The optimal allocation of available resources is the concern of every investigator in choosing a study design. The recent development of statistical methods for the analysis of two-stage data makes these study designs attractive for their economy and efficiency. However, little work has been done on deriving two-stage designs that are optimal under the kinds of constraints encountered in practi...

In this paper, a preprocessing model for hand-written Arabic text on the basis of the Voronoi Diagrams (VDs) is presented and discussed. The proposed VD-based pre-processing model consists of five stages: a preparatory stage, page segmentation, thinning, baseline estimation, and slanting correction. In the preparatory stage, the text image is converted via VDs into a group of geometrical forms ...

Nationally representative samples of large populations often have complex design features for a variety of reasons (e.g., cost efficiency). For purposes of estimating sampling variances based on complex multi-stage sample designs involving stratification and cluster sampling, the sampling error codes provided by survey organizations in public use survey data files often assume “ultimate cluster...

Epidemiologic and clinical changes in the HIV epidemic over time have presented a challenge to public health surveillance to monitor behavioral and clinical factors that affect disease progression and HIV transmission. The Medical Monitoring Project (MMP) is a supplemental surveillance project designed to provide representative, population-based data on clinical status, care, outcomes, and beha...

A Bayesian manner which marginalizes transition probabilities can be generally applied to various kinds of probabilistic finite state machine models. Based on such a Bayesian manner, we implemented and compared three algorithms: variable-length gram, state merging method for PDFAs, and collapsed Gibbs sampling for PFAs. Among those, collapsed Gibbs sampling for PFAs performed the best on the da...

The contribution of this paper is two-fold; first, we present a novel approach for sampling and reconstructing two dimensional signals with parametric structure or namely signals with Finite Rate of Innovation (FRI). The considered signals are bi-level polygons and set of 2-D Diracs and it will be shown that with the use of ACMP method, projection-slice theorem, Radon projections and exponentia...

A new method of farthest point strategy (FPS) for progressive image acquisition-an acquisition process that enables an approximation of the whole image at each sampling stage-is presented. Its main advantage is in retaining its uniformity with the increased density, providing efficient means for sparse image sampling and display. In contrast to previously presented stochastic approaches, the FP...