V.B. Melas

N Balakrishnan

S. Ermakov

This is a volume consisting of selected papers that were presented at the 3rd St. Petersburg Workshop on Simulation held at St. Petersburg, Russia, during June 28-July 3, 1998. The Workshop is a regular international event devoted to mathematical problems of simulation and applied statistics organized by the Department of Stochastic Simulation at St. Petersburg State University in cooperation with INFORMS College on Simulation (USA). Its main purpose is to exchange ideas between researchers from Russia and from the West as well as from other coun tries throughout the World. The 1st Workshop was held during May 24-28, 1994, and the 2nd workshop was held during June 18-21, 1996. The selected proceedings of the 2nd Workshop was published as a special issue of the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference. Russian mathematical tradition has been formed by such genius as Tchebysh eff, Markov and Kolmogorov whose ideas have formed the basis for contempo rary probabilistic models. However, for many decades now, Russian scholars have been isolated from their colleagues in the West and as a result their mathe matical contributions have not been widely known. One of the primary reasons for these workshops is to bring the contributions of Russian scholars into lime light and we sincerely hope that this volume helps in this specific purpose.

Advances in Stochastic Simulation Methods

W.S. Chen

Lognormal distributions are one of the most commonly studied models in the sta tistical literature while being most frequently used in the applied literature. The lognormal distributions have been used in problems arising from such diverse fields as hydrology, biology, communication engineering, environmental science, reliability, agriculture, medical science, mechanical engineering, material science, and pharma cology. Though the lognormal distributions have been around from the beginning of this century (see Chapter 1), much of the work concerning inferential methods for the parameters of lognormal distributions has been done in the recent past. Most of these methods of inference, particUlarly those based on censored samples, involve extensive use of numerical methods to solve some nonlinear equations. Order statistics and their moments have been discussed quite extensively in the literature for many distributions. It is very well known that the moments of order statistics can be derived explicitly only in the case of a few distributions such as exponential, uniform, power function, Pareto, and logistic. In most other cases in cluding the lognormal case, they have to be numerically determined. The moments of order statistics from a specific lognormal distribution have been tabulated ear lier. However, the moments of order statistics from general lognormal distributions have not been discussed in the statistical literature until now primarily due to the extreme computational complexity in their numerical determination.

N Balakrishnan

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