Challenging evaluation of tropical forest biodiversity requires the reporting of taxonomic diversity but also the systematic characterization of wood properties in order to discover new promising species for timber industry. Among wood properties, the dimensional stability is regarded as a major technological characteristic to validate whether a wood species is adapted to commercial uses. Cell ...

Brain aging research relies mostly on cross-sectional studies, which infer true changes from age differences. We present longitudinal measures of five-year change in the regional brain volumes in healthy adults. Average and individual differences in volume changes and the effects of age, sex and hypertension were assessed with latent difference score modeling. The caudate, the cerebellum, the h...

It has been shown that local linear smoothing possesses a variety of very attractive properties, not least being its mean square performance. However, such results typically refer only to asymptotic mean squared error, meaning the mean squared error of the asymptotic distribution, and in fact, the actual mean squared error is often in®nite. See Seifert and Gasser (1996). This diculty may be ov...

Estimating a covariance matrix is an important task in applications where the number of variables is larger than the number of observations. In the literature, shrinkage approaches for estimating a high-dimensional covariance matrix are employed to circumvent the limitations of the sample covariance matrix. A new family of nonparametric Stein-type shrinkage covariance estimators is proposed who...

BACKGROUND Lymphangiomas are congenital malformations of the lymphatic system with characteristic dilated endothelium-lined spaces. It is vulnerability to infection or chemical irritants cause spontaneous reduction in size and in some cases complete resolution. Intralesional injection of OK-432 or Picibanil (lyophilized incubation mixture of Group A Streptococcus pyogenes of human origin) is sl...

Collagen is a polymer that exists as a triple helix with chains held together by hydrogen bonds. These molecules are aggregated and organized as fibrils with tensile properties attributable to intermolecular cross-links.2 When collagen is denatured by heat, the intramolecular hydrogen bonds rupture and the triple helices “unwind to produce a gel of random-coil molecules.”3 Tissue tension in hum...

High-dimensional and highly correlated data leading to non- or weakly identified effects are commonplace. Maximum likelihood will typically fail in such situations and a variety of shrinkage methods have been proposed. Standard techniques, such as ridge regression or the lasso, shrink estimates toward zero, with some approaches allowing coefficients to be selected out of the model by achieving ...

We present a deterministic algorithm that counts the number of satisfying assignments for any de Morgan formula F of size at most n3−16ε in time 2n−n ε · poly(n), for any small constant ε > 0. We do this by derandomizing the randomized algorithm mentioned by Komargodski et al. (FOCS, 2013) and Chen et al. (CCC, 2014). Our result uses the tight “shrinkage in expectation” result of de Morgan form...

Shrinkage estimation usually reduces variance at the cost of bias. But when we care only about some parameters of a model, I show that we can reduce variance without incurring bias if we have additional information about the distribution of covariates. In a linear regression model with homoscedastic Normal noise, I consider shrinkage estimation of the nuisance parameters associated with control...

the sustainability of the built environment is increasingly coming to the forefront of infrastructure design and maintenance decisions. to address this, development of a new class of more sustainable cement-based materials is needed. fiber reinforced self-consolidating mortar (frscm) was developed by optimizing the micromechanical parameters, which control composite properties in the hardened s...