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    Nonparametric Predictive Inference for Multiple Comparisons

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    This thesis presents Nonparametric Predictive Inference (NPI) for several multiple comparisons problems. We introduce NPI for comparison of multiple groups of data including right-censored observations. Different right-censoring schemes discussed are early termination of an experiment, progressive censoring and competing risks. Several selection events of interest are considered including selecting the best group, the subset of best groups, and the subset including the best group. The proposed methods use lower and upper probabilities for some events of interest formulated in terms of the next future observation per group. For each of these problems the required assumptions are Hill's assumption A(n) and the generalized assumption rc-A(n) for right-censored data. Attention is also given to the situation where only a part of the data range is considered relevant for the inference, where in addition the numbers of observations to the left and to the right of this range are known. Throughout this thesis, our methods are illustrated and discussed via examples with data from the literature

    The importance of merging activity for the kinetic polarization of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich signal from galaxy clusters

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    Context: The polarization sensitivity of upcoming millimetric observatories will open new possibilities for studying the properties of galaxy clusters and for using them as powerful cosmological probes. For this reason it is necessary to investigate in detail the characteristics of the polarization signals produced by their highly ionized intra-cluster medium (ICM). This work is focused on the polarization effect induced by the ICM bulk motion, the so-called kpSZ signal, which has an amplitude proportional to the optical depth and to the square of the tangential velocity. Aims: We study how this polarization signal is affected by the internal dynamics of galaxy clusters and its dependence on the physical modelling adopted to describe the baryonic component. Methods: This is done by producing realistic kpSZ maps starting from the outputs of two different sets of high-resolution hydrodynamical N-body simulations. The first set (17 objects) follows only non-radiative hydrodynamics, while for each of 9 objects of the second set we implement four different kinds of physical processes. <BR />Results: Our results shows that the kpSZ signal is a very sensitive probe of the dynamical status of galaxy clusters. We find that major merger events can amplify the signal up to one order of magnitude with respect to relaxed clusters, reaching amplitudes up to about 100 nK. This result implies that the internal ICM dynamics must be taken into account when evaluating this signal because simplicistic models, based on spherical rigid bodies, may provide wrong estimates. In particular, the selection of sufficient relaxed clusters seems to be fundamental to obtain a robust measurement of the intrinsic quadrupole of the cosmic microwave background through polarization. We find that the dependence on the physical modelling of the baryonic component is relevant only in the very inner regions of clusters
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