About me
I am Professor in methodological statistics (secs-s/01, Sapienza University of Rome, MEMOTEF department), graduated in Economics and PhD in Applied Statistics (University of Milano-Bicocca). The main topics of my research are income distributions, inequality, well-being, networks, and partial orders.
In the bachelor thesis I applied the cluster analysis and the principal component analysis to a set of well-being indicators related to the Italian regions. My master’s degree thesis is about an estimation method for the parameters of the linear regression model alternative to the least squares method, based on lower and upper means. The PhD thesis is about a new income distribution model.
I examined this topic in two papers published in the journals Statistica & Applicazioni and Statistical Methods & Applications. This distribution model is strictly related to inequality indexes. A single-author paper published in Statistica & Applicazioni proposes a numerical procedure to estimate the model parameters with restrictions on the inequality indices. Other papers about income distribution models and inequality curves are published in Statistica & Applicazioni and in a special issue of the Revista Colombiana de Estadística. Another single-author paper is published in Statistical Methods & Applications, and it is about the decomposition by sources of inequality indices.
I am also interested in Multi-indicator Systems (MIS). I studied partial orders and networks to analyse MIS based on a set of ordinal variables. These studies led to the publication of five chapters in specialized research books and to twelve articles in the journals Revista Colombiana de Estadística, Statistics in Transition and Social Indicators Research. An article deserves attention since it is multidisciplinary between statistics and computer science. It is about algorithms finalized to complexity reduction and to find the poset most closed to other ones that share the same set and have a different order relation. The article is published in 2022 in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis. The postdoctoral position introduced me to complex networks. I delivered the presentation “Analysis of Input-Output networks via Inequality Measures” to the Euro Working Group for Commodities and Financial Modelling 54° Meeting. I’m author of an article about non-structural temporal evolution of socio-economic real networks in the Quality & Quantity journal and two about peer multi-agent networks.
I published three papers about graphs and higher order assortativity, two in the European Journal of Operational Research and one in the Journal of Business Research. In 2022 I published an article in the special issue “Big Data and Data Science in Sport” of the Journal Annals of Operations Research a paper about the scoring of tennis player based on an eigenvector centrality measure instead of the actual ELO scores.
I am skilled in computer science. I am an advanced user of Office Suites (Microsoft, LibreOffice and Google Workspace) and I write VBA scripts. I code in C, SQL and I am interested in Python. Since 2003, I’m an R developer for statistical applications and data analysis. I developed the “sBF” package, about Smooth Backfitting methodologies. I have also developed the “parsec” package (PARtial orders in Socio-EConomics) and the “POSetR” package about partial orders and their application in socio economics. I realized a fourth package “ineqJD” about inequality indices and their decomposition by sources and sub-populations. A fifth package “HOasso” allows to evaluate Higher Order assortativity in complex networks. All the cited packages are available on CRAN. A final package “COGARCH” is devoted to the simulation and parameters estimation for COGARCH(1,1) processes with different methods and it is available on r-forge.