This report summarizes timber resource statistics for the 20 counties in eastern Washington. The inventory sampled all private and public lands except those administered by the National Forest System in 2001, and those that were reserved from management for wood products.

The importance to society of environmental services, provided by forest ecosystems, has significantly increased during the last few decades. A growing global concern with the deterioration of forests, beginning perhaps most noticeably in the 1980s, has led to an increasing public awareness of the environmental, cultural, economic, and social values that forests provide. Around the world, ideas of sustainable, close-to-nature, and multi-functional forestry have progressively replaced the older perception of forests as only a source for timber. The international impetus to protect and sustainably manage forests has come from global initiatives at management, conservation, and sustainable development related to all types of forests and forestry. A few of the more notable initiatives include: the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, UNCED); regional follow-ups to the Earth Summit such as the Montreal Process and Helsinki Accords; the forest elements of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD); and the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC).

Online marketing with visual content continues to grow and drive tons of traffic. The team at Venngage gathered together the latest data in the 14 Visual Content Marketing Statistics to Know for 2019 infographic and built it using their own tool.

From Nadya Khoja at Venngage:

Two years ago I asked 300 different online marketers to help me figure out how they were using visual content as part of their marketing strategies in 2016 and their predictions for 2017.

This year I wanted to see if there were any changes in how marketers were creating visuals, and what kind of content engagement they were seeing.

I also asked a couple of additional questions to see how the use of various visual formats impacted their blogging strategies.

Conclusion:

The data says it all–visual content isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Not only are more brands leveraging the use for of visuals for various social media platforms, but there is a lot of added benefit when it comes to SEO and organic rankings as well, particularly in Google’s image search results.

And of course, creating engaging visual content is a surefire way to resonate with your audience and communicate your ideas more effectively.

There are a few things to unravel here:

• It’s good survey data, but take it with a grain of salt. Venngage is a visual design tool, sharing data about visual content marketing.

• The infographic is a fantastic format to summarize the survey results and use in social media to draw in readers to the full article.

• The infographic is built using Venngage, so it’s also a great way to showcase what their design tool is capable of. In fact, clicking on the infographic gives you the opportunity to use this design as a template for designing your own infographic.

• Sections 5 & 10 are disappointing visually. There are no data visualizations, just a bunch of percentage values shown in text.

• I’m not a fan of the bright color scheme, and it’s visually distracting from highlighting insights in the data.

• The article still references 2018 data, even though the infographic has been updated with newer data from 2019.

Consider the following prediction problem. Assume that there is a block box that produces bits according to some unknown computable distribution on the binary tree. We know first $n$ bits $x_1 x_2 ldots x_n$. We want to know the probability of the event that that the next bit is equal to $1$. Solomonoff suggested to use universal semimeasure $m$ for solving this task. He proved that for every computable distribution $P$ and for every $b in {0,1}$ the following holds: $$sum_{n=1}^{infty}sum_{x: l(x)=n} P(x) (P(b | x) - m(b | x))^2 < infty .$$ However, Solomonoff's method has a negative aspect: Hutter and Muchnik proved that there are an universal semimeasure $m$, computable distribution $P$ and a random (in Martin-L{"o}f sense) sequence $x_1 x_2ldots$ such that $lim_{n o infty} P(x_{n+1} | x_1ldots x_n) - m(x_{n+1} | x_1ldots x_n) rightarrow 0$. We suggest a new way for prediction. For every finite string $x$ we predict the new bit according to the best (in some sence) distribution for $x$. We prove the similar result as Solomonoff theorem for our way of prediction. Also we show that our method of prediction has no that negative aspect as Solomonoff's method.

Are you looking to start 2020 with a fresh web design for your business? If so, you must know what you need to do in 2020 to have a website that drives success for your business. With website statistics for 2020, you can see what to do and what to avoid, which will help you […]

The post Website Statistics for 2020: 10 Critical Stats to Know for Web Design appeared first on WebFX Blog.

Statistics help us make sense of the world around us. These numbers help everyone from political pollsters to fantasy football aficionados make informed calls based on the mountains of data at their disposal. In this weekly series, learn how to decode the statistics that pop up on a daily basis. Eddie Davila explores a new eclectic, real-world topic each week. Learn how stats are used to find the average score on a test, how casinos use stats to ensure that the house will usually win, and more.

