The book presents statistical methods and models that can usefully support the ev- uation of educational services and quality of products. The contributions collected in this book summarize the work of several researchers from the universities of Bologna, Firenze, Napoli and Padova. The contributions are written with a cons- tent notation and a uni?ed view, and concern methodological advances developed mostly with reference to speci?c problems of evaluation using real data sets. The evaluation of educational services, as well as the analysis of judgements and preferences, poses severe methodological challenges because of the presence of one or more of the following aspects: the observational (non experimental) nature of the context, which is associated with the well-known problems of selection bias and presence of nuisance factors; the hierarchical structure of the data, that entails c- related observations and consideration of effects at different levels of the hierarchy and their interactions (multilevel analysis); the multivariate and qualitative nature of the dependent variable, that requires the use of ad hoc statistical methodologies; the presence of non observable factors, e. g. the satisfaction, calling for the use of latent variables models; the simultaneous presence of components of pleasure and components of uncertainty in the explication of the judgments, that asks for the speci?cation and estimation of mixture models. The ?rst part of the book deals with latent variable models.

The Department of Statistical Sciences of the University of Bologna in collaboration with the Department of Management and Engineering of the University of Padova, the Department of Statistical Modelling of Saint Petersburg State University, and INFORMS Simulation Society sponsored the Seventh Workshop on Simulation. This international conference was devoted to statistical techniques in stochastic simulation, data collection, analysis of scientific experiments, and studies representing broad areas of interest. The previous workshops took place in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1994, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2005, and 2009. The Seventh Workshop took place in the Rimini Campus of the University of Bologna, which is in Rimini's historical center.

Ranking of Multivariate Populations: A Permutation Approach with Applications presents a novel permutation-based nonparametric approach for ranking several multivariate populations. Using data collected from both experimental and observation studies, it covers some of the most useful designs widely applied in research and industry investigations, such as multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and multivariate randomized complete block (MRCB) designs. The first section of the book introduces the topic of ranking multivariate populations by presenting the main theoretical ideas and an in-depth literature review. The second section discusses a large number of real case studies from four specific research areas: new product development in industry, perceived quality of the indoor environment, customer satisfaction, and cytological and histological analysis by image processing. A web-based nonparametric combination global ranking software is also described. Designed for practitioners and postgraduate students in statistics and the applied sciences, this application-oriented book offers a practical guide to the reliable global ranking of multivariate items, such as products, processes, and services, in terms of the performance of all investigated products/prototypes.

Ranking of Multivariate Populations: A Permutation Approach with Applications presents a novel permutation-based nonparametric approach for ranking several multivariate populations. Using data collected from both experimental and observation studies, it covers some of the most useful designs widely applied in research and industry investigations, such as multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and multivariate randomized complete block (MRCB) designs. The first section of the book introduces the topic of ranking multivariate populations by presenting the main theoretical ideas and an in-depth literature review. The second section discusses a large number of real case studies from four specific research areas: new product development in industry, perceived quality of the indoor environment, customer satisfaction, and cytological and histological analysis by image processing. A web-based nonparametric combination global ranking software is also described. Designed for practitioners and postgraduate students in statistics and the applied sciences, this application-oriented book offers a practical guide to the reliable global ranking of multivariate items, such as products, processes, and services, in terms of the performance of all investigated products/prototypes.

Highlighting the latest advances in nonparametric and semiparametric statistics, this book gathers selected peer-reviewed contributions presented at the 4th Conference of the International Society for Nonparametric Statistics (ISNPS), held in Salerno, Italy, on June 11-15, 2018. It covers theory, methodology, applications and computational aspects, addressing topics such as nonparametric curve estimation, regression smoothing, models for time series and more generally dependent data, varying coefficient models, symmetry testing, robust estimation, and rank-based methods for factorial design. It also discusses nonparametric and permutation solutions for several different types of data, including ordinal data, spatial data, survival data and the joint modeling of both longitudinal and time-to-event data, permutation and resampling techniques, and practical applications of nonparametric statistics. The International Society for Nonparametric Statistics is a unique global organization, and its international conferences are intended to foster the exchange of ideas and the latest advances and trends among researchers from around the world and to develop and disseminate nonparametric statistics knowledge. The ISNPS 2018 conference in Salerno was organized with the support of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability, the Journal of Nonparametric Statistics and the University of Salerno.

The Department of Statistical Sciences of the University of Bologna in collaboration with the Department of Management and Engineering of the University of Padova, the Department of Statistical Modelling of Saint Petersburg State University, and INFORMS Simulation Society sponsored the Seventh Workshop on Simulation. This international conference was devoted to statistical techniques in stochastic simulation, data collection, analysis of scientific experiments, and studies representing broad areas of interest. The previous workshops took place in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1994, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2005, and 2009. The Seventh Workshop took place in the Rimini Campus of the University of Bologna, which is in Rimini's historical center.

