The adaptive cluster sampling (ACS) is a suitable sampling design for rare and clustered populations. In environmental and ecological applications, biological populations are generally animals or plants with highly patchy spatial distribution. However, ACS would be a less efficient design when the study population is not rare with low aggregation since the final sample size could be easily out ...

The problem of clustering large data sets has attracted a lot of current research. The approaches taken are mainly based either on the more efficient implementation or modification of existing methods or/and on the construction of clusters from a small sub-sample of the data and then the assignment of all observations in those clusters. The current paper focuses on the latter direction. An alte...

Nowadays, there is an increasing use of sampling methods in network and spatial populations. Although the most common link-tracing designs such as adaptive cluster sampling and snowball sampling have advantages over conventional sampling designs such as simple random sampling and cluster sampling, these designs still present many drawbacks. Adaptive web sampling is a new link-tracing design tha...

This paper examines the problem of selecting a suitable subset of data to be labelled when building pattern classifiers from labelled and unlabelled data. The selection of representative set is guided by a clustering information and various options of allocating a number of samples within clusters and their distributions are investigated. The experimental results show that hybrid methods like S...

Lot quality assurance sampling (LQAS) surveys are commonly used for monitoring and evaluation in resource-limited settings. Recently several methods have been proposed to combine LQAS with cluster sampling for more timely and cost-effective data collection. For some of these methods, the standard binomial model can be used for constructing decision rules as the clustering can be ignored. For ot...

A novel method is presented for predicting the common secondary structures and alignment of two homologous RNA sequences by sampling the 'structural alignment' space, i.e. the joint space of their alignments and common secondary structures. The structural alignment space is sampled according to a pseudo-Boltzmann distribution based on a pseudo-free energy change that combines base pairing proba...

Cluster sampling algorithm is a scheme for sequential data assimilation developed to handle general non-Gaussian and nonlinear settings. The algorithm relaxes the Gaussian prior assumption widely used in the data assimilation context to approximate the prior distribution obtained by integrating the posterior distribution in previous assimilation cycles. The algorithm can be in general used to s...

Randomized response is a research method to get accurate answers to sensitive questions in structured sample survey. Simple random sampling is widely used in surveys of sensitive questions but hard to apply on large targeted populations. On the other side, more sophisticated sampling regimes and corresponding formulas are seldom employed to sensitive question surveys. In this work, we developed...