In Denver, teachers will go on strike Monday to protest a performance-pay system that’s been in place for 15 years. The dispute is illustrative of a larger national shift away from differentiated pay.

Utah is one of four states where state laws conflict with components of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act meaning districts may have to answer to two separate accountability systems this fall.

This paper sets out three challenges to the creation of a future for Indo-Pacific states and peoples consistent with the visions of a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ (FOIP) expressed by Japan, India, the US and Australia, and now by the ASEAN outlook on the Indo-Pacific. It also describes a path for states to operate in an environment of coercive Chinese state power that seeks to influence how states relate and how they operate within their domestic boundaries.

As the state rolls out a new school accountability system and a separate federal accountability system, disputes have flared between the state department and school board over which underperforming schools should get extra federal money.

Berlin : Fischer's Medicin. Buchhandlung, H. Kornfeld, 1897.

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Berlin : S. Karger, 1905.

Braunschweig : Druck und Verlag von Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1898.

Berlin : J. Springer, 1893.

Leipzig : Cnobloch, 1822.

Bonn : O. Paul, 1895.

Berlin : A. Hirschwald, 1879.

Leipzig : W. Engelmann, 1875.

Wiesbaden : J.F. Bergmann, 1887.

London : H. Kimpton, 1893.

London : Boericke & Tafel, 1881.

London : Smith, Elder, 1877.

Bonnae : Typis Joan. Frid. Abshoven, 1790.

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[London] : Waterlow Bros. & Layton, Limited, [1893]

Republican legislators last month replaced the state's accountability system with a new one amid debate over the powers of the governor. The state education department says it's not ESSA-compliant.

[Place of publication not identified] : [publisher not identified], [18--?]

[Place of publication not identified] : [publisher not identified], [18--?]

[Place of publication not identified] : [publisher not identified], [18--?]

Rockville, Maryland : National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1979.

Rockville, Maryland : National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1979.

Gregor Pasemann, Wilhelm Stannat.

Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 547--579.

Abstract:
A parameter estimation problem for a class of semilinear stochastic evolution equations is considered. Conditions for consistency and asymptotic normality are given in terms of growth and continuity properties of the nonlinear part. Emphasis is put on the case of stochastic reaction-diffusion systems. Robustness results for statistical inference under model uncertainty are provided.

We study derivative-free methods for policy optimization over the class of linear policies. We focus on characterizing the convergence rate of these methods when applied to linear-quadratic systems, and study various settings of driving noise and reward feedback. Our main theoretical result provides an explicit bound on the sample or evaluation complexity: we show that these methods are guaranteed to converge to within any pre-specified tolerance of the optimal policy with a number of zero-order evaluations that is an explicit polynomial of the error tolerance, dimension, and curvature properties of the problem. Our analysis reveals some interesting differences between the settings of additive driving noise and random initialization, as well as the settings of one-point and two-point reward feedback. Our theory is corroborated by simulations of derivative-free methods in application to these systems. Along the way, we derive convergence rates for stochastic zero-order optimization algorithms when applied to a certain class of non-convex problems.

Parametrised state space models in the form of recurrent networks are often used in machine learning to learn from data streams exhibiting temporal dependencies. To break the black box nature of such models it is important to understand the dynamical features of the input-driving time series that are formed in the state space. We propose a framework for rigorous analysis of such state representations in vanishing memory state space models such as echo state networks (ESN). In particular, we consider the state space a temporal feature space and the readout mapping from the state space a kernel machine operating in that feature space. We show that: (1) The usual ESN strategy of randomly generating input-to-state, as well as state coupling leads to shallow memory time series representations, corresponding to cross-correlation operator with fast exponentially decaying coefficients; (2) Imposing symmetry on dynamic coupling yields a constrained dynamic kernel matching the input time series with straightforward exponentially decaying motifs or exponentially decaying motifs of the highest frequency; (3) Simple ring (cycle) high-dimensional reservoir topology specified only through two free parameters can implement deep memory dynamic kernels with a rich variety of matching motifs. We quantify richness of feature representations imposed by dynamic kernels and demonstrate that for dynamic kernel associated with cycle reservoir topology, the kernel richness undergoes a phase transition close to the edge of stability.

Abedin Haidari, Amir T. Payandeh Najafabadi, Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan.

Source: Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics, Volume 34, Number 1, 150--166.

Abstract:
Consider two parallel systems, say $A$ and $B$, with respective lifetimes $T_{1}$ and $T_{2}$ wherein independent component lifetimes of each system follow exponentiated generalized gamma distribution with possibly different exponential shape and scale parameters. We show here that $T_{2}$ is smaller than $T_{1}$ with respect to the usual stochastic order (reversed hazard rate order) if the vector of logarithm (the main vector) of scale parameters of System $B$ is weakly weighted majorized by that of System $A$, and if the vector of exponential shape parameters of System $A$ is unordered mojorized by that of System $B$. By means of some examples, we show that the above results can not be extended to the hazard rate and likelihood ratio orders. However, when the scale parameters of each system divide into two homogeneous groups, we verify that the usual stochastic and reversed hazard rate orders can be extended, respectively, to the hazard rate and likelihood ratio orders. The established results complete and strengthen some of the known results in the literature.

Rodrigo Citton P. dos Reis, Enrico A. Colosimo, Gustavo L. Gilardoni.

Source: Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics, Volume 33, Number 2, 374--396.

Abstract:
In the data analysis from multiple repairable systems, it is usual to observe both different truncation times and heterogeneity among the systems. Among other reasons, the latter is caused by different manufacturing lines and maintenance teams of the systems. In this paper, a hierarchical model is proposed for the statistical analysis of multiple repairable systems under different truncation times. A reparameterization of the power law process is proposed in order to obtain a quasi-conjugate bayesian analysis. An empirical Bayes approach is used to estimate model hyperparameters. The uncertainty in the estimate of these quantities are corrected by using a parametric bootstrap approach. The results are illustrated in a real data set of failure times of power transformers from an electric company in Brazil.

Kevin McGoff, Sayan Mukherjee, Natesh Pillai.

Source: Statistics Surveys, Volume 9, 209--252.

Abstract:
The topic of statistical inference for dynamical systems has been studied widely across several fields. In this survey we focus on methods related to parameter estimation for nonlinear dynamical systems. Our objective is to place results across distinct disciplines in a common setting and highlight opportunities for further research.

This paper studies a service system in which arriving customers are provided with information about the delay they will experience. Based on this information they decide to wait for service or to leave the system. The main objective is to estimate the customers' patience-level distribution and the corresponding potential arrival rate, using knowledge of the actual workload process only. We cast the system as a queueing model, so as to evaluate the corresponding likelihood function. Estimating the unknown parameters relying on a maximum likelihood procedure, we prove strong consistency and derive the asymptotic distribution of the estimation error. Several applications and extensions of the method are discussed. In particular, we indicate how our method generalizes to a multi-server setting. The performance of our approach is assessed through a series of numerical experiments. By fitting parameters of hyperexponential and generalized-hyperexponential distributions our method provides a robust estimation framework for any continuous patience-level distribution.