Bücher der Reihe Contributions to Statistics

The numerous applications (micro-arrays, paleo- ecological data, radar waveforms, spectrometric curves, speech recognition, continuous time series, 3-D images, etc.) in various fields (biology, econometrics, environmetrics, the food industry, medical sciences, paper industry, etc.) make researching this statistical topic very worthwhile.

This book presents a collection of statistical methods and procedures to assess data coming from educational systems.

This volume collects latest methodological and applied contributions on functional, high-dimensional and other complex data, related statistical models and tools as well as on operator-based 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.

This intellectually stimulating atmosphere is achieved by limiting the number of participants to around eighty, by the choice of location so that participants can live as a community, and, of course, through the care ful selection of scientific direction made by the Programme Committee.

This volume contains a substantial number of the papers presented at the mODa 7 conference. mODastands for Model Oriented Data Analysis and pre­ vious conferences have been held in Wartburg (1987) (then in the GDR), St Kirik monastery, Bulgaria (1990), Petrodvorets, St Petersburg, Russia (1992), The island of Spetsos, Greece (1995), the Centre International de Rencontres Mathematiques, Marseilles, France (1998) and Puchberg/Schneeberg, Aus­ tria, (2001). The purpose of these workshops has traditionally been to bring together scientists from the East and West interested in the optimal design of exper­ iments and related topics and younger and senior researchers in the field. These traditions remain vital to the health of the series. During this period Europe has seen increasing unity and the organizers of and participants in mODa must take some satisfaction from the fact that the youthful ideals of the founders of the series are reflected in this transition. The present conference and mODa 6 are supported by a European Union conference grant (contract HPCF-CT 2000 00045) whose funding emphasis is on younger participants. The company GlaxoSmithKline has very generously continued its support. We are very grateful for these substantial contribu­ tions.

The numerous applications (micro-arrays, paleo- ecological data, radar waveforms, spectrometric curves, speech recognition, continuous time series, 3-D images, etc.) in various fields (biology, econometrics, environmetrics, the food industry, medical sciences, paper industry, etc.) make researching this statistical topic very worthwhile.

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.

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.

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.