Pasquale Valentini

University of Chieti-Pescara | UNICH · Department of Economics

Background. The evaluation of midpalatal suture maturation is essential to undertake the most predictable maxillary expansion approach. Several factors, such as age, gender, and facial growth patterns, seem to be involved in midpalatal suture staging and, consequently, in its opening; however, the link between these variables and the stages of midp...

Spatial confounding, often regarded as a major concern in epidemiological studies, relates to the difficulty of recovering the effect of an exposure on an outcome when these variables are associated with unobserved factors. This issue is particularly challenging in spatio-temporal analyses, where it has been less explored so far. To study the effec...

This paper draws its motivation from applications in geophysics, agricultural, and environmental sciences where empirical evidence of slow decay of correlations have been found for data observed on a regular lattice. Spatial ARFIMA models represent a widely used class of spatial models for analyzing such data. Here, we consider their generalization...

Forecasting covariance matrices is a difficult task in many research fields since the predicted matrices should be at least positive semidefinite. This problem can be overcome by including constraints in the predictive model or through a parametrization of the matrices to be predicted. In this paper, we focus on the latter approach in a financial a...

Detailed knowledge on the effects of air pollutants on human health is a prerequisite for the development of effective policies to reduce the adverse impact of ambient air pollution. However, measuring the effect of exposure on health outcomes is an extremely difficult task as the health impact of air pollution is known to vary over space and over...

In breast cancer survivors (BCS), the contemporaneous increase of sedentary time and reduction of physical activity (PA) requires early attention because it has negative consequences for their health. Aims of the study were to investigate: a) the correlations between PA, sedentarism, and health-related measures; b) the association between different...

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic varied significantly across different countries, with important consequences in the definition of control and response strategies. In this work, to investigate the heterogeneity of this crisis, we analyse the spatial patterns of deaths attributed to COVID-19 in several European countries. To this end, we propose...

A new two-parameter “full exponential cardioid” radial growth model for two-dimensional geometric objects is proposed and analyzed. The model depends additionally on two rotation parameters and on two seeds about which the growth is centered, plus a choice of three possible assumptions about statistical errors. If the seeds are assumed known, the r...

Network analytical tools are becoming increasingly popular in analysing interdependent and interacting data entities. Statistical modelling of network data seeks to recover the underlying relational structure of the data capturing relevant characteristics and regularities in the pattern of interactions. This framework is widely adopted in multivari...

In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian statistical model for the analysis of functional data observed at several time points. Examples of such data include the Michigan growth study where we wish to characterize the shape changes of human mandible profiles. The form of the mandible is often used by clinicians as an aid in predicting the mandibular...

In modern validity theory, a major concern is the construct validity of a test, which is commonly assessed through confirmatory or exploratory factor analysis. In the framework of Bayesian exploratory Multidimensional Item Response Theory (MIRT) models, we discuss two methods aimed at investigating the underlying structure of a test, in order to ve...

Recent years have seen increased attention paid to monitoring social anomie and its dependency on micro- and macro-factors. In this paper, we endorse the theorisation of social anomie as a complex, multidimensional and multilevel phenomenon. To ensure a rigorous measurement of the varying levels of social anomie in the European countries, the curre...

Albeit the dominant source of radon in indoor environments is the geology of the territory, many studies have demonstrated that indoor radon concentrations also depend on dwelling-specific characteristics. Following a stepwise analysis, in this study we propose a combined approach to delineate radon prone areas. We first investigate the impact of v...

In the last 30 years, a large number of studies have provided substantial statistical evidence of the adverse health effects associated with air pollution. Statistical literature is very rich and includes a plethora of models to manage different types of spatial data. This paper starts with a thorough discussion on the spatial nature of the availab...

During the last decades, many studies have documented a persistent and widespread decline in satisfaction in some established democracies, giving empirical support to the heterogeneity of democratic systems in terms of their quality. The main implication is that if democracies vary in terms of their performance, such variation should be reflected i...

Nowadays, one of the most changeling points in statistics is the analysis of high dimensional data. In such cases, it is commonly assumed that the dimensionality of the data is only artificially high: although each data point is described by thousands of features, it is assumed that it can be modeled as a function of only a few underlying parameter...

Radon-222 is a noble gas arising naturally from decay of uranium-238 present in the earth’s crust. In confined spaces, high concentrations of radon can become a serious health concern. Hence, experts widely agree that prolonged exposure to this gas can significantly increase the risk of lung cancer. A range of variables, such as geological factors,...

In recent years there has been an increasing awareness on problems related to the economic growth and on the conditions under which some socio-economic variables measured on European countries tend to converge over time towards a common level. This paper is concerned with the use of energy from renewable sources and considers the extent to which EU...

This article proposes a spatial dynamic structural equation model for the analysis of housing prices at the State level in the USA. The study contributes to the existing literature by extending the use of dynamic factor models to the econometric analysis of multivariate lattice data. One of the main advantages of our model formulation is that by mo...

In this chapter we consider a functional spatio-temporal model for shape objects represented by landmark data. The model describes a time-varying deformation of the ambient space in which the objects of interest lie. The use of basis functions, defined by principal warps in space and time, facilitates both the model specification and the fitting of...

The paper is concerned with a dynamic factor model for spatiotemporal coupled environmental variables. The model is proposed in a state space formulation which, through Kalman recursions, allows a unified approach to prediction and estimation. Full probabilistic inference for the model parameters is facilitated by adapting standard Markov chain Mon...

In this paper we deal with the problem of identifying a valid way to characterize heterogeneity in the analysis of customer satisfaction observing the phenomenon through a new perspective. In the literature, the variability of a Customer Satisfaction index is measured by the standard deviation or the coefficient of variation. In this way, heteroge...

Whether leptin has positive or negative influences on cardiac structure and function in healthy sedentary overweight postmenopausal women is unknown. We investigated the role of leptin in cardiac health and whether aerobic fitness enhancement influences any relationships revealed between leptin and echocardiographic measurements. Thirty-nine sedent...

Introduction A big amount of postmenopausal women is overweight. Excessive body fat (FM%), especially when centrally distributed, is associated with an increased risk to develop diabetes, coronary heart disease, hypertension, ischemic stroke and several cancers. As adipose tissue is the main source of plasma leptin levels (PLL), FM% increases PLL u...

Aim of this study was to investigate the effect of regular exercise practice on plasma leptin levels (PLL’s) in 22 overweight or moderately-obese postmenopausal women. Body composition, dietary habits, estimated VO2max (VO2maxest) and PLL’s were taken both at the beginning and at the end of 3 months walking training. No dietary suggestions were giv...

As requested by the framework EU Directive on air quality assessment and management (96/62/EC) and related ‘daughter’ directives, air quality standards for specific pollutants are designed to protect public health and environment. Modeling is one of the main activities to evaluate air quality and to prepare future control programs. Of course, this...

In this paper we focus on sampling designs best suited to meeting the needs of Customer Satisfaction (CS) assessment with particular attention being paid to adaptive sampling which may be useful. Complex sampling designs are illustrated in order to build CS indices that may be used for inference purposes. When the phenomenon of satisfaction is rare...

Since the use of landmarks can give useful but limited information about the shape of an object, we consider here the problem of fitting an outline. The interpolation of a real-valued function can be performed using the kriging framework which also allows for the use of derivative information. In this paper, the opportunity of using tangent directi...