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Psychological scale refinement traditionally relies on response-based methods such as factor analysis, item response theory, and network psychometrics to optimize item composition. Although rigorous, these approaches require large samples…
Food webs, networks of feeding relationships among organisms, provide fundamental insights into mechanisms that determine ecosystem stability and persistence. Despite long-standing interest in the compartmental structure of food webs, past…
The bifactor model and its extensions are multidimensional latent variable models, under which each item measures up to one subdimension on top of the primary dimension(s). Despite their wide applications to educational and psychological…
Empirical studies on food expenditure are largely based on cross-section data and for a few studies based on longitudinal (or panel) data the focus has been on the conditional mean. While the former, by construction, cannot model the…
Identifying and addressing poverty is challenging in administrative units with limited information on income distribution and well-being. To overcome this obstacle, small area estimation methods have been developed to provide reliable and…
Understanding the assembly of ecosystems to estimate the number of species at different spatial scales is a challenging problem. Until now, maximum entropy approaches have lacked the important feature of considering space in an explicit…
Malnutrition is a major public health concern in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs). Understanding food and nutrient intake across communities, households and individuals is critical to the development of health policies and…
We introduce two models of non-parametric random utility for demand systems: the stochastic absolute risk aversion (SARA) model, and the stochastic safety-first (SSF) model. In each model, individual-level heterogeneity is characterized by…
This paper addresses the challenge of object-centric layout generation under spatial constraints, seen in multiple domains including floorplan design process. The design process typically involves specifying a set of spatial constraints…
A robot-assisted feeding system must successfully acquire many different food items. A key challenge is the wide variation in the physical properties of food, demanding diverse acquisition strategies that are also capable of adapting to…
Crime events are known to reveal spatio-temporal patterns, which can be used for predictive modeling and subsequent decision support. While the focus has hitherto been placed on areas with high population density, we address the challenging…
When outcome data are expensive or onerous to collect, scientists increasingly substitute predictions from machine learning and AI models for unlabeled cases, a process which has consequences for downstream statistical inference. While…
Our method extends the application of random spanning trees to cases where the response variable belongs to the exponential family, making it suitable for a wide range of real-world scenarios, including non-Gaussian likelihoods. The…
We develop a cross-sectional research design to identify causal effects in the presence of unobservable heterogeneity without instruments. When units are dense in physical space, it may be sufficient to regress the "spatial first…
Perceiving the surrounding environment in terms of objects is useful for any general purpose intelligent agent. In this paper, we investigate a fundamental mechanism making object perception possible, namely the identification of…
Food authenticity studies are concerned with determining if food samples have been correctly labeled or not. Discriminant analysis methods are an integral part of the methodology for food authentication. Motivated by food authenticity…
We study the extent to which we can infer users' geographical locations from social media. Location inference from social media can benefit many applications, such as disaster management, targeted advertising, and news content tailoring.…
The consumption rate is a process critically important for the stability of consumer-resource systems and the persistence, sustainability and biodiversity of complex food webs. Its mathematical description in the form of functional response…
A multimodal system with Poisson, Gaussian, and multinomial observations is considered. A generative graphical model that combines multiple modalities through common factor loadings is proposed. In this model, latent factors are like…
Transportation systems can be conceptualized as an instrument of spreading people and resources over the territory, playing an important role in developing sustainable cities. The current rationale of transport provision is based on…