Different methods for assessing the abilities of participants in a sports tournament, and their corresponding winning probabilities for the tournament, are embedded in a common framework and their predictive performances compared. First, ratings of abilities (such as the Elo rating) are...

Statistical graphics are often augmented by the use of color coding information contained in some variable. When this involves the shading of areas (and not only points or lines)--e.g., as in bar plots, pie charts, mosaic displays or heatmaps--it is important that the colors are perceptually...

The classical approach to testing for structural change employs retrospective tests using a historical data set of a given length. Here we consider a wide array of fluctuation-type tests in a monitoring situation-given a history period for which a regression relationship is known to be stable,...

Understanding the determinants of aggregated corporate default probabilities (PDs) has attracted substantial research interest over the past decades. This study addresses two major difficulties in understanding the determinants of aggregate PDs: model uncertainty and multicollinearity among the...

Despite the increasing popularity of journal rankings to evaluate the quality of research contributions, the individual rankings for journals that ranked below the top tier of publications usually feature only modest agreement. Attempts to merge rankings into meta-rankings suffer from some...

We derive exact and asymptotic formulas for the probability that a symmetric n×n matrix with unit diagonal and upper diagonal elements i.i.d. uniform on (−1,1) is positive definite (and thus a “random correlation matrix”): this is almost never the case for n≥6.