International Statistical Review最新文献

Crowdsourcing methods facilitate the production of scientific information by non-experts. This form of citizen science (CS) is becoming a key source of complementary data in many fields to inform data-driven decisions and study challenging problems. However, concerns about the validity of these data often constrain their utility. In this paper, we focus on the use of citizen science data in addressing complex challenges in environmental conservation. We consider this issue from three perspectives. First, we present a literature scan of papers that have employed Bayesian models with citizen science in ecology. Second, we compare several popular majority vote algorithms and introduce a Bayesian item response model that estimates and accounts for participants' abilities after adjusting for the difficulty of the images they have classified. The model also enables participants to be clustered into groups based on ability. Third, we apply the model in a case study involving the classification of corals from underwater images from the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. We show that the model achieved superior results in general and, for difficult tasks, a weighted consensus method that uses only groups of experts and experienced participants produced better performance measures. Moreover, we found that participants learn as they have more classification opportunities, which substantially increases their abilities over time. Overall, the paper demonstrates the feasibility of CS for answering complex and challenging ecological questions when these data are appropriately analysed. This serves as motivation for future work to increase the efficacy and trustworthiness of this emerging source of data.

The foundations of correspondence analysis rests with Pearson's chi-squared statistic. More recently, it has been shown that the Freeman–Tukey statistic plays an important role in correspondence analysis and confirmed the advantages of the Hellinger distance that have long been advocated in the literature. Pearson's and the Freeman–Tukey statistics are two of five commonly used special cases of the Cressie–Read family of divergence statistics. Therefore, this paper explores the features of correspondence analysis where its foundations lie with this family and shows that log-ratio analysis (an approach that has gained increasing attention in the correspondence analysis and compositional data analysis literature) and the method based on the Hellinger distance are special cases of this new framework.

The binomial proportion is a classic parameter with many applications and has also been extensively studied in the literature. By contrast, the reciprocal of the binomial proportion, or the inverse proportion, is often overlooked, even though it also plays an important role in various fields. To estimate the inverse proportion, the maximum likelihood method fails to yield a valid estimate when there is no successful event in the Bernoulli trials. To overcome this zero-event problem, several methods have been introduced in the previous literature. Yet to the best of our knowledge, there is little work on a theoretical comparison of the existing estimators. In this paper, we first review some commonly used estimators for the inverse proportion, study their asymptotic properties, and then develop a new estimator that aims to eliminate the estimation bias. We further conduct Monte Carlo simulations to compare the finite sample performance of the existing and new estimators, and also apply them to handle the zero-event problem in a meta-analysis of COVID-19 data for assessing the relative risks of physical distancing on the infection of coronavirus.