National forest inventory programs are tasked to produce timely and accurate estimates for a wide range of forest resource variables for a variety of users and applications. Time, cost, and precision constraints cause these programs to seek technological innovations that contribute to...

An important problem in pattern recognition is the effect of limited training samples on classification performance. When the ratio of the number of training samples to the dimensionality is small, parameter estimates become highly variable, causing the deterioration of classification...

Uranium exploration once again is in a ''boom'' cycle. The energy needs of the OPEC and non-OPEC countries alike have created a demand for uranium which appears certain to increase in future years. In turn, this demand has stimulated a dramatic rise in both the price of uranium and the...

Many investment decisions of agribusiness firms such as when to invest in an emerging market or whether to expand the capacity of the firm involve irreversible investment and uncertainty about demand, cost or competition. This paper uses an option-value model to examine the factors affecting an...

This study focused on identifying factors that significantly affect the potentially insolvent status of life insurers. The potentially insolvent status is indicated based on insurer’s Risk-based capital ratio (RBC ratio) reported in the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC)...

In public health research, it is common to follow a cohort of subjects over time, observing a vector of health indicators and a set of covariates at each of many visits. An objective of analysis is to characterize the inter-dependencies, in particular, the feedback of one response upon another...

Hierarchical or "multilevel" regression models typically parameterize the mean response conditional on unobserved latent variables or "random" effects and then make simple assumptions regarding their distribution. The interpretation of a regression parameter in such a model is the change in...

This research endeavor consisted of two distinct efforts. First, following a literature review of the characteristics, objectives, and incentive programs available to nonindustrial private forest (NIPF) landowners, the potential effects of wood chip mill harvests on forest management practices...

This study used selected student record data to investigate the effect of students? characteristics prior to university admission (pre-admission variables), and academic actions and educational achievement indicators (post-admission variables) on retention in higher education. The analysis...

Over the last decade there has been growing interest in pool-based active learning techniques, where instead of receiving an i.i.d. sample from a pool of unlabeled data, a learner may take an active role in selecting examples from the pool. Queries to an oracle (a human annotator in most...