Capture reactions can be a technical challenge in the energy region of astrophysical interest. Alternative experimental techniques were developed making use of beams available at higher energies. Although they have been widely applied, these indirect methods have long called for theoretical validation. In this work we discuss the use of transfer and breakup reactions as astrophysical tools. We ...

Backpropagation neural networks are a computer-based pattern-recognition method that has been applied to the interpretation of clinical data. Unlike rule-based pattern recognition, backpropagation networks learn by being repetitively trained with examples of the patterns to be differentiated. We describe and analyze the phenomenon of overtraining in backpropagation networks. Overtraining refers...

In response to Zhu and Rower (1996), a recent communication (Goutte, 1997) established that leave-one-out cross validation is not subject to the "no-free-lunch" criticism. Despite this optimistic conclusion, we show here that cross validation has very poor performances for the selection of linear models as compared to classic statistical tests. We conclude that the statistical tests are prefera...

the generalization error cannot be computed exactly. Leave-one-out cross validation provides an estimate of with low bias but high variance. Kfold cross validation provides an estimate with lower variance but higher bias. Instead, Efron et al introduced the 632 bootstrap approach which counterbalances the positive bias of the fitting error by the negative bias of the leave-one out cross-validat...