This monograph is a compilation of research on the inverse Gaussian distribution. It emphasizes the presentation of the statistical properties, methods, and applications of the two-parameter inverse Gaussian family of distribution. It is useful to statisticians and users of statistical distribution.

In 1978 the idea of studying the generalized inverse Gaussian distribution was proposed to me by Professor Ole Barndorff-Nielsen, who had come across the distribution in the study of the socalled hyperbolic distributions where it emerged in connection with the representation of the hyperbolic distributions as mixtures of normal distributions. The statistical properties of the generalized inverse Gaussian distribution were at that time virtually unde veloped, but it turned out that the distribution has some nice properties, and models many sets of data satisfactorily. This work contains an account of the statistical properties of the distribu tion as far as they are developed at present. The work was done at the Department of Theoretical Statistics, Aarhus University, mostly in 1979, and was partial fulfilment to wards my M. Sc. degree. I wish to convey my warm thanks to Ole Barn dorff-Nielsen and Preben BI~sild for their advice and for comments on earlier versions of the manuscript and to Jette Hamborg for her skilful typing.

This book is written in the hope that it will serve as a companion volume to my first monograph. The first monograph was largely devoted to the probabilistic aspects of the inverse Gaussian law and therefore ignored the statistical issues and related data analyses. Ever since the appearance of the book by Chhikara and Folks, a considerable number of publications in both theory and applications of the inverse Gaussian law have emerged thereby justifying the need for a comprehensive treatment of the issues involved. This book is divided into two sections and fills up the gap updating the material found in the book of Chhikara and Folks. Part I contains seven chapters and covers distribution theory, estimation, significance tests, goodness-of-fit, sequential analysis and compound laws and mixtures. The first part forms the backbone of the theory and wherever possible I have provided illustrative examples for easy assimilation of the theory. The second part is devoted to a wide range of applications from various disciplines. The applied statistician will find numerous instances of examples which pertain to a first passage time situation. It is indeed remarkable that in the fields of life testing, ecology, entomology, health sciences, traffic intensity and management science the inverse Gaussian law plays a dominant role. Real life examples from actuarial science and ecology came to my attention after this project was completed and I found it impossible to include them.

This monograph is a compilation of research on the inverse Gaussian distribution. It emphasizes the presentation of the statistical properties, methods, and applications of the two-parameter inverse Gaussian family of distribution. It is useful to statisticians and users of statistical distribution.

This book provides guidelines and fully worked examples of how to select, construct, interpret and evaluate the full range of count models.

This volume contains twenty refereed papers presented at the 4th Seminar on Stochastic Processes, Random Fields and Applications, which took place in Ascona, Switzerland, from May 2002. The seminar focused mainly on stochastic partial differential equations, stochastic models in mathematical physics, and financial engineering. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers in stochastic analysis and professionals interested in stochastic methods in finance and insurance.

A comprehensive and self-contained introduction to Gaussian processes, which provide a principled, practical, probabilistic approach to learning in kernel machines. Gaussian processes (GPs) provide a principled, practical, probabilistic approach to learning in kernel machines. GPs have received increased attention in the machine-learning community over the past decade, and this book provides a long-needed systematic and unified treatment of theoretical and practical aspects of GPs in machine learning. The treatment is comprehensive and self-contained, targeted at researchers and students in machine learning and applied statistics. The book deals with the supervised-learning problem for both regression and classification, and includes detailed algorithms. A wide variety of covariance (kernel) functions are presented and their properties discussed. Model selection is discussed both from a Bayesian and a classical perspective. Many connections to other well-known techniques from machine learning and statistics are discussed, including support-vector machines, neural networks, splines, regularization networks, relevance vector machines and others. Theoretical issues including learning curves and the PAC-Bayesian framework are treated, and several approximation methods for learning with large datasets are discussed. The book contains illustrative examples and exercises, and code and datasets are available on the Web. Appendixes provide mathematical background and a discussion of Gaussian Markov processes.