This project is an equipment grant under the activity Grants For Scientific Computing Research Equipment For The Mathematical Sciences program. The project involves the purchase of special purpose equipment dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. In general, this equipment is required jointly by several research projects and would be difficult to justify on one project alone. This research equipment support from the National Science Foundation is coupled with discounts and contributions of equipment from manufacturers and significant cost-sharing from the submitting institution. This project provides a good example of university, industrial, and government cooperation in the support of basic research in the mathematical sciences. This equipment will be used in a number of projects including: (1) Lagrangean decomposition applied to problems in integer programming, (2) the development of robust statistical procedures for situations with missing data, (3) adjustment of permutation inferential techniques for observational studies where the treatments are not assigned at random to the subjects, (4) investigation of the properties of time series estimation methods when there is missing data, and (5) the use of bootstrap methods to produce prediction intervals in time series settings.
