Germany's tight budget

A tale of two Germanys

Editor—The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the beginning of the end of communism in eastern Europe and in eastern Germany. As McKee and Fister point out, certain constellations of epidemiological and demographic variables characterise the resultant process of political and economic transition: low or even decreasing life expectancy (especially for men) and higher prevalences of alcoholis...

Speech Translation on a Tight Budget without Enough Data

Online Marketing of a Dental Supply E-Store on a Tight Budget

Dental offices have been switching to online purchasing of their dental supplies and equipment. This case presents the marketing strategy for a newly created online store for a dental supply company. The online store provides dentists with over 16,000 different dental products from alloys to dental instruments to x-ray products. Online sales are a more efficient approach to the traditional cata...

SQG-Differential Evolution for Difficult Optimization Problems under a Tight Function Evaluation Budget

In the context of industrial engineering it is important to integrate efficient computational optimization methods in the product development process. Some of the most challenging simulation based engineering design optimization problems are characterized by: a large number of design variables, the absence of analytical gradient information, highly non-linear objectives and a limited function e...

Tight (Lower) Bounds for the Fixed Budget Best Arm Identification Bandit Problem

We consider the problem of best arm identification with a fixed budget T , in theK-armed stochastic bandit setting, with arms distribution defined on [0, 1]. We prove that any bandit strategy, for at least one bandit problem characterized by a complexityH , will misidentify the best arm with probability lower bounded by exp ( − T log(K)H ) , whereH is the sum for all sub-optimal arms of the inv...