This book considers specific inferential issues arising from the analysis of dynamic shapes with the attempt to solve the problems at hand using probability models and nonparametric tests. The models are simple to understand and interpret and provide a useful tool to describe the global dynamics of the landmark configurations. However, because of the non-Euclidean nature of shape spaces, distributions in shape spaces are not straightforward to obtain. The book explores the use of the Gaussian distribution in the configuration space, with similarity transformations integrated out. Specifically, it works with the offset-normal shape distribution as a probability model for statistical inference on a sample of a temporal sequence of landmark configurations. This enables inference for Gaussian processes from configurations onto the shape space. The book is divided in two parts, with the first three chapters covering material on the offset-normal shape distribution, and the remaining chapters covering the theory of NonParametric Combination (NPC) tests. The chapters offer a collection of applications which are bound together by the theme of this book. They refer to the analysis of data from the FG-NET (Face and Gesture Recognition Research Network) database with facial expressions. For these data, it may be desirable to provide a description of the dynamics of the expressions, or testing whether there is a difference between the dynamics of two facial expressions or testing which of the landmarks are more informative in explaining the pattern of an expression.

Statistical shape analysis is a geometrical analysis from a set of shapes in which statistics are measured to describe geometrical properties from similar shapes or different groups, for instance, the difference between male and female Gorilla skull shapes, normal and pathological bone shapes, etc. Some of the important aspects of shape analysis are to obtain a measure of distance between shapes, to estimate average shapes from a (possibly random) sample and to estimate shape variability in a sample 1]. One of the main methods used is principal component analysis. Specific applications of shape analysis may be found in archaeology, architecture, biology, geography, geology, agriculture, genetics, medical imaging, security applications such as face recognition, entertainment industry (movies, games), computer-aided design and manufacturing. This is a proposal for a new Brief on statistical shape analysis and the various new parametric and non-parametric methods utilized to facilitate shape analysis.

The book presents statistical methods and models that can usefully support the ev- uation of educational services and quality of products. The contributions collected in this book summarize the work of several researchers from the universities of Bologna, Firenze, Napoli and Padova. The contributions are written with a cons- tent notation and a uni?ed view, and concern methodological advances developed mostly with reference to speci?c problems of evaluation using real data sets. The evaluation of educational services, as well as the analysis of judgements and preferences, poses severe methodological challenges because of the presence of one or more of the following aspects: the observational (non experimental) nature of the context, which is associated with the well-known problems of selection bias and presence of nuisance factors; the hierarchical structure of the data, that entails c- related observations and consideration of effects at different levels of the hierarchy and their interactions (multilevel analysis); the multivariate and qualitative nature of the dependent variable, that requires the use of ad hoc statistical methodologies; the presence of non observable factors, e. g. the satisfaction, calling for the use of latent variables models; the simultaneous presence of components of pleasure and components of uncertainty in the explication of the judgments, that asks for the speci?cation and estimation of mixture models. The ?rst part of the book deals with latent variable models.

Permutation testing for multivariate stochastic ordering and ANOVA designs is a fundamental issue in many scientific fields such as medicine, biology, pharmaceutical studies, engineering, economics, psychology, and social sciences. This book presents new advanced methods and related R codes to perform complex multivariate analyses. The prerequisites are a standard course in statistics and some background in multivariate analysis and R software.

This book deals with problems related to the evaluation of customer satisfaction in very different contexts and ways. Often satisfaction about a product or service is investigated through suitable surveys which try to capture the satisfaction about several partial aspects which characterize the perceived quality of that product or service. This book presents a series of statistical techniques adopted to analyze data from real situations where customer satisfaction surveys were performed. The aim is to give a simple guide of the variety of analysis that can be performed when analyzing data from sample surveys: starting from latent variable models to heterogeneity in satisfaction and also introducing some testing methods for comparing different customers. The book also discusses the construction of composite indicators including different benchmarks of satisfaction. Finally, some rank-based procedures for analyzing survey data are also shown.

The purpose of this book is to illustrate a new statistical approach to test allelic association and genotype-specific effects in the genetic study of diseases. There are some parametric and non-parametric methods available for this purpose. We deal with population-based association studies, but comparisons with other methods will also be drawn, analysing the advantages and disadvantages of each one, particularly with regard to power properties with small sample sizes. In this framework we will work out some nonparametric statistical permutation tests and likelihood-based tests to perform case-control analyses to study allelic association between marker, disease-gene and environmental factors. Permutation tests, in particular, will be extended to multivariate and more complex studies, where we deal with several genes and several alleles together. Furthermore, we show simulations under different assumptions on the genetic model and analyse real data sets by simply studying one locus with the permutation test.