Article history: Received 25 August 2015 Received in revised form 17 November 2015 Accepted 17 November 2015 Available online 18 November 2015 Law is a powerful tool for combatting public health issues. This article reviews existing empirical research on the effect of eight legal levers on outcomes related to child maltreatment. Laws created with the intent to address child maltreatment are oft...

In this paper we develop dual free SDCA with adaptive probabilities for regularized empirical risk minimization. This extends recent work of Shai Shalev-Shwartz [SDCA without Duality, arXiv:1502.06177] to allow non-uniform selection of ”dual” coordinate in SDCA. Moreover, the probability can change over time, making it more efficient than uniform selection. Our work focuses on generating adapti...

This paper aims to provide direct and indirect evidence on setting up rules for applications of the empirical Bayes shrinkage (EBS), and offers cautionary remarks concerning its applicability. In epidemiology, there is still a lack of relevant criteria in the application of EBS. The bias of the shrinkage estimator is investigated in terms of the sums of errors, squared errors and absolute error...

Drawing on empirical research completed in Belgium, this article presents a comparative analysis of the care regimes for two categories of children: transnational adoptees and unaccompanied minors. Although state immigration policies consider the two groups of minors as humanitarian exceptions that require preferential treatment, the kind of humanitarian help and social investment they are beli...

Developed in this article are theories of the so-called linear estimation techniques. The methods are exclusively based on the space-time empirical orthogonal functions which describe nonuniform covariance statistics of background uctuations of investigated variable. Two speciic methods to be discussed are the detection and the estimation algorithms with speciic emphasis on the description of e...

We propose a general theorem providing upper bounds for the risk of an empirical risk minimizer (ERM).We essentially focus on the binary classi…cation framework. We extend Tsybakov’s analysis of the risk of an ERM under margin type conditions by using concentration inequalities for conveniently weighted empirical processes. This allows us to deal with other ways of measuring the ”size”of a clas...

OBJECTIVES To review the extant literature on HIV criminal laws, and to determine the impact of these laws on public health practice. METHODS The available research on this topic was obtained and reviewed. RESULTS The extant literature addressed three main topics: people's awareness of HIV criminal laws; people's perceptions of HIV criminal laws; and the potential effects of HIV criminal la...

We give improved constants for data dependent and variance sensitive confidence bounds, called empirical Bernstein bounds, and extend these inequalities to hold uniformly over classes of functions whose growth function is polynomial in the sample size n. The bounds lead us to consider sample variance penalization, a novel learning method which takes into account the empirical variance of the lo...