governance in health is cited as one of the key factors in balancing the concerns of the government and public sector with the interests of civil society/private players, but often remains poorly described and operationalized. richard saltman and antonio duran look at two aspects in the search for new provider models in a context of health markets signalling liberalisation: (i) the role of the ...

OBJECTIVES Treatment switching refers to the situation in a randomized controlled trial where patients switch from their randomly assigned treatment onto an alternative. Often, switching is from the control group onto the experimental treatment. In this instance, a standard intention-to-treat analysis does not identify the true comparative effectiveness of the treatments under investigation. We...

In many everyday situations, humans must make precise decisions in the presence of uncertain sensory information. For example, when asked to combine information from multiple sources we often assign greater weight to the more reliable information. It has been proposed that statistical-optimality often observed in human perception and decision-making requires that humans have access to the uncer...

It has become increasingly popular to obtain machine learning labels through commercial crowdsourcing services. The crowdsourcing workers or annotators are paid for each label they provide, but the task requester usually has only a limited amount of the budget. Since the data instances have different levels of labeling difficulty and the workers have different reliability for the labeling task,...

Active robotic sensing is a large field aimed at providing robotic systems with tools and methods for decision making under uncertainty, e.g. in a changing environment and lack of sufficient information. Active sensing (AS) incorporates the following aspects: (i) where to position sensors, (ii) how to make decisions for next actions in order to extract maximum information from the sensor data, ...

UNLABELLED The percentage that benefit from medical preventive measures is small but all are exposed to the risk of side effects so most of those harmed would never benefit from their use. There is no expression or acronym to describe the ratio of harm to benefit nor discussion of what level of harm is acceptable for what benefit. Here we describe the harm to benefit ratio (HBR) expressed as nu...

Large amounts of data are collected and stored within universities, but little is done to reuse this data to support decision making processes. This paper discusses the use of data visualisation and statistical analysis as methods of making sense of the collected data, analysing it to assess the effects of historical institutional decisions and discusses the use of such techniques to aid decisi...

Techniques in applied statistics play an important role in decision making and risk measures. Many practical models are inspired by empirical studies and are developed to explain observed phenomena. This issue has collected six papers devoted to this theme. The papers have been presented in the International Conference on Applied Statistics and Financial Mathematics (ASFM2010) and International...