in the early stages of a construction project, the reliability and accuracy of conceptual cost estimates are major concerns for clients and cost engineers. previous studies applied scoring methods and established common rules or mathematical methods to assess the quality of cost estimates. however, those approaches have some limitations in adapting to real-world projects or require understandin...

In many real world applications where DEA is applied, DMUs can often be put into groups, such as those which may be under a single management team. This often means that the multipliers used within a group should be common across that group’s members. The case example examined in this regard is one involving a set of power plants, with each containing a set of power units under a common plant m...

Resolution, the ability to separate closely occurring events, is an important criterion for most analytical instrument techniques since it effects the ability to obtain accurate, quantitative results. Thermal Analysis techniques are no exception to this basic rule. A good example is thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) which measures weight changes with temperature, providing information about mate...

This paper conducts a comparison analysis of some of the most common defuzzification techniques which helps rank fuzzy weights calculated from fuzzy comparison matrices through Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process. Ranking of weights calculated through FAHP algorithms is of critical importance as it directly effects the decision making process. More so ranking of fuzzy numbers is also important in ...

Analyzing sequencing data is difficult because of the low frequency of rare variants, which may result in low power to detect associations. We consider pathway analysis to detect multiple common and rare variants jointly and to investigate whether analysis at the pathway level provides an alternative strategy for identifying susceptibility genes. Available pathway analysis methods for data from...

We analyze a collaboration network based on the Marvel Universe comic books. First, we consider the system as a binary network, where two characters are connected if they appear in the same publication. The analysis of degree correlations reveals that, in contrast to most real social networks, the Marvel Universe presents a disassortative mixing on the degree. Then, we use a weight measure to s...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To compare physical activity outcome expectations related to cancer survival with traditional physical activity outcome expectations in breast and colon cancer survivors
. DESIGN Cross-sectional survey
. SETTING Canada and the United States. SAMPLE 146 participants
. METHODS Self-reported survey instruments and height and weight measurement. The online survey was comp...

The highest efficiency score 1 (100% efficiency) is regarded as a common benchmark for Decision Making Units (DMUs). This brings about the existence of more than one DMU with the highest score. Such a case normally occurs in all Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models and also in all the Common Set of Weights (CSWs) methods and it may lead to the lack of thorough ranking of DMUs. And ideal DMU b...

Conventional data envelopment analysis (DEA) assists decision makers in distinguishing between efficient and inefficient decisionmaking units (DMUs) in a homogeneous group. However, DEA does not provide more information about the efficient DMUs. This research proposes a methodology to determine one common set of weights for the performance indices of only DEA efficient DMUs. Then, these DMUs ar...