Domenico Vistocco

• PhD Computational Statistics
• Professor (Associate) at University of Naples Federico II

The Qu (2008) test for changing coefficients in quantile regression is analyzed in order to investigate its diagnostic propensities when appropriately decomposed. The goal is to reveal the diagnostic capabilities of this test: it can indeed be implemented to detect the location of a break and to pin point its impact on each regression coefficient....

Style analysis is an asset class factor model aiming at obtaining information on the internal allocation of a financial portfolio and at comparing portfolios with similar investment strategies. The aim of the paper is to investigate the use of quantile regression to draw inferences on style coefficients. In particular, we compare an approximation w...

Precision Livestock Farming, as a specific sub-sector of Public Health Informatics, focuses on the application of process engineering principles and techniques to achieve an automatic monitoring, modelling, and management of animal productions. In the present work a timely "protocol" is proposed for unobtrusive direct/indirect monitoring of biometr...

The aim of the chapter is to provide step-by-step instructions to implement, estimate, and interpret a Quantile Composite-based Path Model, exploiting the qcpm package (https://rdrr.io/cran/qcpm/), freely available for the R software. The chapter encompasses both methodological aspects of this recent quantile approach to Partial Least Squares Path...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are potentially participated in by very many students from different parts of the world, which means that learning analytics is especially challenging. In this framework, predicting students’ performance is a key issue, but the high level of heterogeneity affects understanding and measurement of the causal links...

The paper aims to introduce a multigroup approach to assess group effects in quantile regression. The procedure estimates the same regression model at different quantiles, and for different groups of observations. Such groups are defined by the levels of one or more stratification variables. The proposed approach exploits a computational procedure...

The present work aims at describing a viable "protocol" for unobtrusive direct/indirect monitoring of biometric parameters for the estimation of body conditions on Mediterranean Buffalo populations, using low-cost automated systems i.e., smart cameras endowed with depth perception capabilities.

Primiparous buffaloes were tested in two periods of the year characterized, by either low or high reproductive efficiency. They were subjected to two protocols for synchronization of ovulation: (i) Ovsynch (OV) and (ii) progesterone based (P4) treatment. After calving, the animals underwent a series of four cycles of re-synchronization protocols. T...

In recent literature, the issue of sustainability and its measure has been addressed with different approaches that depend on the multidimensional nature of the concept and the specific sector and context to which it applies. The present work focuses on the economic sustainability component and suggests an operative measure at the farm level. The m...

By reference to a sample of 173 emerging adult seminarians in South Italy, this study evaluates the influence of attachment to one’s parents and peers on identity development and well-being in seminarians. The statistical analysis (PLS-PM) reports that secure attachment to one’s mother and secure attachment to a peer are positively associated with...

Analyzing sports data has become a challenging issue as it involves not standard data structures coming from several sources and with different formats, being often high dimensional and complex. This paper deals with a dyadic structure (athletes/coaches), characterized by a large number of manifest and latent variables. Data were collected in a sur...

Quantile composite-based path modeling is a recent extension to the conventional partial least squares path modeling. It estimates the effects that predictors exert on the whole conditional distributions of the outcomes involved in path models and provides a comprehensive view on the structure of the relationships among the variables. This method c...

External preference mapping is widely used in marketing and R&D divisions to understand the consumer behaviour. The most common preference map is obtained through a two-step procedure that combines principal component analysis and least squares regression. The standard approach exploits classical regression and therefore focuses on the conditional...

In many fields of applications, linear regression is the most widely used statistical method to analyze the effect of a set of explanatory variables on a response variable of interest. Classical least squares regression focuses on the conditional mean of the response, while quantile regression extends the view to conditional quantiles. Quantile reg...

Composite-based path modeling aims to study the relationships among a set of constructs, that is a representation of theoretical concepts. Such constructs are operationalized as composites (i.e. linear combinations of observed or manifest variables). The traditional partial least squares approach to composite-based path modeling focuses on the cond...

This article proposes a quantitative analysis to measure social vulnerability in a urban space, specifically in the area of the Municipality of Rome. Social vulnerability can be defined as a situation in which people are characterized by a condition of multidimensional deprivation that encompasses multiple aspects of life and exposes population to...

Recent studies have pointed out the effect of personality traits on athletes’ performance and success; however, fewer analyses have focused the relation among these features and specific athletic behaviors, skills, and strategies to enhance performance. To fill this void, the present paper provides evidence on what personality traits mostly affect...

Purpose Investigate the behaviour and the habits of the consumers from central-southern Italy in relation to extra olive oil consumption, focussing on the impact of protected designation of origin (PDO) and EU–organic certification on purchase intention and quality perception. Design/methodology/approach A specific questionnaire was submitted to 1...

This book includes 25 peer-reviewed short papers submitted to the Scientific Opening Conference titled “Statistics and Information Systems for Policy Evaluation”, aimed at promoting new statistical methods and applications for the evaluation of policies and organized by the Association for Applied Statistics (ASA) and the Department of Statistics,...

