PURPOSE The recent Breast Cancer Prevention Trial has shown that tamoxifen may prevent invasive breast cancer. We used a Markov model to estimate the long-term effects of chemoprevention with tamoxifen on survival, quality-adjusted survival, and health care costs. METHODS We used a hypothetical cohort of women with breast-cancer risk similar to that of participants in the Breast Cancer Preven...

This article presents a model of the important health-policy dilemmas of risk selection and moral hazard. When providers can increase revenues by selecting favorable risks, capitation or purely prospective payment is unlikely to be optimal. A second best payment system may involve mixed levels of both demandand supply-side cost sharing: consumers may prefer to pay deductibles and co-payments ra...

The primate connectome, possessing a characteristic global topology and specific regional connectivity profiles, is well organized to support both segregated and integrated brain function. However, the organization mechanisms shaping the characteristic connectivity and its relationship to functional requirements remain unclear. The primate brain connectome is shaped by metabolic economy as well...

PROBLEM • Monotonically improve a parametric gaussian policy πθ in a continuous MDP, avoiding unsafe oscillations in the expected performance J(θ). • Episodic Policy Gradient: – estimate ∇̂θJ(θ) from a batch of N sample trajectories. – θ′ ← θ+Λ∇̂θJ(θ) • Tune step size α and batch size N to limit oscillations. Not trivial: – Λ: trade-off with speed of convergence← adaptive methods. – N : trade-off...

Research on a new metaheuristic for optimization is often initially focused on proof of concept applications. Time and cost are the most important factors to be considered in every construction project. Over the years, many research studies have been conducted to model the time-cost relationship. Construction planners often face the challenge of optimum resources utilization to compromise betwe...

The discrete time –cost trade-off problem (DTCTP) is one of the main aspects of project scheduling. In DTCTP , we treat cost as a non-renewable resource and the availability of renewable resource per period has been neglected. It was recently suggested that the quality of project should also be taken into consideration. Therefore, when renewable resources and quality are considered, the traditi...

& This article proposes optimal bidding strategies for a generation company (GenCo) considering risk of profit variation by self-organizing hierarchical particle swarm optimization with time-varying acceleration coefficients (SPSO-TVAC). Based on a trade-off technique, the expected profit maximization and risk minimization are achieved. Nonconvex operating cost functions of thermal generation u...