Typical heart rate variability (HRV) times series are cluttered with outliers generated by measurement errors, artifacts and ectopic beats. Robust estimation is an important tool in HRV analysis, since it allows clinicians to detect arrhythmia and other anomalous patterns by reducing the impact...

A survey on the economic and social conditions of households in the city of Modena was carried out in 2002 and in 2006 (two waves) by the CAPP (Centre for Analyses of Public Policies). In the first wave of 2002, each designated sampling unit (i.e., the family) had three units as reserves. If the...

Using data from PISA 2006 on 29 countries, this paper analyses immigrant school gaps (difference in scores between immigrants and natives) and focuses on tracking and comprehensive educational systems. Results show that the wider negative gaps are present where tracking is sharp and less...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the behaviour of the Federal Reserve in the Greenspan era by using recently developed neuro-fuzzy techniques. Such models require the operation assumptions concerning the conduct of monetary policy to be set in the form of flexible rules. Moreover, the...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the behaviour of the Federal Reserve in the Greenspan era by using recently developed neuro-fuzzy techniques. Such models require the operation assumptions concerning the conduct of monetary policy to be set in the form of flexible rules. Moreover, the...

We consider a robust parameter estimator minimizing an empirical approximation to the q-entropy and show its relationship to minimization of power divergences through a simple parameter transformation. The estimator balances robustness and efficiency through a tuning constant q and avoids kernel...

Using data from PISA 2006 on 29 countries, this paper analyses immigrant school gaps (difference in scores between immigrants and natives) and focuses on tracking and comprehensive educational systems. Results show that the wider negative gaps are present where tracking is sharp and less...

Using data from PISA 2006, we examine the performance of immigrant students in different international educational environments. Our results show smaller immigrant gaps – differences in scores with respect to natives - where educational systems are more flexible and students’ mobility...

Operational risk data, when available, are usually scarce, heavy-tailed and possibly dependent. In this work, we introduce a model that captures such real-world characteristics and explicitly deals with heterogeneous pairwise and tail dependence of losses. By considering flexible families of...

Index tracking aims at replicating a given benchmark with a smaller number of its constituents. Different quantitative models cam be set up to determine the optimal index replicating portfolio.In this paper, we propose an alternative based on imposing a constraint on the q-norm, 0 q 1, of the...