Hyperspectral image sensors provide images with a large number of contiguous spectral channels per pixel and enable information about diierent materials within a pixel to be obtained. The problem of spectrally unmixing materials may be viewed as a speciic case of the blind source separation problem where data consists of mixed signals (in this case minerals) and the goal is to determine the con...

We consider mixed-integer sets of the type MIX = {x : Ax ≥ b; xi integer, i ∈ I}, where A is a totally unimodular matrix, b is an arbitrary vector and I is a nonempty subset of the column indices of A. We show that the problem of checking nonemptiness of a setMIX is NP-complete even in the case in which the system describes mixed-integer network flows with half-integral requirements on the node...

Congress has required CMS to expand the Medicare outpatient prospective payment system (PPS) for dialysis services to include as many drugs and diagnostic procedures provided to end stage renal disease (ESRD) patients as possible. One important implementation question is whether dialysis facility case mix should be reflected in payment. We use fiscal year (FY) 2000 cost report and patient billi...

The Minimal-Hitting-Set attack (HS-attack) [10] is a well-known passive intersection attack against Mix-based anonymity systems, applicable in cases where communication behaviour is non-uniform and unknown. The attack allows an observer to identify uniquely the fixed set of communication partners of a particular user by observing the messages of all senders and receivers using a Mix. Whilst the...

A common function of anonymity systems is the embedding of subjects that are associated to some attributes in a set of subjects, the anonymity set. Every subject within the anonymity set appears to be possibly associated to attributes of every other subject within it. The anonymity set covers the associations between the subjects and their attributes. The limit of anonymity protection basically...

Global trends in pollinator-dependent crops have raised awareness of the need to support managed and wild bee populations to ensure sustainable crop production. Provision of sufficient forage resources is a key element for promoting bee populations within human impacted landscapes, particularly those in agricultural lands where demand for pollination service is high and land use and management ...

One of the most important decision making problems in many production systems is identification and determination of products and their quantities according to available resources. This problem is called product-mix. However, in the real-world situations, for existing constrained resources, many companies try to provide some products from external resources to achieve more profits. In this pape...

This paper describes a methodology for the case mix problem at the strategic level in the health care sector. Aiming to maximize hospital profits under the given resource capacity, a mathematical model is developed to produce an optimal case mix pattern and a corresponding resource allocation scheme. Two exact methods, integer linear programming and branch-and-price, are deployed to solve the c...

BACKGROUND The hospital standardized mortality ratio (HSMR) is developed to evaluate and improve hospital quality. Different methods can be used to standardize the hospital mortality ratio. Our aim was to assess the validity and applicability of directly and indirectly standardized hospital mortality ratios. METHODS Retrospective scenario analysis using routinely collected hospital data to co...