The paper investigates the problem of determining patterns of criminal behaviour from official criminal histories, concentrating on the variety and type of offending convictions. The analysis is carried out on the basis of a multivariate latent Markov model which allows for discrete covariates...

type="main" xml:id="rssc12030-abs-0001" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>Motivated by an application to a longitudinal data set coming from the Health and Retirement Study about self-reported health status, we propose a model for longitudinal data which is based on a latent process to account for the unobserved...</p>

Following Cox & Wermuth (1994, 2002), we show that the distribution of a set of binary observable variables, induced by a certain discrete latent variable model, may be approximated by a quadratic exponential distribution. This discrete latent variable model is equivalent to the latent-class...

<Para ID="Par1">A method for robust estimation of dynamic mixtures of multivariate distributions is proposed. The EM algorithm is modified by replacing the classical M-step with high breakdown S-estimation of location and scatter, performed by using the bisquare multivariate S-estimator. Estimates are obtained...</para>

Precarious employment is a serious social problem, especially in those countries, such as Italy, where there are limited benefits from social security. We investigate this phenomenon by analysing the initial part of the career of employees starting with unstable contracts for a panel of Italian...