Note: Because this is an ongoing series, viewers will not receive a certificate of completion.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is adopting IBM social software to support the way thousands of employees connect and interact.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) today announced that more than 2.6 million households across Australia submitting Census forms via the web-based eCensus solution. This represents a significant jump from the 2006 Census, when 778,000 (9.1 per cent) of Australian households completed their forms online.

China's reporting obfuscations are blamed for the lack of U.S. preparedness. But other governments recognized the situation in China months ago and took action.

APRIL saw 20.5 million job losses in the United States, the biggest rise in the jobless rate since the Great Depression.

Statistical methods are a key part of data science, yet few data scientists have formal statistical training. Courses and books on basic statistics rarely cover the topic from a data science perspective. The second edition of this popular guide adds comprehensive examples in Python, provides practical guidance on applying statistical methods to data science, tells you how to avoid their misuse, and gives you advice on what’s important and what’s not.

Manitoba’s unemployment rate nearly doubled between March and April, according to the monthly report from Statistics Canada released Friday morning.

The Current Index to Statistics (CIS) is now hosted by the AMS.  It is available on the MathSciNet servers from the URL mathscinet.ams.org/cis.  The database is openly available using a brand new search interface.  Some history The Current Index to … Continue reading →

In 2015, 43.3 million immigrants lived in the United States, comprising 13.5 percent of the population. The foreign-born population grew more slowly than in prior years, up 2 percent from 2014. Get sought-after data on U.S. immigration trends, including top countries of origin, Mexican migration, refugee admissions, illegal immigration, health-care coverage, and much more in this Spotlight article.

The United States is by far the world's top migration destination, home to roughly one-fifth of all global migrants. In 2016, nearly 44 million immigrants lived in the United States, comprising 13.5 percent of the country's population. Get the most sought-after data available on immigrants and immigration trends, including top countries of origin, legal immigration pathways, enforcement actions, health-care coverage, and much more.

Immigrant arrivals to the United States and the makeup of the foreign-born population have been changing in significant ways: Recent immigrants are more likely to be from Asia than from Mexico and the overall immigrant population is growing at a slower rate than before the 2008-09 recession. This useful article collects in one place some of the most sought-after statistics on immigrants in the United States.

WASHINGTON — The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) today published the annual update to its data-rich article, Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States, offering readers a wealth of information that can help inform understanding about an issue that is the subject of much conversation.

Interested in answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about immigration and immigrants in the United States? This incredible resource collects in one place top statistics from authoritative government and nongovernmental sources, offering a snapshot of the immigrant population, visa and enforcement statistics, and data on emerging trends, including the slowing of growth of the foreign-born population, changing origins, and increasing educational levels.

England : League of Nations, 1925.

Tamara Fernández, Nicolás Rivera.

Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 1872--1916.

Abstract:
In this paper, we study Kaplan-Meier V- and U-statistics respectively defined as $ heta (widehat{F}_{n})=sum _{i,j}K(X_{[i:n]},X_{[j:n]})W_{i}W_{j}$ and $ heta _{U}(widehat{F}_{n})=sum _{i eq j}K(X_{[i:n]},X_{[j:n]})W_{i}W_{j}/sum _{i eq j}W_{i}W_{j}$, where $widehat{F}_{n}$ is the Kaplan-Meier estimator, ${W_{1},ldots ,W_{n}}$ are the Kaplan-Meier weights and $K:(0,infty )^{2} o mathbb{R}$ is a symmetric kernel. As in the canonical setting of uncensored data, we differentiate between two asymptotic behaviours for $ heta (widehat{F}_{n})$ and $ heta _{U}(widehat{F}_{n})$. Additionally, we derive an asymptotic canonical V-statistic representation of the Kaplan-Meier V- and U-statistics. By using this representation we study properties of the asymptotic distribution. Applications to hypothesis testing are given.

Sean L. Simpson, F. DuBois Bowman, Paul J. Laurienti

Source: Statist. Surv., Volume 7, 1--36.

Abstract:
Complex functional brain network analyses have exploded over the last decade, gaining traction due to their profound clinical implications. The application of network science (an interdisciplinary offshoot of graph theory) has facilitated these analyses and enabled examining the brain as an integrated system that produces complex behaviors. While the field of statistics has been integral in advancing activation analyses and some connectivity analyses in functional neuroimaging research, it has yet to play a commensurate role in complex network analyses. Fusing novel statistical methods with network-based functional neuroimage analysis will engender powerful analytical tools that will aid in our understanding of normal brain function as well as alterations due to various brain disorders. Here we survey widely used statistical and network science tools for analyzing fMRI network data and discuss the challenges faced in filling some of the remaining methodological gaps. When applied and interpreted correctly, the fusion of network scientific and statistical methods has a chance to revolutionize the understanding of brain function.

