In a problem of target hitting, the capture basin at cost c is the set of states that can reach the target with a cost lower or equal than c, without breaking the viability constraints. The boundary of a c-capture basin is the c-contour of the problem value function. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that solves target hitting problems, by iteratively approximating capture basins at suc...

A new algorithm is presented for Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) where the templates are obtained via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of High Range Resolution (HRR) profiles. SVD analysis of a large class of HRR data reveals that the Range-space eigenvectors corresponding to the largest singular value accounts for more than 90% of target energy. Hence, it is proposed that the Range-space ...

Equity analysts’ target price can be decomposed into two components: the earnings forecast and the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio forecast, with the former containing shortterm earnings news and the latter containing news about long-term earnings growth and discount rates. Using a large database of target prices from 1997 to 2004, we document that both components are important in driving target ...

Drug discovery is a long process in which only a few successful new therapeutic discoveries are made and identification of drug target candidate proteins requires considerable time and efforts. However, the accumulation of information on drugs has made it possible to devise new computational methods for classifying drug target candidates. In this paper, we devise a Drug Target Protein (DT-P) cl...

Executive Summary v Glossary of Economic Terms ix 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Background and hypotheses 1 1.2 Objectives and target audience 1 1.3 Definitions and scope 1 1.4 Structure of paper 4 2. Economics and Forestry: a Conceptual Overview 4 2.1 Introduction 4 2.2 Forestry, economics and public resource allocation 4 2.3 Recent changes in economic and forest policies 5 2.4 The development of envi...

We formulate a model of reference-dependent preferences based on the marginal rate of substitution at the reference-point of a reference-free utility function. Using binary choices on the trade-off between money and travel time, reference-dependence is captured by value functions that are centered at the reference. The model predicts a directly testable relationship among four commonly used val...

In order to test if an unknown matrix has a given rank (null hypothesis), we consider the family of statistics that are minimum squared distances between an estimator and the manifold of fixed-rank matrix. Under the null hypothesis, every statistic of this family converges to a weighted chi-squared distribution. In this paper, we introduce the constrained bootstrap to build bootstrap estimate o...

We conducted a choice experiment (CE) to estimate willingness to accept (WTA) values for a planned conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme designed to increase toilet use in South Africa. The payment is made conditional on using a toilet and bringing urine to a central collection point. In a split-sample approach, a segment of respondents were given time to think (TTT) (24 hours) about their ...

A number of recent papers in environmental economics have focused on the process of researching preferences – agents are uncertain about preferences but at a cost may narrow their uncertainty. This issue has arisen in formulating bids in contingent valuation as well as the debate over the divergence between WTP and WTA. In the context of contingent valuation, it has been hypothesized that the h...

We consider a particular two-sample homogeneity testing problem often encountered in case-control studies with contaminated controls, or in detecting a treatment effect when some subjects are not affected by the treatment in biological experiments. We propose an EM-test designed to simultaneously detect mean difference and differential variability in the two samples. We show that the EM-test st...