Many real-world constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) can be over-constrained but contain a set of mandatory or hard constraints that have to be satisfied for a solution to be acceptable. Recent research has shown that constraint weighting local search algorithms can be very effective in solving a variety of CSPs. However, little work has been done in applying such algorithms to over-constrai...

External validity is a challenge in treatment effect estimation. Even in randomized trials, the experimental sample often differs from the population of interest. If participation decisions are explained by observed variables such differences can be overcome by reweighting. However, participation may depend on unobserved variables. Even in such cases, under a common support assumption there exi...

Abstract Inverse probability weighting (IPW) is widely used in many areas when data are subject to unrepresentativeness, missingness, or selection bias. An inevitable challenge with the use of IPW that estimator can be remarkably unstable if some probabilities very close zero. To overcome this problem, at least three remedies have been developed literature: stabilizing, thresholding, and trimmi...

The problem of character weighting in cladistic analysis is revisited. The finding that, in large molecular data sets, removal of third positions (with more homoplasy) decreases the number of well supported groups has been interpreted by some authors as indicating that weighting methods are unjustified. Two arguments against that interpretation are advanced. Characters that collectively determi...

Mesh simplification has become a key ingredient for real-time graphics applications. However, practitioners have found that automatic simplification methods usually fail to produce satisfactory result when models of very low polygon count are desired. This is due to the fact that existing methods take no semantic or functional metric into account, and moreover, each error metric proposed previo...

Title of Document: TRANSFORMATION IN CHINESE THEATRE WORKS’ THE LEGEND OF WHITE SNAKE Li-Min Lin, M.A., 2010 Directed By: Assistant Professor Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Department of Theatre This thesis examines Chinese Theatre Work’s The Legend of White Snake as a case study of intercultural performance. As an overseas non-profit organization in NYC, CTW creates production aims to “transform” t...

Penalty Logic is a natural and commonsense Knowledge Representation technique to deal with potentially inconsistent beliefs. Penalty Logic allows some kind of compensation between different pieces of information. But one of the main and less studied flaws of Penalty Logic is the influence of the choice of weights on inference: the same pieces of information can provide extremely different resul...

The Stochastic Context Tree (SCOT) is a useful tool for studying infinite random sequences generated by an m-Markov Chain (m-MC). It captures the phenomenon that the probability distribution of the next state sometimes depends on less than m of the preceding states. This allows compressing the information needed to describe an m-MC. The SCOT construction has been earlier used under various name...