Structural Changes and Regional Disparity in China's Inflation

The inflation problem in China has attracted a great deal of international attention in recent years. This paper examines the time series properties of China's CPI series. It is found that the overall inflation series and the inflation of food, tobacco, clothes, urban transport and urban housing are not persistent. Structural breaks in inflation are found in 2003 and 2004. The degree of rural-urban inflation disparity in China is also investigated. We find evidence that rural residents experience higher inflation than their urban counterparts.Structural Break, Unit Root, ADF Test, Rural and Urban Inflation.

Vandermonde Factorization of Hankel Matrix for Complex Exponential Signal Recovery -- Application in Fast NMR Spectroscopy

Many signals are modeled as a superposition of exponential functions in spectroscopy of chemistry, biology and medical imaging. This paper studies the problem of recovering exponential signals from a random subset of samples. We exploit the Vandermonde structure of the Hankel matrix formed by the exponential signal and formulate signal recovery as Hankel matrix completion with Vandermonde factorization (HVaF). A numerical algorithm is developed to solve the proposed model and its sequence convergence is analyzed theoretically. Experiments on synthetic data demonstrate that HVaF succeeds over a wider regime than the state-of-the-art nuclear-normminimization-based Hankel matrix completion method, while has a less restriction on frequency separation than the state-of-the-art atomic norm minimization and fast iterative hard thresholding methods. The effectiveness of HVaF is further validated on biological magnetic resonance spectroscopy data.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables, 63 reference

Self-partitioning SlipChip for slip-induced droplet formation and human papillomavirus viral load quantification with digital LAMP

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is one of the most common sexually transmitted infections worldwide, and persistent HPV infection can cause warts and even cancer. Nucleic acid analysis of HPV viral DNA can be very informative for the diagnosis and monitoring of HPV. Digital nucleic acid analysis, such as digital PCR and digital isothermal amplification, can provide sensitive detection and precise quantification of target nucleic acids, and its utility has been demonstrated in many biological research and medical diagnostic applications. A variety of methods have been developed for the generation of a large number of individual reaction partitions, a key requirement for digital nucleic acid analysis. However, an easily assembled and operated device for robust droplet formation without preprocessing devices, auxiliary instrumentation or control systems is still highly desired. In this paper, we present a self-partitioning SlipChip (sp-SlipChip) microfluidic device for the slip-induced generation of droplets to perform digital loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) for the detection and quantification of HPV DNA. In contrast to traditional SlipChip methods, which require the precise alignment of microfeatures, this sp-SlipChip utilized a design of “chain-of-pearls” continuous microfluidic channel that is independent of the overlapping of microfeatures on different plates to establish the fluidic path for reagent loading. Initiated by a simple slipping step, the aqueous solution can robustly self-partition into individual droplets by capillary pressure-driven flow. This advantage makes the sp-SlipChip very appealing for the point-of-care quantitative analysis of viral load. As a proof of concept, we performed digital LAMP on an sp-SlipChip to quantify human papillomaviruses (HPVs) 16 and 18 and tested this method with fifteen anonymous clinical samples