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The latest development in Empirical Asset Pricing is the employment of Machine Learning methods to address the problem of the factor zoo. These techniques offer great flexibility and prediction accuracy but require special care as they strongly depart from traditional Econometrics. I review and critically assess the most recent and relevant contributions in the literature with special attention to the interpretation of non-standard statistical tools applied to this field and I summarize the empirical findings in detail into hints for further developments.

Everyday large amount of data is produced in healthcare industry which contain valuable information about the patient. The healthcare domain area is complex and can be difficult to apprehend. There are plenty of specialized disciplines in medical. Applying text mining and natural language processing to health records needs special care and understanding of the domain. There is a large demand for tools that can make healthcare better and more efficient .Biomedical informatics and computational biology provide excellent opportunities for presenting applications of NLP in the biomedical domain. Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. A large amount of the information in an electronic patient record system is unstructured in the form of free text. In this paper we provide entail of NLP and its various methods used to identify and extract clinical information from unstructured clinical data .Thus natural language processing tools are used to convert data into a format that computers can understand; that is structured data. In this study it is found from literature that the areas of fundamental BioNLP is innovative and challenging from an NLP perspective.

Hybrid time series data often require special care in estimating seasonal factors. Series such as the state and metro area Current Employment Statistics produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) are composed of two different source series that often have two different seasonal patterns. In this paper we address the process to test for differing seasonal patterns within the hybrid series. We also discuss how to apply differing seasonal factors to the separate parts of the hybrid series. Currently the BLS simply juxtaposes the two different sets of seasonal factors at the transition point between the benchmark part of the data and the survey part. We argue that the seasonal factors should be extrapolated at the transition point or that an adjustment should be made to the level of the unadjusted data to correct for a bias in the survey part of the data caused by differing seasonal factors at the transition month.

This paper explores the introduction of treaty body jurisprudence into domestic legal systems. Specifically it will consider the use of general comments by human rights treaty bodies. The contribution will begin with a brief introduction of the treaty bodies, as it is the nature of these bodies that warrants consideration of their jurisprudence as a legitimate interpretive tool. It will then present an overview of references to treaty body general comments in the case law across a selection of jurisdictions, including the UK and South Africa, as well as the EU as a supranational jurisdiction. Finally, it will analyse the impact that these domestic engagements with treaty body jurisprudence has on the interpretation of international human rights standards. It will consider whether the outcome of a court case that has relied upon general comments contributes to or detracts from the strength of the treaty body outputs. It is posited that in instances where rights are progressively recognised for protection, general comments serve as a chisel to aid in refining rights. In instances where the judiciary disregards or distorts treaty body guidance, it is suggested that the general comments act more as a hammer that weakens a particular right. Thus it is extremely important that treaty bodies take special care when drafting their opinions, comments and reports therefore some attention will be given to the issue of treaty body drafting.

This study of the academic performance of special children found that majority (58.34%) of them has bad academic results. For the basic reasons determining academic performance, special-children depression (DC), teachers' contribution (TC), parents' contribution (PC), school facilitation contribution (SFC) and contribution of poverty (CP) were tried as explanatory variables. Results indicated that almost all explanatory variables were found statistically significant at α Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended that special counselors be made available in each of the institutions of special students who are specially assigned the duty of lowering special students anxiety and depression.It was also recommended that special care be given to appoint administrative and teaching staff who give particular care to teaching and also provide due respect to the special students.Parents of the handicapped students should be aware to educate their children without discrimination of male and female and normal/abnormal. A good learning environment at school should be provided to special students, and teachers should be aware to teach according to the needs of special students' psychology.

An infant is in law, regarded as of immature, intelligence and discretion and owing to his want of capacity and judgment is disabled from binding himself, except where it is for his benefit. Thus, the law will as a general principle treat all acts of an infant which are for his benefit on the same footing as those of an adult but will not permit him to do anything prejudicial to his own interests. This Principle regulates not only the infant’s capacity to acquire and dispose off property but also his capacity in reference to legal proceedings instituted by or against him. In legislatures in India have taken special care in jealously protecting the interest of the minors, the same is evidenced by the inbuilt provisions made in various legislations in order to safeguard the interest of the minors. The study shall specifically highlight the provisions laid done by the legislatures in India on various matters concerning the minors.

