Methods for improving estimators of truncated circular parameters

In decision theoretic estimation of parameters in Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^p$, the action space is chosen to be the convex closure of the estimand space. In this paper, the concept has been extended to the estimation of circular parameters of distributions having support as a circle, torus or cylinder. As directional distributions are of curved nature, existing methods for distributions with parameters taking values in $\mathbb{R}^p$ are not immediately applicable here. A circle is the simplest one-dimensional Riemannian manifold. We employ concepts of convexity, projection, etc., on manifolds to develop sufficient conditions for inadmissibility of estimators for circular parameters. Further invariance under a compact group of transformations is introduced in the estimation problem and a complete class theorem for equivariant estimators is derived. This extends the results of Moors [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 76 (1981) 910-915] on $\mathbb{R}^p$ to circles. The findings are of special interest to the case when a circular parameter is truncated. The results are implemented to a wide range of directional distributions to obtain improved estimators of circular parameters.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/15-BEJ736 in the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

Absolute and Conditional Convergence: Its Speed for Selected Countries for 1961--2001

The study gives the theoretical justification for the per capita growth equations using Solovian model(1956) and its factor accumulation assumptions. The different forms of the per capita growth equation is used to test for 'absolute convergence' and 'conditional convergence' hypotheses and also work out the speed of absolute and conditional convergence for selected countries from 1961-2001.Only EU and East Asian countries together have shown uniform evidence of absolute convergence in all periods. While EU as a region has shown significant evidence of absolute convergence in two periods, 1961-2001 and 1970-2001, there is no convincing statistical evidence in favor of absolute convergence in the last two periods: 1980-2001 and 1990-2001. The speed of absolute convergence in the four periods range between 0.99-2.56 % p.a. (2% for the EU was worked out by Barro and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, 1995, for European regions) for EU while it ranges between 0.57-1.16 % p.a. for the countries in East Asia and EU regions together. However, there is no evidence of convergence among the South Asian countries in all periods and some major CIS republics since 1966.There is however tendency for absolute convergence among countries of South Asia, East Asia and European Union together particularly after the 1980s. Conditional convergence is prevalent among almost all pairs of regions in our sample except East Asian and South Asian nations together. Speed of conditional convergence ranges from 0.2 % in an year to 22%.In the European nations, the speed of conditional convergence works out be nearly 20 % unlike the speed of absolute convergence which hovered around 2 %.Such results would mean that countries in Europe are converging very quickly to their own potential level of incomes per capita but not so quickly to a common potential level of income per capita.Growth equation; absolute convergence; conditional convergence; speed of absolute and conditional convergence; elasticity of output with respect to capital; half life of convergence

Growth Accounting for Some Selected Developing, Newly Industrialized and Developed Nations from 1966-2000: A Data Envelopment Analysis

We work out technical efficiency levels of 29 countries consisting of some selected South Asian, East Asian and EU countries using data envelopment analysis. Luxembourg has an efficiency score of one(most efficient) in all the years .Netherlands also has an efficiency score of one in 1966,1971,1976 and 1981.Japan,UK,Belgium,Ireland,Indonesia,Spain and Germany has an efficiency score of one in at least one of the years from 1966 to 2000.In the year 2000 though mean efficiency levels(without including life expectancy as input) of South Asian countries is higher than the European Union Countries and East Asian countries. Japan has the highest average efficiency followed by Hong Kong in the East Asian region in the period 1966-2000. We also decompose labor productivity growth into components attributable to technological changes (shifts in the overall production frontier), technological catch up or efficiency changes(movement towards or away from the frontier),capital accumulation(movement along the frontier) and human capital accumulation( proxied by life expectancy).The overall production frontier is constructed using deterministic methods requiring no specification of functional form for the technology nor any assumption about market structure or the absence of market imperfections. Growth accounting results tend to convey that for the East Asian and the South Asian countries efficiency changes(technological catch up) have contributed the most, while for the European countries it is the technical changes which has contributed more to labour productivity changes between 1966-2000. We also analyze the evolution of cross country distribution for the 29 countries included in our sample using Kernel densities. It seems that there are other factors like trade openness,quality of governments,population rate of growth, savings rate, corruption perception indices, rule of law index, social capital and trust variables, formal and informal rules governing the society, among others, rather than the ones that are included below for the growth accounting exercise which may be responsible for productivity accounting on point to point basis. For all the seven periods(point to point basis) we see a major role played by technological changes and efficiency changes together to account for the current period counterfactual distributions and for the bimodal distribution in year 2000, and for the period 1966-2000(not point to point basis –an excercise done similar to Kumar and Russell(2002)) we find technical changes and its combination with other tripartite and quadripartite changes jointly account for the bimodal distribution in year 2000.However, from this growth accounting exercise, we do find that there is convergence in statistical terms of efficiency changes and human capital accumulation across countries of the EU, South Asian and East Asian regions.: Data envelopment analysis, growth accounting, technical efficiency, efficiency change, technological change, capital accumulation, human capital accumulation, kernel smoothing, cross country labor productivity distribution and counterfactual distributions

Trust Management Model for Cloud Computing Environment

Software as a service or (SaaS) is a new software development and deployment paradigm over the cloud and offers Information Technology services dynamically as "on-demand" basis over the internet. Trust is one of the fundamental security concepts on storing and delivering such services. In general, trust factors are integrated into such existent security frameworks in order to add a security level to entities collaborations through the trust relationship. However, deploying trust factor in the secured cloud environment are more complex engineering task due to the existence of heterogeneous types of service providers and consumers. In this paper, a formal trust management model has been introduced to manage the trust and its properties for SaaS in cloud computing environment. The model is capable to represent the direct trust, recommended trust, reputation etc. formally. For the analysis of the trust properties in the cloud environment, the proposed approach estimates the trust value and uncertainty of each peer by computing decay function, number of positive interactions, reputation factor and satisfaction level for the collected information.Comment: 5 Pages, 2 Figures, Conferenc

Relative benefits/losses of India aligning with RCEP and BRICS countries under the conjecture of free trade area in goods

The present study works out the relative benefits/losses of India aligning with RCEP and BRICS member countries under the conjecture of free trade area in good trade only. The study uses partial (SMART model) and general equilibrium (GTAP model) tools for this assessment. The main focus in the study is to compare the benefits/losses to Indian economy associated with both policy scenarios. The results reveal that it would be beneficial for India to align with other RCEP member countries under the policy of free trade area in goods trade. If India wants to join BRICS FTA in the near future then it must negotiate for the entry of its own specialized products into their markets and in reciprocity, it should allow the entry of their specialized products in to the domestic market. The results are in favor to make free trade area between RCEP countries which is more beneficial for India in comparison to make BRICS FTA