The inherent complexity of the Genetic Algorithms (GAs) has led to various theoretical an experimental approaches whose ultimate goal is to better understand the dynamics of such algorithms. Through such understanding, it is hoped, we will be able to improve their efficiency. Experiments, typically, explore the GA’s behavior by testing them versus a set of functions with characteristics deemed ...

Rutting is one of the major load-related distresses in airport flexible pavements. Rutting in paving materials develop gradually with an increasing number of load applications, usually appearing as longitudinal depressions in the wheel paths and it may be accompanied by small upheavals to the sides. Significant research has been conducted to determine the factors which affect rutting and how th...

Length of stay (LOS) is an important performance indicator for costing and hospital management and a key measure of efficiency of NHS. However, LOS is difficult to analyse because its statistical distribution is non-normal and LOS data habitually have many outliers. Furthermore, the usefulness of LOS for improving NHS performance is undermined because no adjustments are made for some key factor...

Measures including sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values have been traditionally used to assess a diagnostic test's ability to detect the presence or absence of disease. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis allows visual evaluation of the trade-offs between sensitivity and specificity associated with different values of the test result, or diffe...

OBJECTIVES Since 1994 the National Immunization Survey (NIS) has monitored progress toward the Healthy People 2000 and 2010 vaccination goals. The NIS collects data in two phases: first, a random-digit-dialing (RDD) telephone survey to identify households with children 19-35 months old and, second, a mail survey to vaccination providers to obtain vaccination histories used to estimate vaccinati...

The NISAN system is a new interactive statistical analysis program package constructed by an organization of Japanese statisticans. The package is widely available for both statistical situations, confirmatory analysis and exploratory analysis, and is planned to obtain statistical wisdom and to choose optimal process of statistical analysis for senior statisticians.

The number of open government initiatives and directives around the globe with focused interest on publishing large amounts of data on the Web as “open” is increasing rapidly in the recent years. Opening up data aims for citizens, scientists and organizations to easily access, discover and exploit the data and consequently to benefit out of them. As a result, there has been an emerging need of ...

Astronomy is facing a revolution in data collection, storage, analysis, and interpretation of large datasets. The data volumes here are several orders of magnitude larger than what astronomers and statisticians are used to dealing with, and the old methods simply do not work. The National Virtual Observatory (NVO) initiative has recently emerged in recognition of this need and to federate numer...

In this paper we address the problem of protecting confidentiality in statistical tables containing sensitive information that cannot be disseminated. This is an issue of primary importance in practice. Cell Suppression is a widely-used technique for avoiding disclosure of sensitive information, which consists in suppressing all sensitive table entries along with a certain number of other entri...