We derive the bias function that minimizes the statistical error of free energy differences calculated in work-biased fast-switching simulations. The optimum bias function is compared to other bias functions using a particle pulled through a viscous fluid as an illustrative example. Our analysis indicates that the uncertainty in the free energy is smallest if both dominant and typical work valu...

The domain adaptation problem, especially domain adaptation in natural language processing, started gaining much attention very recently [Daumé III and Marcu, 2006, Blitzer et al., 2006, Ben-David et al., 2007, Daumé III, 2007, Satpal and Sarawagi, 2007]. However, some special kinds of domain adaptation problems have been studied before under different names such as class imbalance [Japkowicz a...

Search engine bias has been seriously noticed in recent years. Several pioneering studies have reported that bias perceivably exists even with respect to the URLs in the search results. On the other hand, the potential bias with respect to the content of the search results has not been comprehensively studied. In this paper, we propose a two-dimensional approach to assess both the indexical bia...

A recurrent problem in the analysis of behavioral dynamics, given a simultaneously evolving social network, is the difficulty of separating effects of partner selection from effects of social influence. Because misattribution of selection effects to social influence, or vice versa, suggests wrong conclusions about the social mechanisms underlying the observed dynamics, special diligence in data...

The process of systematic review has shone a light on the methodology of randomized controlled trials. Notably, a range of potential biases hinders the interpretation of chronic pain trials. These include a consistent bias favouring active over placebo in trials that are small and of short duration. The use of the 'last observation carried forward' imputation method is known to inflate results,...

We have performed a series of simulations of clusters of galaxies on the basis of the smoothed particle hydrodynamics technique in a spatially-flat cold dark matter universe with Ω = 0.3, λ = 0.7, and H0 = 70km/s/Mpc as one of the most successful representative cosmological scenarios. In particular, we focus on the Sunyaev–Zel’dovich effect in submm and mm bands, and estimate the reliability of...

This paper describes a sentence selection strategy for tuning a statistical machine translation system based on Moses that translates Spanish into English. This work proposes two techniques that allow selecting the more similar source sentences of the development corpus to the sentences to translate (source test sentences). With this selection, better model weights are obtained to be used later...

Much debate in the handedness literature has centred on the relative merits of questionnaire-based measures assessing hand preference versus simple movement tasks such as peg moving or finger tapping, assessing hand performance. A third paradigm has grown in popularity, which assesses choices by participants when either hand could be used to execute movements. These newer measures may be useful...

Abstract: In extreme value statistics for stationary sequences, blocks estimators are usually constructed by using disjoint blocks because exceedances over high thresholds of different blocks can be assumed asymptotically independent. In this paper we focus on the estimation of the extremal index which measures the degree of clustering of extremes. We consider disjoint and sliding blocks estima...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Analytical approaches to addressing survey non-participation bias typically use only demographic information to improve estimates. We applied a novel methodology which uses health information from data linkage to adjust for non-representativeness. We illustrate the method by presenting adjusted alcohol consumption estimates for Scotland. DESIGN Data on consenting responden...