System Priors

System Priors
Author: Michal Andrle
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 26
Release: 2013-12-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1475548818

This paper proposes a novel way of formulating priors for estimating economic models. System priors are priors about the model's features and behavior as a system, such as the sacrifice ratio or the maximum duration of response of inflation to a particular shock, for instance. System priors represent a very transparent and economically meaningful way of formulating priors about parameters, without the unintended consequences of independent priors about individual parameters. System priors may complement or also substitute for independent marginal priors. The new philosophy of formulating priors is motivated, explained and illustrated using a structural model for monetary policy.

System Priors for Econometric Time Series

System Priors for Econometric Time Series
Author: Michal Andrle
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 18
Release: 2016-11-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1475555822

The paper introduces “system priors”, their use in Bayesian analysis of econometric time series, and provides a simple and illustrative application. System priors were devised by Andrle and Benes (2013) as a tool to incorporate prior knowledge into an economic model. Unlike priors about individual parameters, system priors offer a simple and efficient way of formulating well-defined and economically-meaningful priors about high-level model properties. The generality of system priors are illustrated using an AR(2) process with a prior that most of its dynamics comes from business-cycle frequencies.

Defense Travel System: Overview of Prior Reported Challenges Faced by DoD in Implementation and Utilization

Defense Travel System: Overview of Prior Reported Challenges Faced by DoD in Implementation and Utilization
Author: McCoy Williams
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
Total Pages: 18
Release: 2008-10
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1437903959

In 1995, the DoD began an effort to implement a standard departmentwide travel system, the Defense Travel System (DTS). This testimony focuses on prior reporting concerning: (1) the lack of quantitative metrics to measure the extent to which DTS is actually being used; (2) weaknesses with DTS¿s requirements mgmt. and system testing; and (3) two key assumptions related to the estimated cost savings in the Sept. 2003 DTS economic analysis were not reasonable. Also highlights actions that DoD could explore to help streamline its administrative travel processes such as using a commercial database to identify unused airline tickets. Includes recommendations. Charts and tables.

Smoothness Priors Analysis of Time Series

Smoothness Priors Analysis of Time Series
Author: Genshiro Kitagawa
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1461207614

Smoothness Priors Analysis of Time Series addresses some of the problems of modeling stationary and nonstationary time series primarily from a Bayesian stochastic regression "smoothness priors" state space point of view. Prior distributions on model coefficients are parametrized by hyperparameters. Maximizing the likelihood of a small number of hyperparameters permits the robust modeling of a time series with relatively complex structure and a very large number of implicitly inferred parameters. The critical statistical ideas in smoothness priors are the likelihood of the Bayesian model and the use of likelihood as a measure of the goodness of fit of the model. The emphasis is on a general state space approach in which the recursive conditional distributions for prediction, filtering, and smoothing are realized using a variety of nonstandard methods including numerical integration, a Gaussian mixture distribution-two filter smoothing formula, and a Monte Carlo "particle-path tracing" method in which the distributions are approximated by many realizations. The methods are applicable for modeling time series with complex structures.

Probability and Bayesian Modeling

Probability and Bayesian Modeling
Author: Jim Albert
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 553
Release: 2019-12-06
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1351030132

Probability and Bayesian Modeling is an introduction to probability and Bayesian thinking for undergraduate students with a calculus background. The first part of the book provides a broad view of probability including foundations, conditional probability, discrete and continuous distributions, and joint distributions. Statistical inference is presented completely from a Bayesian perspective. The text introduces inference and prediction for a single proportion and a single mean from Normal sampling. After fundamentals of Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms are introduced, Bayesian inference is described for hierarchical and regression models including logistic regression. The book presents several case studies motivated by some historical Bayesian studies and the authors’ research. This text reflects modern Bayesian statistical practice. Simulation is introduced in all the probability chapters and extensively used in the Bayesian material to simulate from the posterior and predictive distributions. One chapter describes the basic tenets of Metropolis and Gibbs sampling algorithms; however several chapters introduce the fundamentals of Bayesian inference for conjugate priors to deepen understanding. Strategies for constructing prior distributions are described in situations when one has substantial prior information and for cases where one has weak prior knowledge. One chapter introduces hierarchical Bayesian modeling as a practical way of combining data from different groups. There is an extensive discussion of Bayesian regression models including the construction of informative priors, inference about functions of the parameters of interest, prediction, and model selection. The text uses JAGS (Just Another Gibbs Sampler) as a general-purpose computational method for simulating from posterior distributions for a variety of Bayesian models. An R package ProbBayes is available containing all of the book datasets and special functions for illustrating concepts from the book. A complete solutions manual is available for instructors who adopt the book in the Additional Resources section.

Web Information Systems Engineering -- WISE 2013

Web Information Systems Engineering -- WISE 2013
Author: Xuemin Lin
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 550
Release: 2013-10-07
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3642412300

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2013, held in Nanjing, China, in October 2013. The 48 full papers, 29 short papers, and 10 demo and 5 challenge papers, presented in the two-volume proceedings LNCS 8180 and 8181, were carefully reviewed and selected from 198 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: Web mining; Web recommendation; Web services; data engineering and database; semi-structured data and modeling; Web data integration and hidden Web; challenge; social Web; information extraction and multilingual management; networks, graphs and Web-based business processes; event processing, Web monitoring and management; and innovative techniques and creations.

Learning Statistics with R

Learning Statistics with R
Author: Daniel Navarro
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 617
Release: 2013-01-13
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1326189727

"Learning Statistics with R" covers the contents of an introductory statistics class, as typically taught to undergraduate psychology students, focusing on the use of the R statistical software and adopting a light, conversational style throughout. The book discusses how to get started in R, and gives an introduction to data manipulation and writing scripts. From a statistical perspective, the book discusses descriptive statistics and graphing first, followed by chapters on probability theory, sampling and estimation, and null hypothesis testing. After introducing the theory, the book covers the analysis of contingency tables, t-tests, ANOVAs and regression. Bayesian statistics are covered at the end of the book. For more information (and the opportunity to check the book out before you buy!) visit http://ua.edu.au/ccs/teaching/lsr or http://learningstatisticswithr.com