A formidable challenge in uncertainty modeling in general, and when learning Bayesian networks in particular, is the discovery of unknown hidden variables. Few works that tackle this task are typically limited to discrete or Gaussian domains, or to tree structures. We propose a novel approach for discovering hidden variables in flexible nonGaussian domains using the powerful class of Gaussian c...

This paper investigates the nonlinear dynamics of a vehicle with two flexible flapping wings. The body dynamics and the wings’ deformation are monolithically grouped into a single system of equations, with aerodynamics accounted for by a quasi-steady blade element method. A periodic shooting method is then used to locate closed orbits of this non-autonomous system, and Floquet multipliers asses...

Two simple proof-load testing procedures are suggested to estimate the correlation between two variables that can individually only be determined destructively. The first procedure assumes that the means and variances of the variables are known. The second testing procedure is more flexible and requires no prior information. By assuming that the variables have a bivariate normal distribution an...

This paper proposes causal models to enhance the performance analysis of parallel processing. Causal models explicitly denote the relations among the variables involved. This makes it possible to automate the modeling task as well as to present the user a clear and understandable performance analysis. It is a flexible approach, since new environment variables can easily be integrated and perfor...

To compare the difference in pain score during flexible TRIAL DESIGN: cystoscopy between patients undergoing the procedure with plain lubricating gel only and plain gel with diclofenac suppository in a randomized control trial. : A total of 60 male patients with an indication of flexible cystoscopy METHODS were enrolled in a prospective, randomized controlled study. Patients were randomized i...

temperature restrictions on aqueous effluents dictate that streams with a temperature higher than the permitted level needed to pass through cooling systems to reduce the effluent temperature before discharge. in this study, by considering the grouping design rules based on pinch technology, an optimum design for a distributed effluent cooling system, has been developed. a counter-flow wet cool...

Variational auto-encoders (VAE) are scalable and powerful generative models. However, the choice of the variational posterior determines tractability and flexibility of the VAE. Commonly, latent variables are modeled using the normal distribution with a diagonal covariance matrix. This results in computational efficiency but typically it is not flexible enough to match the true posterior distri...

We propose a simple and practical method for improving the flexibility of the approximate posterior in variational auto-encoders (VAEs) through a transformation with autoregressive networks. Autoregressive networks, such as RNNs and RNADE networks, are very powerful models. However, their sequential nature makes them impractical for direct use with VAEs, as sequentially sampling the latent vari...

OBJECTIVE To investigate and compare the effects on pain of intraurethral 2% lidocaine gel and plain lubricating gel in male patients underwent flexible cystoscopy. MATERIAL AND METHODS The data of 220 male patients who underwent flexible cystoscopy between March 2012 and August 2014 were retrospectively analized. The patients were divided into 2 groups according to using intraurethral gel ty...