduce the influence of noise in time series prediction, a neural network, the multilayered perceptron, is combined with smoothing units based on the wavelet multiresolution analysis. Two approaches are compared: smoothing based on the statistical criterion and smoothing which uses the prediction error as the criterion. For the latter an algorithm for simultaneous setting of free parameters ...

This paper concerns the forecasting of seasonal intraday time series. An extension of Holt-Winters exponential smoothing has been proposed that smoothes an intraday cycle and an intraweek cycle. A recently proposed exponential smoothing method involves smoothing a different intraday cycle for each distinct type of day of the week. Similar days are allocated identical intraday cycles. A limitati...