This paper develops a general framework for analyzing asymptotics of $V$-statistics. Previous literature on limiting distribution mainly focuses on the cases when $n o infty$ with fixed kernel size $k$. Under some regularity conditions, we demonstrate asymptotic normality when $k$ grows with $n$ by utilizing existing results for $U$-statistics. The key in our approach lies in a mathematical reduction to $U$-statistics by designing an equivalent kernel for $V$-statistics. We also provide a unified treatment on variance estimation for both $U$- and $V$-statistics by observing connections to existing methods and proposing an empirically more accurate estimator. Ensemble methods such as random forests, where multiple base learners are trained and aggregated for prediction purposes, serve as a running example throughout the paper because they are a natural and flexible application of $V$-statistics.

Xiaohui Chen, Kengo Kato.

Source: The Annals of Statistics, Volume 47, Number 6, 3127--3156.

Abstract:
This paper studies inference for the mean vector of a high-dimensional $U$-statistic. In the era of big data, the dimension $d$ of the $U$-statistic and the sample size $n$ of the observations tend to be both large, and the computation of the $U$-statistic is prohibitively demanding. Data-dependent inferential procedures such as the empirical bootstrap for $U$-statistics is even more computationally expensive. To overcome such a computational bottleneck, incomplete $U$-statistics obtained by sampling fewer terms of the $U$-statistic are attractive alternatives. In this paper, we introduce randomized incomplete $U$-statistics with sparse weights whose computational cost can be made independent of the order of the $U$-statistic. We derive nonasymptotic Gaussian approximation error bounds for the randomized incomplete $U$-statistics in high dimensions, namely in cases where the dimension $d$ is possibly much larger than the sample size $n$, for both nondegenerate and degenerate kernels. In addition, we propose generic bootstrap methods for the incomplete $U$-statistics that are computationally much less demanding than existing bootstrap methods, and establish finite sample validity of the proposed bootstrap methods. Our methods are illustrated on the application to nonparametric testing for the pairwise independence of a high-dimensional random vector under weaker assumptions than those appearing in the literature.

Joshua Cape, Minh Tang, Carey E. Priebe.

Source: The Annals of Statistics, Volume 47, Number 5, 2405--2439.

Abstract:
The singular value matrix decomposition plays a ubiquitous role throughout statistics and related fields. Myriad applications including clustering, classification, and dimensionality reduction involve studying and exploiting the geometric structure of singular values and singular vectors. This paper provides a novel collection of technical and theoretical tools for studying the geometry of singular subspaces using the two-to-infinity norm. Motivated by preliminary deterministic Procrustes analysis, we consider a general matrix perturbation setting in which we derive a new Procrustean matrix decomposition. Together with flexible machinery developed for the two-to-infinity norm, this allows us to conduct a refined analysis of the induced perturbation geometry with respect to the underlying singular vectors even in the presence of singular value multiplicity. Our analysis yields singular vector entrywise perturbation bounds for a range of popular matrix noise models, each of which has a meaningful associated statistical inference task. In addition, we demonstrate how the two-to-infinity norm is the preferred norm in certain statistical settings. Specific applications discussed in this paper include covariance estimation, singular subspace recovery, and multiple graph inference. Both our Procrustean matrix decomposition and the technical machinery developed for the two-to-infinity norm may be of independent interest.

Xiao Fang, Li Luo, Qi-Man Shao.

Source: Bernoulli, Volume 26, Number 3, 2319--2352.

Abstract:
We prove a refined Cramér-type moderate deviation result by taking into account of the skewness in normal approximation for sums of local statistics of independent random variables. We apply the main result to $k$-runs, U-statistics and subgraph counts in the Erdős–Rényi random graph. To prove our main result, we develop exponential concentration inequalities and higher-order tail probability expansions via Stein’s method.

Akio Fujiwara, Koichi Yamagata.

Source: Bernoulli, Volume 26, Number 3, 2105--2142.

Abstract:
We herein develop a theory of contiguity in the quantum domain based upon a novel quantum analogue of the Lebesgue decomposition. The theory thus formulated is pertinent to the weak quantum local asymptotic normality introduced in the previous paper [Yamagata, Fujiwara, and Gill, Ann. Statist. 41 (2013) 2197–2217], yielding substantial enlargement of the scope of quantum statistics.

Sumit Mukherjee.

