Yield Stability of Maize Hybrids Evaluated in Maize Regional Trials in Southwestern China Using Nonparametric Methods

Analysis of multi-environment trials （METs） of crops for the evaluation and recommendation of varieties is an important issue in plant breeding research. Evaluating on the both stability of performance and high yield is essential in MET analyses. The objective of the present investigation was to compare 11 nonparametric stability statistics and apply nonparametric tests for genotype-by-environment interaction （GEI） to 14 maize （Zea mays L.） genotypes grown at 25 locations in southwestern China during 2005. Results of nonparametric tests of GEl and a combined ANOVA across locations showed that both crossover and noncrossover GEI, and genotypes varied highly significantly for yield. The results of principal component analysis, correlation analysis of nonparametric statistics, and yield indicated the nonparametric statistics grouped as four distinct classes that corresponded to different agronomic and biological concepts of stability. Furthermore, high values of TOP and low values of rank-sum were associated with high mean yield, but the other nonparametric statistics were not positively correlated with mean yield. Therefore, only rank-sum and TOP methods would be useful for simultaneously selection for high yield and stability. These two statistics recommended JY686 and HX168 as desirable and ND108, CM12, CN36, and NK6661 as undesirable genotypes.

An Eigenspace Method for Detecting Space-Time Disease Clusters with Unknown Population-Data

Space-time disease cluster detection assists in conducting disease surveillance and implementing control strategies.The state-of-the-art method for this kind of problem is the Space-time Scan Statistics(SaTScan)which has limitations for non-traditional/non-clinical data sources due to its parametric model assumptions such as Poisson orGaussian counts.Addressing this problem,an Eigenspace-based method called Multi-EigenSpot has recently been proposed as a nonparametric solution.However,it is based on the population counts data which are not always available in the least developed countries.In addition,the population counts are difficult to approximate for some surveillance data such as emergency department visits and over-the-counter drug sales,where the catchment area for each hospital/pharmacy is undefined.We extend the population-based Multi-EigenSpot method to approximate the potential disease clusters from the observed/reported disease counts only with no need for the population counts.The proposed adaptation uses an estimator of expected disease count that does not depend on the population counts.The proposed method was evaluated on the real-world dataset and the results were compared with the population-based methods:Multi-EigenSpot and SaTScan.The result shows that the proposed adaptation is effective in approximating the important outputs of the population-based methods.

A synthetic aperture radar sea surface distribution estimation by n-order Bézier curve and its application in ship detection

To dates,most ship detection approaches for single-pol synthetic aperture radar（SAR） imagery try to ensure a constant false-alarm rate（CFAR）.A high performance ship detector relies on two key components：an accurate estimation to a sea surface distribution and a fine designed CFAR algorithm.First,a novel nonparametric sea surface distribution estimation method is developed based on n-order Bézier curve.To estimate the sea surface distribution using n-order Bézier curve,an explicit analytical solution is derived based on a least square optimization,and the optimal selection also is presented to two essential parameters,the order n of Bézier curve and the number m of sample points.Next,to validate the ship detection performance of the estimated sea surface distribution,the estimated sea surface distribution by n-order Bézier curve is combined with a cell averaging CFAR（CA-CFAR）.To eliminate the possible interfering ship targets in background window,an improved automatic censoring method is applied.Comprehensive experiments prove that in terms of sea surface estimation performance,the proposed method is as good as a traditional nonparametric Parzen window kernel method,and in most cases,outperforms two widely used parametric methods,K and G0 models.In terms of computation speed,a major advantage of the proposed estimation method is the time consuming only depended on the number m of sample points while independent of imagery size,which makes it can achieve a significant speed improvement to the Parzen window kernel method,and in some cases,it is even faster than two parametric methods.In terms of ship detection performance,the experiments show that the ship detector which constructed by the proposed sea surface distribution model and the given CA-CFAR algorithm has wide adaptability to different SAR sensors,resolutions and sea surface homogeneities and obtains a leading performance on the test dataset.

Hypothesis Testing of Population Percentiles via the Wald Test with Bootstrap Variance Estimates

Testing the equality of percentiles (quantiles) between populations is an effective method for robust, nonparametric comparison, especially when the distributions are asymmetric or irregularly shaped. Unlike global nonparametric tests for homogeneity such as the Kolmogorv-Smirnov test, testing the equality of a set of percentiles (i.e., a percentile profile) yields an estimate of the location and extent of the differences between the populations along the entire domain. The Wald test using bootstrap estimates of variance of the order statistics provides a unified method for hypothesis testing of functions of the population percentiles. Simulation studies are conducted to show performance of the method under various scenarios and to give suggestions on its use. Several examples are given to illustrate some useful applications to real data.