OBJECTIVE To examine whether the continuous updating of networks of prospectively planned randomised controlled trials (RCTs) ("living" network meta-analysis) provides strong evidence against the null hypothesis in comparative effectiveness of medical interventions earlier than the updating of conventional, pairwise meta-analysis. DESIGN Empirical study of the accumulating evidence about the ...

In comparative biology, pairwise comparisons of species or genes (terminal taxa) are used to detect character associations. For instance, if pairs of species contrasting in the state of a particular character are examined, the member of a pair with a particular state might be more likely than the other member to show a particular state in a second character. Pairs are chosen so as to be phyloge...

Pairwise comparisons are a well-known method for the representation of the subjective preferences of a decision maker. Evaluating their inconsistency has been a widely studied and discussed topic and several indices have been proposed in the literature to perform this task. Since an acceptable level of consistency is closely related with the reliability of preferences, a suitable choice of an i...

The classification of the various image features or visual objects can be done by the consistency-driven pairwise comparisons method based on their relative importance. A key issue in the proposed approach is a weight based synthesis for combining various image features. When compared with the traditional experience-based linear assignment method, the proposed approach is more effective and eas...

Analysis of carcinogenicity data generally involves a trend test across all dose groups and a pairwise comparison of the high dose group with the control. The most commonly used test for a positive trend is the Cochran-Armitage test. This test is asymptotically normal. For the pairwise comparison of the high dose group with the control group, we propose two modifications: the first modification...

Distance-based approaches in phylogenetics such as Neighbor-Joining are a fast and popular approach for building trees. These methods take pairs of sequences, and from them construct a value that, in expectation, is additive under a stochastic model of site substitution. Most models assume a distribution of rates across sites, often based on a gamma distribution. Provided the (shape) parameter ...

We describe a new approach based on tropical optimization techniques to solve the problem of rating alternatives from pairwise comparison data. The problem is formulated to approximate, in the logChebyshev sense, pairwise comparison matrices by reciprocal matrices of unit rank, and then represented in general terms of tropical mathematics as a tropical optimization problem. The optimization pro...

We introduce five regression models for the modeling of expressed emotion in music using data obtained in a two alternative forced choice listening experiment. The predictive performance of the proposed models is compared using learning curves, showing that all models converge to produce a similar classification error. The predictive ranking of the models is compared using Kendall’s τ rank corr...