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south africa (sa) is experiencing a rapid epidemiologic transition as a consequence of political, economic and social changes. in this study we described, based on hospital data, the mortality patterns of non communicable diseases (ncd), communicable diseases (cd), the ncd/cd ratios, and the trends of deaths.we conducted a cross-sectional survey of all deaths occurring in several public hospita...

We consider the Bellman residual minimization approach for solving discounted Markov decision problems, where we assume that a generative model of the dynamics and rewards is available. At each policy iteration step, an approximation of the value function for the current policy is obtained by minimizing an empirical Bellman residual defined on a set of n states drawn i.i.d. from a distribution ...

We consider N processors communicating unidirectionally over a closed transmission channel, or ring. Each message is assembled into a xed-length packet. Packets to be sent are generated at random times by the processors, and the transit times spent by packets on the ring are also random. Packets being forwarded, i.e., packets already on the ring, have priority over waiting packets. The objectiv...

Objective: To develop a measure of cancer services integration (CsI) that can inform clinical and administrative decision-makers in their efforts to monitor and improve cancer system performance. Methods: We employed a systematic approach to measurement development, including review of existing cancer/health services integration measures, key-informant interviews and focus groups with cancer sy...

Political astuteness, including awareness, knowledge, and involvement, is necessary if nurses are to engage in policy advocacy-a vital aspect of the nursing profession. However, little is known about the effects of learning activities, such as legislative days, on political astuteness. The purpose of this research was to determine if political astuteness changed after participants attended a st...

In the secretary problem of Cayley (1875) and Moser (1956), n non-negative, independent, random variables with common distribution are sequentially presented to a decision maker who decides when to stop and collect the most recent realization. The goal is to maximize the expected value of the collected element. In the k-choice variant, the decision maker is allowed to make kď n selections to ma...

There exists a large literature on two-person bargaining games and distribution games (or divide-the-dollar games) under simple majority rule, where in equilibrium a minimal winning coalition takes full advantage over everyone else. Here we extend the study to an n-person veto game where players take turns proposing policies in an n-dimensional policy space and everybody has a veto over changes...

This paper is about learning a continuous approximation of the Pareto frontier in Multi–Objective Markov Decision Problems (MOMDPs). We propose a policy–based approach that exploits gradient information to generate solutions close to the Pareto ones. Differently from previous policy–gradient multi–objective algorithms, where n optimization routines are used to have n solutions, our approach per...

In this paper, we study an unreliable multi-product production/inventory system consisting of N production machines and an assembly machine. The final products are assembled-to-order whereas components are built at N separate production machines on a make-to-stock routine. The objective of our study is to develop an integrated optimal control policy that minimizes the total long-run average cos...