The contributions gathered in this book focus on modern methods for statistical learning and modeling in data analysis and present a series of engaging real-world applications. The book covers numerous research topics, ranging from statistical inference and modeling to clustering and factorial methods, from directional data analysis to time series...

Over the years, several studies have shown the relevance of one-to-one compared to one-to-many tutoring, shedding light on the need for technology-based platforms to assist traditional learning methodolo-gies. Therefore, in recent years, tutoring systems that collect and analyse responses during the user interaction for an automated assessment and...

The aim of the paper is to propose a quantile regression based strategy to assess heterogeneity in a multi-block type data structure. Specifically, the paper deals with a particular data structure where several blocks of variables are observed on the same units and a structure of relations is assumed between the different blocks. The idea is that q...

Massive Open Online Courses, universally labelled as MOOCs, become more and more relevant in the era of digitalization of higher education. The availability of free education resources without access restrictions for a plenty of potential users has changed the learning market in a way unthinkable only few decades ago. This form of web-based educati...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) phenomenon is the new frontier of online learning, where unlimited time and no location restrictions allow users to follow different strategies of learning. In the learning analytics literature there are many contributes dealing on how MOOC learners' behaviour affects their performance and influences reaching the...

The correlation amongst exposure to ultrafine particle concentrations and heart rate in a large healthy population was investigated. The study was conducted by continuously monitoring for seven days fifty volunteers in terms of exposure to particle concentrations, heart rate and physical activity performed through portable monitors. Data were analy...

Volume two of Quantile Regression offers an important guide for applied researchers that draws on the same example-based approach adopted for the first volume. The text explores topics including robustness, expectiles, m-quantile, decomposition, time series, elemental sets and linear programming. Graphical representations are widely used to visuall...

In many real data applications, statistical units belong to different groups and statistical models should be tailored to incorporate and exploit this heterogeneity among units. This paper proposes an innovative approach to identify group effects through a quantile regression model. The method assigns a conditional quantile to each group and provid...

In an informal study, two versions of a story involving probability are introduced to undergraduates. The findings reveal that students have troubles detecting equal probabilities in a sampling scheme without replacement in which no information on earlier draws is available.

The paper aims to explore consumer behavior towards “Made in” products in order to determine the associated quality and value-attributes related to the purchasing intention of consumers. In particular, the article presents the comments and results deriving from an empirical investigation on “Made in Italy”. The research questions addressed are: (1)...

This paper presents results of HeritageBot, a regional research project for developing a robotic platform to be used in Cultural Heritage frameworks. The design and a prototype of HBOT Platform for demo purposes is introduced with features of low-cost construction and user-oriented performance. The design requirements are presented for application...

The paper is part of a wider research which aims to study the attitude towards the purchase of products " Made in Italy " , by means of empirical investigations. In a previous paper we investigated the characteristics associated by consumers in related to the products " Made in Italy " , detecting the presence or absence of a willingness to pay and...

The paper is part of a wider research which aims to study the attitude towards the purchase of products " Made in Italy " , by means of empirical investigations. In a previous paper we investigated the characteristics associated by consumers in related to the products " Made in Italy " , detecting the presence or absence of a willingness to pay and...

The paper is part of a wider research which aims to study the attitude towards the purchase of products " Made in Italy " , by means of empirical investigations. In a previous paper we investigated the characteristics associated by consumers in related to the products " Made in Italy " , detecting the presence or absence of a willingness to pay and...

The paper aims to analyze the attitude of the consumers towards “Made in Italy” in order to identify the associated attributes and value systems that may affect the purchase of “Made in Italy” products. The research questions considered are: 1) the existence of a recognition of the “Made in Italy” in terms of a qualitative characterization of produ...

Hierarchical clustering represents one of the most widespread analytical approaches to tackle classification problems mainly due to the visual powerfulness of the associated graphical representation, the dendrogram. That said, the requirement of appropriately choosing the number of clusters still represents the main difficulty for the final user. W...

This paper aims to propose an innovative approach to identify a typology in a quantile regression model. Quantile regression is a regression technique that allows to focus on the effects that a set of explanatory variables has on the entire conditional distribution of a dependent variable. The proposal concerns the use of multivariate techniques to...

Given its properties, quantile regression (QR) can be considered a versatile method for use in several frameworks, unlike the classical regression model. This chapter deals with the main extensions of QR: its application in nonparametric models and nonlinear relationships among the variables, in the presence of censored and longitudinal data, when...

Quantile regression is a statistical analysis that does not restrict attention to the conditional mean and therefore permits to approximate the whole conditional distribution of a response variable. This chapter offers a visual introduction to quantile regression (QR) starting from the simplest model with a dummy predictor, moving then to the simpl...

This chapter focuses on the quantile regression estimators for models characterized by heteroskedastic and by dependent errors. It considers the precision of the quantile regression model in the case of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) errors, taking a closer look at the computation of confidence intervals and hypothesis testing on...

The development and dissemination of quantile regression (QR) started with the formulation of the QR problem as a linear programming problem. Such formulation allows to exploit efficient methods and algorithms to solve a complex optimization problem offering the way to explore the whole conditional distribution of a variable and not only its center...

