OBJECTIVES The objective of this study was to investigate variants of case-crossover design for assessing correlations between counts of health events over time and exposure to ambient air pollution. For illustrative purposes, daily emergency department (ED) visits for depression among females were considered. MATERIALS AND METHOD Ambient nitrogen dioxide (NO(2)) was used as a principal ambie...

This paper proposes a two-strategy reinforcement evolutionary algorithm using data-mining crossover strategy (TSR-EADCS) with a TSK-type fuzzy controller (TFC) for solving various control problems. The purpose of the R-EADCS is not only to improve the design of traditional reinforcement signal but also to determine the suitable rules in a TFC and the suitable groups that are selected to perform...

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Aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling (ASS) is a major issue in the daily air traffic control (ATC) operations. This paper reports on the application of genetic algorithms (GAs) to tackle the ASS problem in multi-runway systems. Most existing GAs for ASS are confronted with feasibility and efficiency problems in the design of their evolutionary operators, particularly the crossover. The ne...

OBJECTIVES The validity of a new sham acupuncture technique was tested on acupuncture naïve healthy subjects. METHODS The procedure was tested in accupoints LI4 and ST6 in a randomised, single blind and crossover study. The participants were blind to which technique they received. 32 healthy volunteers (15 men, 17 women, aged between 20 and 62 years, mean age 34 years) were recruited at the U...

Studying the effect of chronic medication exposure by means of a case-crossover design may result in an upward-biased odds ratio. In this study, our aim was to assess the occurrence of this bias and to evaluate whether it is remedied by including a control group (the case-time-control design). Using Danish data resources from 1995-2012, we conducted case-crossover and case-time-control analyses...

Stock valuation is very important for fundamental investors to select undervalue stocks to earn excess profit. However, it may be difficult to use stock valuation results because different models generate different estimates on the same stock. This suggests that the value of a stock should be multi-valued rather than single-valued. We therefore develop a multi-valued stock valuation model based...

Many genetic algorithms GA have been applied to solve different NP-complete combinatorial optimization problems so far. The striking point of using GA refers to selecting a combination of appropriate patterns in crossover, mutation, and and so forth and fine tuning of some parameters such as crossover probability, mutation probability, and and so forth. One way to design a robust GA is to selec...

The case-crossover design was introduced in epidemiology 15 years ago as a method for studying the effects of a risk factor on a health event using only cases. The idea is to compare a case's exposure immediately prior to or during the case-defining event with that same person's exposure at otherwise similar "reference" times. An alternative approach to the analysis of daily exposure and case-o...