The aim of this study was to track and analyze the 200-m Freestyle performance stability throughout elite swimmer’s career. 29 Portuguese male top-50 were analyzed for seven consecutive seasons between 12 and 18 years old. Best performances were collected from ranking tables. Longitudinal assessment was performed based on two approaches: (i) mean stability was analyzed by descriptive statistics...

Weather and environmental factors are verified to have played significant roles in historical major cascading outages and blackouts. Therefore, in the simulation and risk assessment of cascading outages in power systems, it is necessary to consider the weather and environmental effects. This paper proposes a method for the risk assessment of weather-related cascading outages. Based on the analy...

The prediction of the small-scale spatial-temporal pattern of intense rainfall events is crucial for flood risk assessment in small catchments and urban areas. In the absence of a full deterministic modelling of small-scale rainfall, it is common practice to resort to the use of stochastic downscaling models to generate ensemble rainfall predictions to be used as inputs to rainfall-runoff model...

Recidivism prediction instruments (RPIs) provide decision-makers with an assessment of the likelihood that a criminal defendant will reoffend at a future point in time. Although such instruments are gaining increasing popularity across the country, their use is attracting tremendous controversy. Much of the controversy concerns potential discriminatory bias in the risk assessments that are prod...

South African heavy vehicles are currently designed according to suggested standards designed and enforced by the National Department of Transport (DoT); these standards are regulated in terms of mass, dimensions and vehicle configuration. However, the current prescriptive standards leave little room for innovation in terms of heavy vehicle design. Performance Based Standards (PBS), originated ...

Risk prediction models based on medical history or results of tests are increasingly common in the cancer literature. An important use of these models is to make treatment decisions on the basis of estimated risk. The relative utility curve is a simple method for evaluating risk prediction in a medical decision-making framework. Relative utility curves have three attractive features for the eva...

In forecastinga nancial time series, the mean prediction can be validated by direct comparison with the value of the series. However, the volatility or variance can only be validated by indirect means such as the likelihood function. Systematic errors in volatility prediction have anèconomic value' since volatility is a tradable quantity (e.g., in options and other derivatives)in addition to be...

In many structured prediction problems, the highest-scoring labeling is hard to compute exactly, leading to the use of approximate inference methods. However, when inference is used in a learning algorithm, a good approximation of the score may not be sufficient. We show in particular that learning can fail even with an approximate inference method with rigorous approximation guarantees. There ...

This paper introduces an application of financial risk management methods to the deregulated electricity markets. A framework for the Monte Carlo performance simulation of a power portfolio is presented. The optimal portfolio selection problem is addressed and a numerical method is implemented. Numerical results of simulation and optimization are presented in the Nordic electricity market. The ...