This chapter shows the behavior of quantile regressions in datasets with different characteristics. Using simulated data, the chapter also shows the empirical distribution of the quantile regression estimator in the case of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) errors, non-identically distributed (i.ni.d.) errors and dependent (ni.i.d.)...

To appreciate the meaningful potentialities of quantile regression (QR), it is necessary to have a greater understanding of the interpretations and the evaluation tools. This chapter deals with some typical issues arising from a real data analysis, highlighting the capability of QR and its differences compared with other methods. It discusses the e...

A guide to the implementation and interpretation of Quantile Regression models. This book explores the theory and numerous applications of quantile regression, offering empirical data analysis as well as the software tools to implement the methods. The main focus of this book is to provide the reader with a comprehensive description of the main iss...

Style analysis, as originally proposed by Sharpe, is an asset class factor model aimed at obtaining information on the internal allocation of a financial portfolio and at comparing portfolios with similar investment strategies. The classical approach is based on a constrained linear regression model and the coefficients are usually estimated exploi...

The paper proposes a multivariate approach to study the dependence of the scientific productivity on the human research potential in the Italian University system. In spite of the heterogeneity of the system, Redundancy Analysis is exploited to analyse the University research system as a whole. The proposed approach is embedded in an exploratory da...

Style analysis models are widely used in common financial practice to estimate the composition of a financial portfolio. The models exploit past returns of the financial portfolio and a set of market indexes, the so-called constituents, that reflect the portfolio investment strategy. The classical model is based on a constrained least squares regre...

A method to rank mutual funds according to their investment style measured with respect to the returns of a reference portfolio (benchmark) is introduced. It is based on a style analysis model estimating a mutual fund portfolio composition as well as the benchmark one. Starting from such compositions, it computes a proximity measure based on the L1...

In this paper we propose a mixed analytical and graphical exploratory strategy based on data archetypes for the exploratory analysis of multivariate data. Our approach is of considerable help in exploring the periphery of the data scatter, exploiting an outward-inward perspective, to highlight small peripheral groups as well as anomalies, outliers...

Benchmarking plays a relevant role in performance analysis, and statistical methods can be fruitfully exploited for its aims. While clustering, regression, and frontier analysis may serve some benchmarking purposes, we propose to consider archetypal analysis as a suitable technique. Archetypes are extreme points that synthesize data and that, in ou...

Many papers refer to Tukey’s (1977) treatise on exploratory data analysis as the contribution that transformed statistical thinking. In actual fact, new ideas introduced by Tukey prompted many statisticians to give a more prominent role to data visualization and more generally to data. However, J.W. Tukey in 1962 had already begun his daring provoc...

Style analysis models aim to decompose the performance of a financial portfolio with respect to a set known indexes. Quantile regression offers a different point of view on the style analysis problem as it allows the extraction of information at different parts of the portfolio returns distribution. Moreover, the quantile regression results are use...

There is wide consensus that entrepreneurial talent lies in the ability to discover and exploit market opportunities by taking the relevant risky decisions. By determining the nature of the discovery and exploitation processes, institutions and technology play an essential role in shaping entrepreneurial opportunities and the nature of entrepreneur...

The paper aims to analyse the internal effectiveness of an niversity educational process by means of quantile regression. In particular, the goal is to evaluate how the students features affect the utcome of the University careers taking into account that this effect can be different for students with good or bad performances.

In this work, adopting an exploratory and graphical approach, we suggest to consider archetypal analysis as a basis for a data driven benchmarking procedure. The procedure is aimed at defining some reference performers, at understanding their features, and at comparing observed performances with them. Being archetypes some extreme points, we propos...

Nowdays neural networks (NN) are applied in the most various fields and are actually receiving a lot of attention among the researcher’s community. In this paper we will provide a review of some NN applications in economics. We distinguish the applications according to the main objectives achieved by NN in this field: prediction, classification and...

Although neural networks have been borned in engineering field they are actually receiving a lot of attention among the statisticians. This paper provides an overview on supervised and unsupervised neural networks modeling with particular attention to their use and overuse in statistics. The performance of neural networks with respect to tree-growi...

This paper introduces a general strategy for a statistical approach to neural

There is a broad consensus among economists that freedom of choice is the route to self-realization and happiness: on the assumption that preferences are either exogenous or endogenously determined through optimal plans, it is argued that policy-makers should seek to create institutions that enhance economic freedom. By the same reasoning, economis...

Il lavoro focalizza l'attenzione sulle gestioni multimanager dei fondi di fondi, prodotti del mercato finanziario che investono in fondi comuni relativi ad una specifica categoria di mercato (azionario, obbligazionario, strumenti derivati). Si proporre un metodo per il ranking dei fondi comuni appartenenti ad una specifica categoria. A tale scopo s...

A variety of techniques has been devised in order to assess accurately the skill of portfolio manager. It is straightforward to say that the task has great practical importance: small savers as well as investment consultants and funds of funds managers all have the need to decide whether or not funds are exhibiting skill. Three major approaches are...