We examine the frequency of price changes for 350 categories of goods and services covering about 70 % of consumer spending, based on unpublished data from the BLS for 1995 to 1997. Compared with previous studies we find much more frequent price changes, with half of goods' prices lasting less than 4.3 months. Even excluding the role of temporary price cuts (sales), we find that half of goods' prices last 5.5 months or less. The frequency of price changes differs dramatically across categories. We exploit this variation to ask how inflation for "flexible-price goods" (goods with frequent changes in individual prices) differs from inflation for "sticky-price goods" (those displaying infrequent price changes). Compared to the predictions of popular sticky price models, actual inflation rates are far more volatile and transient, particularly for sticky-price goods.

In a 1935 paper, and in his book Theory of Probability, Jeffreys developed a methodology for quantifying the evidence in favor of a scientific theory. The centerpiece was a number, now called the Bayes factor, which is the posterior odds of the null hypothesis when the prior probability on the null

In this paper we develop some statistical theory for factor models of large dimensions. The focus is the determination of the number of factors, which is an unresolved issue in the rapidly growing literature on multifactor models. We propose a panel Cp criterion and show that the number of factors

shared variation due to the stock-market factors, and they are linked to bond returns through shared variation in the bond-market factors. Except for low-grade corporates. the bond-market factors capture the common variation in bond returns. Most important. the five factors seem to explain average

. This decomposition corresponds to a factorization of the polyphase matrix of the wavelet or subband filters into elementary matrices. That such a factorization is possible is well-known to algebraists (and expressed by the formula); it is also used in linear systems theory in the electrical engineering community. We

A factor graph is a bipartite graph that expresses how a "global" function of many variables factors into a product of "local" functions. Factor graphs subsume many other graphical models including Bayesian networks, Markov random fields, and Tanner graphs. Following one simple

of these decisions has important consequences for the obtained results. Recommendations that have been made in the methodological literature are discussed. Analyses of 3 existing empirical data sets are used to illustrate how questionable decisions in conducting factor analyses can yield problematic results

A computer is generally considered to be a universal computational device; i.e., it is believed able to simulate any physical computational device with a increase in computation time of at most a polynomial factor. It is not clear whether this is still true when quantum mechanics is taken

, the experimental results indicate a hierarchy of the algorithms under consideration. Furthermore, the emerging effects are evidence that the suggested test functions provide sufficient complexity to compare multiobjective optimizers. Finally, elitism is shown to be an important factor for improving evolutionary

Volume rendering is a technique for visualizing 3D arrays of sampled data. It has applications in areas such as medical imaging and scientific visualization, but its use has been limited by its high computational expense. Early implementations of volume rendering used brute-force techniques that require on the order of 100 seconds to render typical data sets on a workstation. Algorithms with optimizations that exploit coherence in the data have reduced rendering times to the range of ten seconds but are still not fast enough for interactive visualization applications. In this thesis we present a family of volume rendering algorithms that reduces rendering times to one second. First we present a scanline-order volume rendering algorithm that exploits coherence in both the volume data and the image. We show that scanline-order algorithms are fundamentally more efficient than commonly-used ray casting algorithms because the latter must perform analytic geometry calculations (e.g. intersecting rays with axis-aligned boxes). The new scanline-order algorithm simply streams through the volume and the image in storage order. We describe variants of the algorithm for both parallel and perspective projections and