This volume of the Selected Papers is a product of the XIX Congress of the Portuguese Statistical Society, held at the Portuguese town of Nazaré, from September 28 to October 1, 2011. All contributions were selected after a thorough peer-review process. It covers a broad scope of papers in the areas of Statistical Science, Probability and Stochastic Processes, Extremes and Statistical Applications.

Fault detection, control, and forecasting have a vital role in renewable energy systems (Photovoltaics (PV) and wind turbines (WTs)) to improve their productivity, ef?ciency, and safety, and to avoid expensive maintenance. For instance, the main crucial and challenging issue in solar and wind energy production is the volatility of intermittent power generation due mainly to weather conditions. This fact usually limits the integration of PV systems and WTs into the power grid. Hence, accurately forecasting power generation in PV and WTs is of great importance for daily/hourly efficient management of power grid production, delivery, and storage, as well as for decision-making on the energy market. Also, accurate and prompt fault detection and diagnosis strategies are required to improve efficiencies of renewable energy systems, avoid the high cost of maintenance, and reduce risks of fire hazards, which could affect both personnel and installed equipment. This book intends to provide the reader with advanced statistical modeling, forecasting, and fault detection techniques in renewable energy systems.

Molecular biologists are performing increasingly large and complicated experiments, but often have little background in data analysis. The book is devoted to teaching the statistical and computational techniques molecular biologists need to analyze their data. It explains the big-picture concepts in data analysis using a wide variety of real-world molecular biological examples such as eQTLs, ortholog identification, motif finding, inference of population structure, protein fold prediction and many more. The book takes a pragmatic approach, focusing on techniques that are based on elegant mathematics yet are the simplest to explain to scientists with little background in computers and statistics.

Recent Statistical techniques are one of the basal evidence for clinical research, a pivotal in handling new clinical research and in evaluating and applying prior research. This book explores various choices of statistical tools and mechanisms, analyses of the associations among different clinical attributes. It uses advanced statistical methods to describe real clinical data sets, when the clinical processes being examined are still in the process. This book also discusses distinct methods for building predictive and probability distribution models in clinical situations and ways to assess the stability of these models and other quantitative conclusions drawn by realistic experimental data sets. Design of experiments and recent posthoc tests have been used in comparing treatment effects and precision of the experimentation. This book also facilitates clinicians towards understanding statistics and enabling them to follow and evaluate the real empirical studies (formulation of randomized control trial) that pledge insight evidence base for clinical practices. This book will be a useful resource for clinicians, postgraduates scholars in medicines, clinical research beginners and academicians to nurture high-level statistical tools with extensive scope.

"Ntoumanis and Myers have done sport and exercise science researchers and students a tremendous service in producing An Introduction to Intermediate and Advanced Statistical Analyses for Sport and Exercise Scientists. This book has an outstanding compilation of comprehensible chapters dealing with the important concepts and technical minutia of the statistical analyses that sport and exercise science scholars use (or should be using!) in their efforts to conduct meaningful research in the field. It is a resource that all sport and exercise scientists and their students should have on their book shelves." —Robert Eklund, School of Sport, University of Stirling, UK "Motivating, to have a statistics text devoted to enabling researchers studying sport and exercise science to apply the most sophisticated analytical techniques to their data. Authors hit the mark between using technical language as necessary and user-friendly terms or translations to keep users encouraged. Text covers traditional and well-used tools but also less common and more complex tools, but always with familiar examples to make their explanations come alive. As a dynamic systems theorist and developmentalist, I would love to see more researchers in my area create study designs that would enable the use of tools outlined here, such as multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) or mediation & moderation analyses, to uncover cascades of relations among subsystems contributing to motor performance, over time. This text can facilitate that outcome." —Beverly D. Ulrich, School of Kinesiology, University of Michigan, USA "The domain of quantitative methods is constantly evolving and expanding. This means that there is tremendous pressure on researchers to stay current, both in terms of best practices and improvements in more traditional methods as well as increasingly complex new methods. With this volume Ntoumanis and Myers present a nice cross-section of both, helping sport and exercise science researchers to address old questions in better ways, and, even more excitingly, to address new questions entirely. I have no doubt that this volume will quickly become a lovingly dog-eared companion for students and researchers, helping them to continue to move the field forward." —Gregory R. Hancock, University of Maryland and Center for Integrated Latent Variable Research (CILVR), USA

The book focuses on problem solving for practitioners and model building for academicians under multivariate situations. This book helps readers in understanding the issues, such as knowing variability, extracting patterns, building relationships, and making objective decisions. A large number of multivariate statistical models are covered in the book. The readers will learn how a practical problem can be converted to a statistical problem and how the statistical solution can be interpreted as a practical solution. Key features: Links data generation process with statistical distributions in multivariate domain Provides step by step procedure for estimating parameters of developed models Provides blueprint for data driven decision making Includes practical examples and case studies relevant for intended audiences The book will help everyone involved in data driven problem solving, modeling and decision making.

Statistical modeling is a critical tool in scientific research. This book provides comprehensive explanations of the concepts and philosophy of statistical modeling, together with a wide range of practical and numerical examples. The authors expect this work to be of great value not just to statisticians but also to researchers and practitioners in various fields of research such as information science, computer science, engineering, bioinformatics, economics, marketing and environmental science. It’s a crucial area of study, as statistical models are used to understand phenomena with uncertainty and to determine the structure of complex systems. They’re also used to control such systems, as well as to make reliable predictions in various natural and social science fields.

Institutional research is more relevant today than ever before as growing pressures for improved student learning and increased institutional accountability motivate higher education to effectively use ever-expanding data and information resources. As the most current and comprehensive volume on the topic, the Handbook describes the fundamental knowledge, techniques, and strategies that define institutional research. The book contains an overview of the profession and its history, examines how institutional research supports executive and academic leadership and governance, and discusses the varied ways data from federal, state, and campus sources are used by research professionals. With contributions from leading experts in the field, this important resource reviews the analytic tools, techniques, and methodologies used by institutional researchers in their professional practice and covers a wide range of topics such as: conducting institutional research; statistical applications; comparative analyses; quality control systems; measuring student, faculty, and staff opinions; and management activities designed to improve organizational effectiveness.

An explosion of information has occurred since scientists began to define the molecular events that describe the malignant transformation and progression of cells and their development towards a life-threatening metastatic disease. The First International Congress on Molecular Staging of Cancer, held in Munich in December 2001, aimed to establish an international platform of exchange among molecular biologists, cell biologists, tumor immunologists, and clinical and surgical oncologists. This network approach should be fruitful for both clinicians and researchers. The highlighted topics included tumor-associated proteolysis, minimal residual disease, new approaches for molecular diagnosis and targeting, and the first molecular staging models. One session focused on technology transfer, opening up a new field of funding for innovative concepts. Finally, the impact of molecular staging on clinical strategies was discussed.

The theme of the meeting was “Statistical Methods for the Analysis of Large Data-Sets”. In recent years there has been increasing interest in this subject; in fact a huge quantity of information is often available but standard statistical techniques are usually not well suited to managing this kind of data. The conference serves as an important meeting point for European researchers working on this topic and a number of European statistical societies participated in the organization of the event. The book includes 45 papers from a selection of the 156 papers accepted for presentation and discussed at the conference on “Advanced Statistical Methods for the Analysis of Large Data-sets.”