Nonprofit hospitals receive favorable tax treatment in exchange for providing socially beneficial activities. Extending this rationale suggests that nonprofit hospital mergers should be evaluated differently than mergers of for-profit hospitals because suppression of competition may also allow nonprofits to cross-subsidize care for the poor. Using detailed California data, we find no evidence that nonprofit hospitals are more likely than for-profit hospitals to provide more charity care or offer unprofitable services in response to an increase in market power. Therefore, we find no empirical justification for different antitrust standards for nonprofit hospitals, as some courts have suggested.

The high degree of openness of the Uruguayan economy and the fact that the country is characterised by being constantly subject to shocks, strongly suggest the use of simulation tools that allow for predicting its future evolution under different scenarios. Currently, Computable General Equilibrium Models (CGEMs) applied to trade are one of the most potentially powerful available instruments for doing such analyses. Although there already exists some research performing this methodology for Uruguay, accumulation in the area is still scarce. As it is well known, operational CGEMs critically rely on the availability of many parameters, especially related to elasticities, among which Armington elasticities of substitution are crucial when the models are applied to trade. In the case of Uruguay, these parameters have been imposed in order to have coherent simulations and/or using available estimates for other economies. Hence, in order to obtain more robust results, it is of upmost interest to specify and estimate Armington models that would provide estimates of the elasticities using Uruguayan data. The work here summarized intends to start filling in this gap. We performed the task at a 4 digit level of disaggregation (ISIC, Rev.2) for 32 manufacturing sectors along 1989 to 2001, using monthly and quarterly data. We specify our models following Armington’s original proposal. In doing so, we took special care in methodological issues that might hinder the robustness of results. Finally, it is worth mentioning that, in many cases, the value obtained as the upper bound of the estimated intervals is very similar to the magnitude needed for CGEMs simulations to be sensible, as reported in the literature and, particularly, when compared with those stemming from GTAP.

This chapter discusses how local government can seek to avoid a claim being brought against it under the Religious Land Use & Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA). Thus, the focus is not on what steps a local government should take when a RLUIPA claim is brought - or threatened to be brought - against it, but focuses instead on what steps local governments should take to seek to avoid a RLUIPA claim in the first place. After reviewing both the changing context of religious observance in the United States, and RLUIPA decisions to date, the chapter concludes that we are clearly in the midst of a dynamic environment socially, politically, and legally as regards the role of religion in our society and RLUIPA reflects this in the context of potential conflicts between churches and land use regulation. In this environment, local governments face a difficult task in seeking to avoid RLUIPA potential claims and evaluating their likelihood of prevailing if challenged. Local officials can, however, take several steps to lessen the likelihood of a potential claim, including: a comprehensive review of the treatment of religious institutions in its land use codes, both substantively and procedurally; training officials and employees to be sensitive to religious differences; and recognizing that land use applications from and enforcement of regulations against religious institutions must be handled with special care.

We examine intraday volatility for the index and a select set of stocks in the National Stock Exchange, for it's periodicity, and persistence. Our data consists of every trade that occurred in the NSE, in the period Mar 1999-Feb 2001. This data is irregular, and there're multiple trades per second. We take special care to clean up the data to get the optimal frequency at which the data is to be discretised. We study the intraday characteristics of returns, volatility, and autocorrelations. Having shown that intraday volatility is periodic, we use the Fourier Flexible Form of Gallant (1981) to characterize it. We find that there's a distinct U-shape in volatility, and that the Fourier Flexible Form adequately characterizes it. Using GARCH models, we also show that the high volatility persistence of intraday data is due to this periodicity.

This paper has three objectives: the first is to track the changes in labor force participation behavior of women and show its evolution according to time and also according to cohorts; the second is to decompose these changes according to a group of elementary variables, such as position in the household and educational level; the last is to analyze with special care the relationship between educational levels of married women, education of their spouses, and their labor force participation behavior. This last objective is motivated by findings in the second one. We have five main results. The first is not surprising - we find both cohort and time effects at work on changes in participation behavior. The second is perhaps more surprising: position in the household has low statistical explanatory power for labor force participation - in other words, the strong increase in the percentage of female headed household holds little relation with the increase in female labor force participation. The real explanation is a massive increase in the participation rates of married women - this increase alone explains close to 70% of the increase in female labor force participation. Another surprising conclusion is that by far the most important explanatory variable is women's educational level, which alone explains about 50% of the variation in the global female participation rate. This suggests a strong price effect in the propensity to work among women. Finally, we van see that for married women of any educational level, increases in the spouse's educational level (and thus potential income) are associated with a lower labor force participation rate. This suggests an income effect to female participation behavior, although other interpretations are possible.