Bücher der Reihe Contributions to Statistics

The next four meetings were in 1990 (St Kyrik monastery, Bulgaria), 1992 (Petrodvorets, St Petersburg, Russia), 1995 (Spetses, Greece) and 1998 (Marseilles, France). It is a tradition of these meetings to provide low cost accommodation, low fees and financial support for the travel of young and Eastern participants.

At the same time, the advent of computers has facilitated the use of modern statistics in all branches of science, making statistics even more interdisciplinary than in the past;

A group of scholars converging on a common and socially relevant economic theme of research, that of households' welfare and poverty, met several times in the last two years to discuss the research progress and the opportunity to bring to gether for publication the research so far accomplished.

Since the beginning of the seventies computer hardware is available to use programmable computers for various tasks. The introduction of personal computers in the eighties gave new impulses for even further development, already at the beginning of the seven ties some special languages like SAS or SPSS were available for statisticians.

In industrial countries there is a strong interest in the international comparison of business data regarding productivity efficiency and competitiveness. Case studies referring to specific countries play an important role for the development of economic hypotheses that should be tested at the international level.

The subject of this book is the reasoning under uncertainty based on sta tistical evidence, where the word reasoning is taken to mean searching for arguments in favor or against particular hypotheses of interest. This kind of reasoning is called assumption-based reasoning.

In the last ten years, there has been increasing interest and activity in the general area of partially linear regression smoothing in statistics.

This book is a collection of thirty invited papers, covering the important parts of a rapidly developing area like "computational statistics".

? In his ¿Prime ricerche sulla rivoluzione dei prezzi in Firenze¿ (1939), Giuseppe Parenti, by Fernand Braudel regarded as an author who ¿se classait, d¿entrée de jeu et sans discussion possible, à la hauteur même d¿Earl Jefferson Hamilton. . . . ¿ begins his opening lines with a description/de?nition of the price revolution which took place in the XVI in Europe as ¿that extraordinary enhancement of all things that occurred in European countries around the second half of the XVI; revolution in the true meaning of the word, as not only, like any strong price increase, it modi?ed the wealth distribution process and changed the relative position of the various social categories and of the different functions of the economic activity, but affected too, in a way that was not enough studied yet, the relative evolution of the various national economies, and ?nally, . . . . . . . . . . , certainly contributed to the birth, or at least to the dissemination, of the new naturalistic economic ideas, from which the economic science would have sprung¿. De?nition that can be taken as the founding metaphor of this volume.

The book presents statistical methods and models that can usefully support the ev- uation of educational services and quality of products. The contributions collected in this book summarize the work of several researchers from the universities of Bologna, Firenze, Napoli and Padova. The contributions are written with a cons- tent notation and a uni?ed view, and concern methodological advances developed mostly with reference to speci?c problems of evaluation using real data sets. The evaluation of educational services, as well as the analysis of judgements and preferences, poses severe methodological challenges because of the presence of one or more of the following aspects: the observational (non experimental) nature of the context, which is associated with the well-known problems of selection bias and presence of nuisance factors; the hierarchical structure of the data, that entails c- related observations and consideration of effects at different levels of the hierarchy and their interactions (multilevel analysis); the multivariate and qualitative nature of the dependent variable, that requires the use of ad hoc statistical methodologies; the presence of non observable factors, e. g. the satisfaction, calling for the use of latent variables models; the simultaneous presence of components of pleasure and components of uncertainty in the explication of the judgments, that asks for the speci?cation and estimation of mixture models. The ?rst part of the book deals with latent variable models.