At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Department of Biostatistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Sistemas Locales de Atención Integral a la Salud, León (SILAIS-León), Leon, Nicaragua; Hospital Escuela Oscar Danilo Rosales Argüello (HEODRA), León, Nicaragua, Leon, Nicaragua; Biostatistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill...

W. Gao, H. Zhu, K. Giovanello, K. Smith, D. Shen, J. Gilmore, and W. Lin Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States, Department of Biostatistics and BRIC, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Department of Psychology and BRIC, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Department of Radiology, University of Nort...

Many learning tasks involve searching through a discrete space of performance elements, seeking an element whose future utility is expected to be high. As the task of nding the global optimum is often intractable, many practical learning systems use simple forms of hill-climbing to nd a locally optimal element. However, hill-climbing can be complicated by the fact that the utility value of a pe...

When Jim Lyons-Weiler and I discussed what we might do with an Open Access journal on Cancer Informatics, we both felt that it was important to avoid loosing focus on what the end-point of both the research and its dissemination is. In all its forms cancer is inevitably an unpleasant affl iction that harms every aspect of the lives of sufferers and those who love them. Jim and I want this journ...

Awake versus Anesthetized: Layer-Specific Sensory Processing in Visual Cortex and 1 Functional Connectivity between Cortical Areas 2 3 Running Head: Anesthetics Disrupt Sensory Processing 4 5 Kristin K. Sellers, Davis V. Bennett, Axel Hutt , James H. Williams, and Flavio Frohlich 6 7 1 Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC 27599 8 2 Neurobiology C...

W. Gao, H. Zhu, K. Giovanello, K. Smith, D. Shen, J. Gilmore, and W. Lin Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States, Department of Biostatistics and BRIC, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Department of Psychology and BRIC, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Department of Radiology, University of Nort...

W. Gao, H. Zhu, K. Giovanello, K. Smith, D. Shen, J. Gilmore, and W. Lin Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States, Department of Biostatistics and BRIC, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Department of Psychology and BRIC, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Department of Radiology, University of Nort...

We propose a simple and semi-parametric estimator for the tail index of a regular varying elliptical random vector. Since, for univariate random variables, our estimator boils down to the Hill estimator and it inherits the simplicity and asymptotic properties, we name it after Bruce M. Hill. The estimator is based on the distance between an elliptical probability contour and the outer – or exce...

Enforced hill-climbing is an effective deterministic hillclimbing technique that deals with local optima using breadth-first search (a process called “basin flooding”). We propose and evaluate a stochastic generalization of enforced hill-climbing for online use in goal-oriented probabilistic planning problems. We assume a provided heuristic function estimating expected cost to the goal with fla...