An important part of statistical data analysis is hypothesis testing. For example, we know the probability distribution of the characteristics corresponding to a certain disease, we have the values of the characteristics describing a patient, and we must make a conclusion whether this patient has this disease. Traditional hypothesis testing techniques are based on the assumption that we know th...

BACKGROUND Physician cost profiles (also called efficiency or economic profiles) compare the costs of care provided by a physician to his or her peers. These profiles are increasingly being used as the basis for policy applications such as tiered physician networks. Tiers (low, average, high cost) are currently defined by health plans based on percentile cut-offs which do not account for statis...

The stochastic network calculus (SNC) has become an attractive methodology to derive probabilistic performance bounds. So far the SNC is based on (tacitly assumed) exact probabilistic assumptions about the arrival processes. Yet, in practice, these are only true approximately–at best. In many situations it is hard, if possible at all, to make such assumptions a priori. A more practical approach...

Elementary but general statistical analyses determine the uncertainty arising from photon statistics in measuring a line shift and width. Account is taken of a background as well as the required signal. PACS (2010) categories: 02.50.Fz, 06.20.Dk, 95.75.Fg

We point out several problems in scalingup statistical approaches to spoken dialogue systems to enable them to deal with complex but natural user goals, such as disjunctive and negated goals and preferences. In particular, we explore restrictions imposed by current independence assumptions in POMDP dialogue models. This position paper proposes the use of Automatic Belief Compression methods to ...