The budget is the key means for effecting policy in democracies, yet its preparation is typically an opaque and arcane process. Participatory budgeting is making inroads in municipalities, but is usually limited to a small fraction of the total budget as its methods do not scale: They cannot handle quantitative budget items nor hierarchical budget construction. Here we apply the Condorcet princ...

We study average and total cost Markov decision problems with large state spaces. Since the computational and statistical cost of finding the optimal policy scales with the size of the state space, we focus on searching for near-optimality in a low-dimensional family of policies. In particular, we show that for problems with a KullbackLeibler divergence cost function, we can recast policy optim...

In this paper, we present a new framework for large scale online kernel learning, making kernel methods efficient and scalable for large-scale online learning applications. Unlike the regular budget online kernel learning scheme that usually uses some budget maintenance strategies to bound the number of support vectors, our framework explores a completely different approach of kernel functional...

Background Asthma is the first cause of children hospitalization and need for emergency and impose high economic burden on the families and governments. We aimed to investigate the economic burden of pediatric asthma and its contribution to family health budget in Iran. Methods Overall, 283 pediatric asthmatic patients, who referred to two tertiary pediatric referral centers in Tehran capital...

Health-treatment decisions, in much of the world, are affected by the family's ability to meet the cost. In West Africa the situation is more complex because husbands and wives typically have separate budgets. This article reports an exploration of the impact on treatment of divided family budgets in Nigeria where health services now charge for prescribed drugs. It was found that most child ...

Purpose Catering services play important role in the Spanish economy, accounting for 6.2% of GDP 2021. To overcome adverse economic impacts COVID-19, catering are considered one drivers to stimulate growth. Hence, main aim this paper is analyse sociodemographic profile family's breadwinner who allocates most his expenditure budget on different before and during pandemic caused by COVID-19 Spain...