The Dirichlet distribution is often used as a prior distribution for the parameters of a multinomial distribution. Because this distribution has support on the simplex 0[less-than-or-equals, slant]xi[less-than-or-equals, slant]1, [summation operator]xi=1, it does not serve as the prior for a...

Rankings based on counts are often presented to identify popular items, such as baby names, English words, or Web sites. This article shows that, in some examples, the number of correctly identified items can be very small. We introduce a standard error versus rank plot to diagnose possible...

Quasi-regression is a method of Monte Carlo approximation useful for global sensitivity analysis. This paper presents a new version, incorporating shrinkage parameters of the type used in wavelet approximation. As an example application, a black box function from machine learning is analyzed....