Source: Bernoulli, Volume 26, Number 2, 1016--1043.

Abstract:
A sufficient criterion for “non-degeneracy” is given for Exponential Random Graph Models on sparse graphs with sufficient statistics which are functions of the degree sequence. This criterion explains why statistics such as alternating $k$-star are non-degenerate, whereas subgraph counts are degenerate. It is further shown that this criterion is “almost” tight. Existence of consistent estimates is then proved for non-degenerate Exponential Random Graph Models.

Stanislav Minsker, Xiaohan Wei.

Source: Bernoulli, Volume 26, Number 1, 694--727.

Abstract:
Let $Y$ be a $d$-dimensional random vector with unknown mean $mu $ and covariance matrix $Sigma $. This paper is motivated by the problem of designing an estimator of $Sigma $ that admits exponential deviation bounds in the operator norm under minimal assumptions on the underlying distribution, such as existence of only 4th moments of the coordinates of $Y$. To address this problem, we propose robust modifications of the operator-valued U-statistics, obtain non-asymptotic guarantees for their performance, and demonstrate the implications of these results to the covariance estimation problem under various structural assumptions.

Nicolas Privault, Grzegorz Serafin.

Source: Bernoulli, Volume 26, Number 1, 587--615.

Abstract:
We derive normal approximation bounds in the Kolmogorov distance for sums of discrete multiple integrals and weighted $U$-statistics made of independent Bernoulli random variables. Such bounds are applied to normal approximation for the renormalized subgraph counts in the Erdős–Rényi random graph. This approach completely solves a long-standing conjecture in the general setting of arbitrary graph counting, while recovering recent results obtained for triangles and improving other bounds in the Wasserstein distance.

Laura Anderlucci, Angela Montanari, Cinzia Viroli.

Source: Statistical Science, Volume 34, Number 2, 280--300.

Abstract:
In this paper, we retrace the recent history of statistics by analyzing all the papers published in five prestigious statistical journals since 1970, namely: The Annals of Statistics , Biometrika , Journal of the American Statistical Association , Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B and Statistical Science . The aim is to construct a kind of “taxonomy” of the statistical papers by organizing and clustering them in main themes. In this sense being identified in a cluster means being important enough to be uncluttered in the vast and interconnected world of the statistical research. Since the main statistical research topics naturally born, evolve or die during time, we will also develop a dynamic clustering strategy, where a group in a time period is allowed to migrate or to merge into different groups in the following one. Results show that statistics is a very dynamic and evolving science, stimulated by the rise of new research questions and types of data.

About one in 12 Manitoba jobs disappeared during the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Statistics Canada's latest monthly survey of Canadian employment.

Notional amounts of OTC derivatives rose to $640 trillion at end-June 2019. This is up from $544 trillion at end-2018 and the highest level since 2014. It marks a continuation of the trend increase evident since end-2016. The gross market value of OTC derivatives, summing positive and negative values, also rose, from $9.7 trillion to $12.1 trillion, led by increases in euro interest rate derivative contracts. The lastest semiannual data benefit from the addition of more comprehensive information for smaller dealers collected as part of the BIS Triennial Survey. Dealers in emerging market economies (EMEs) accounted for 9% of the outstanding notional amounts of foreign exchange and commodity derivatives globally at end-June 2019, up from 7% at end-June 2016.

Global cross-border bank claims continued to expand rapidly, growing at 9% year on year. As in previous quarters, the expansion was mainly due to claims on the non-bank sector, which grew at 12% year on year. The growth in claims on non-bank financial institutions was particularly strong (+17%). European banks' cross-border lending, which went through a prolonged contraction after the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-09, has been expanding again since the start of 2018.

The debt securities statistics provide quarterly data on borrowing in money and bond markets, distinguishing between international and domestic markets.

The exchange-traded derivatives statistics provide monthly data on the turnover, and quarterly data on the open interest, of foreign exchange and interest rate futures and options. They refer to notional amounts, which enables comparisons of levels and trends in activity across different markets.

The annual growth rate of global cross-border bank claims fell to 6%, down from 9% at end-September 2019. The short-term share of foreign banks' claims, a key indicator of external vulnerability, is elevated for a number of borrowing emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). Borrowers in EMDEs had untapped credit lines of $610 billion, or roughly 10% of the stock of global foreign claims on EMDEs at end-2019. Saudi Arabia joined the reporting population for the locational banking statistics (LBS) with data starting from Q4 2017, bringing the number of countries reporting these data to 48.