Auctions are useful mechanism for allocating items (goods, tasks, resources, etc.) in multiagent systems. The bulk of auction theory assumes that the bidders’ valuations for items are given a priori. In many applications, however, the bidders need to expend significant effort to determine their valuations. In this paper we analyze computational bidder agents that can refine their valuations (ow...

With a rapidly increasing number of devices connected to the internet, big data has been applied to various domains of human life. Nevertheless, it has also opened new venues for breaching users’ privacy. Hence it is highly required to develop techniques that enable data owners to privatize their data while keeping it useful for intended applications. Existing methods, however, do not offer eno...

Many scattering models have been presented in the graphics literature. Few of them, however, have been evaluated through comparisons with real measured data. As the demand for plausible and predictable scattering models increases, more attention is given to performing such comparisons. In this paper we examine the implementation of virtual goniphotometers used to obtain BRDF (bidirectional refl...

BACKGROUND The Youden index, the sum of sensitivity and specificity minus one, is an index used for setting optimal thresholds on medical tests. DISCUSSION When using this index, one implicitly uses decision theory with a ratio of misclassification costs which is equal to one minus the prevalence proportion of the disease. It is doubtful whether this cost ratio truly represents the decision m...

Estimation of the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) is difficult for several reasons: treatments that decrease both cost and effectiveness and treatments that increase both cost and effectiveness can yield identical values of the ICER; the ICER is a discontinuous function of the mean difference in effectiveness; and the standard estimate of the ICER is a ratio. To address these diffic...

Introduction: Since ancient times Malaria in Iran has been considered as a serious health risk, especially in Hormozgan Province, as no other disease like Malaria has imposed irreparable financial and life losses to the country. Since saving costs in the healthcare sector comes as first priority in most countries, this study aims at launching a cost-effectiveness analysis on malaria diagnosis d...