The present monograph is a comprehensive summary of the research on visibility in random fields, which I have conducted with the late Professor Micha Yadin for over ten years. This research, which resulted in several published papers and technical reports (see bibliography), was motivated by some military problems, which were brought to our attention by Mr. Pete Shugart of the US Army TRADOC Systems Analysis Activity, presently called US Army TRADOC Analysis Command. The Director ofTRASANA at the time, the late Dr. Wilbur Payne, identified the problems and encouraged the support and funding of this research by the US Army. Research contracts were first administered through the Office of Naval Research, and subsequently by the Army Research Office. We are most grateful to all involved for this support and encouragement. In 1986 I administered a three-day workshop on problem solving in the area of sto chastic visibility. This workshop was held at the White Sands Missile Range facility. A set of notes with some software were written for this workshop. This workshop led to the incorporation of some of the methods discussed in the present book into the Army simulation package CASTFOREM. Several people encouraged me to extend those notes and write the present monograph on the level of those notes, so that the material will be more widely available for applications.

The author describes the current state of the art in the theory of invariant random fields. This theory is based on several different areas of mathematics, including probability theory, differential geometry, harmonic analysis, and special functions. The present volume unifies many results scattered throughout the mathematical, physical, and engineering literature, as well as it introduces new results from this area first proved by the author. The book also presents many practical applications, in particular in such highly interesting areas as approximation theory, cosmology and earthquake engineering. It is intended for researchers and specialists working in the fields of stochastic processes, statistics, functional analysis, astronomy, and engineering.

Correlated data arise in numerous contexts across a wide spectrum of subject-matter disciplines. Modeling such data present special challenges and opportunities that have received increasing scrutiny by the statistical community in recent years. In October 1996 a group of 210 statisticians and other scientists assembled on the small island of Nantucket, U. S. A. , to present and discuss new developments relating to Modelling Longitudinal and Spatially Correlated Data: Methods, Applications, and Future Direc tions. Its purpose was to provide a cross-disciplinary forum to explore the commonalities and meaningful differences in the source and treatment of such data. This volume is a compilation of some of the important invited and volunteered presentations made during that conference. The three days and evenings of oral and displayed presentations were arranged into six broad thematic areas. The session themes, the invited speakers and the topics they addressed were as follows: • Generalized Linear Models: Peter McCullagh-"Residual Likelihood in Linear and Generalized Linear Models" • Longitudinal Data Analysis: Nan Laird-"Using the General Linear Mixed Model to Analyze Unbalanced Repeated Measures and Longi tudinal Data" • Spatio---Temporal Processes: David R. Brillinger-"Statistical Analy sis of the Tracks of Moving Particles" • Spatial Data Analysis: Noel A. Cressie-"Statistical Models for Lat tice Data" • Modelling Messy Data: Raymond J. Carroll-"Some Results on Gen eralized Linear Mixed Models with Measurement Error in Covariates" • Future Directions: Peter J.

This third volume of case studies presents detailed applications of Bayesian statistical analysis, emphasising the scientific context. The papers were presented and discussed at a workshop held at Carnegie-Mellon University, and this volume - dedicated to the memory of Morrie Groot-reproduces six invited papers, each with accompanying invited discussion, and nine contributed papers with the focus on econometric applications.

This book presents a method of establishing explicit solutions to classical problems of calculating the best lower and upper mean-variance bounds. The following families of distributions are taken into account: arbitrary, symmetric, symmetric unimodal, and U-shaped. The book is addressed to students, researchers, and practitioners in statistics and applied probability. Most of the results are recent, and a significant part of them has not been published yet. Numerous open problems are stated in the text.

These notes represent our summary of much of the recent research that has been done in recent years on approximations and bounds that have been developed for compound distributions and related quantities which are of interest in insurance and other areas of application in applied probability. The basic technique employed in the derivation of many bounds is induc tive, an approach that is motivated by arguments used by Sparre-Andersen (1957) in connection with a renewal risk model in insurance. This technique is both simple and powerful, and yields quite general results. The bounds themselves are motivated by the classical Lundberg exponential bounds which apply to ruin probabilities, and the connection to compound dis tributions is through the interpretation of the ruin probability as the tail probability of a compound geometric distribution. The initial exponential bounds were given in Willmot and Lin (1994), followed by the nonexpo nential generalization in Willmot (1994). Other related work on approximations for compound distributions and applications to various problems in insurance in particular and applied probability in general is also discussed in subsequent chapters. The results obtained or the arguments employed in these situations are similar to those for the compound distributions, and thus we felt it useful to include them in the notes. In many cases we have included exact results, since these are useful in conjunction with the bounds and approximations developed.