Lameness in dairy cows is an important welfare issue. As part of a welfare assessment, herd level lameness prevalence can be estimated from scoring a sample of animals, where higher levels of accuracy are associated with larger sample sizes. As the financial cost is related to the number of cows sampled, smaller samples are preferred. Sequential sampling schemes have been used for informing dec...

Water quality monitoring programs have expanded in an effort to quantify loadings to streams and lakes from various watershed activities and managements. At the core of monitoring programs are strategies or schemes that determine when and how samples are taken for estimating stream loadings. Quantification of the differences between these schemes has not been adequately documented. An analytic ...

Fractional order partial differential equations are generalizations of classical partial differential equations. Increasingly, these models are used in applications such as fluid flow, finance and others. In this paper we examine some practical numerical methods to solve a class of initial- boundary value fractional partial differential equations with variable coefficients on a finite domain. S...

Background. In coalescent theory, computer programs often use importance sampling to calculate likelihoods and other statistical quantities. An importance sampling scheme can exploit human intuition to improve statistical efficiency of computations, but unfortunately, in the absence of general computer frameworks on importance sampling, researchers often struggle to translate new sampling schem...

Control charts are widely applied in industrial practice to maintain manufacturing processes in desired operating conditions. Design of control charts aims at finding the best parameters for the operation of chart. In recent years, it has been revealed that the control charts operating with VSI (variable sampling interval) schemes give better performance than with FSI (fixed sampling interval) ...

1 In this article an optimal selection of tap positions for certain LFSR-based encryption schemes is investigated from both design and cryptanalytic perspective. Two novel algorithms towards an optimal selection of tap positions are given which can be satisfactorily used to provide (sub)optimal resistance to some generic cryptanalytic techniques applicable to these schemes. It is demonstrated t...

In this paper, we consider two variance reduction schemes that exploit the structure of the primal graph of the graphical model: Rao-Blackwellised w-cutset sampling and AND/OR sampling. We show that the two schemes are orthogonal and can be combined to further reduce the variance. Our combination yields a new family of estimators which trade time and space with variance. We demonstrate experime...

There are conflicting opinions in the literature as to whether it is more beneficial to use a large number of gradient sampling orientations in diffusion tensor MRI (DT-MRI) experiments than to use a smaller number of carefully chosen orientations. In this study, Monte Carlo simulations were used to study the effect of using different gradient sampling schemes on estimates of tensor-derived qua...

BACKGROUND T1-mapping has the potential to detect and quantify diffuse processes such as interstitial fibrosis. Detection of disease at an early stage by measurement of subtle changes requires a high degree of reproducibility. Initial implementation of saturation recovery (SR) T1-mapping employed 3-parameter fitting which was highly accurate but was quite sensitive to noise; 2-parameter fitting...

In tomography we have to give an estimate of a function from a nite number of its intergrals along straight lines or on strips. Under very reasonable conditions, the interlaced sampling is well known to be the most eecient scheme for this problem. In this paper we examine some pertu-bations on the interlaced scheme. Using a theorem due to A. Faridani, we show that sampling on coarse grids leads...