Stepped wedge cluster randomised trials (SW-CRTs) are being used with increasing frequency in health service evaluation. Conventionally, these studies are designed with equally spaced steps, with an equal number of clusters randomised at each step, and data collected at each and every step. Here we introduce several variations on this design and consider implications for power. One modifiction ...

A challenging problem in real world logistics applications consists in planning service territories for customer deliveries, in contexts where customers must be clustered into groups that satisfy various conditions such as balance and connectivity. In this paper we propose new algorithms for producing such clusters based upon special procedures for exploiting Thiessen polygons. Our methods are ...

This article holistically maps the consumption patterns of older Americans and compares the economic status of different groups (clusters) of elderly U.S. consumers. Using data from the 2010–2011 Consumer Expenditure Survey, the analysis focuses on the consumption patterns of households whose heads or spouses were age 65 and over. Our factor and cluster analyses revealed six consumption cluster...

This paper describes an e-learning system that is expected to further enhance the educational process in computer-based tutoring systems by incorporating collaboration between students and work in groups. The resulting system is called "Comulang" while as a test bed for its effectiveness a multiple language learning system is used. Collaboration is supported by a user modeling module that is re...

We study an access trace containing a sample of Wikipedia’s traffic over a 107-day period aiming to identify appropriate replication and distribution strategies in a fully decentralized hosting environment. We perform a global analysis of the whole trace, and a detailed analysis of the requests directed to the English edition of Wikipedia. In our study, we classify client requests and examine a...

0957-4174/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Ltd. A doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2009.01.005 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +886 33412500x6103 E-mail addresses: [email protected], whydec6 [email protected] (G.-H. Tzeng), j02255@ji-ee The paper proposed a Fuzzy Multiple Criteria Decision Making (FMCDM) approach for banking performance evaluation. Drawing on the four perspectives of a Balanced Scorec...