We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a risk measure of variability in cost, under the risk-aware MDPs paradigm. Previous studies showed that risk-aware MDPs, based on a minimax approach to handling the risk measure, can be solved using dynamic programming for small to medium sized problems. However, due to the “curse of dimensionality”, MDPs that model real-life problem...

BACKGROUND Telomeres are involved in cellular ageing and shorten with increasing age. If telomere length is a valuable biomarker of ageing, then telomere shortening should be associated with worse physical performance, an ageing trait, but evidence for such an association is lacking. The purpose of this study was to examine whether change in telomere length is associated with physical performan...

There is a growing interest in establishing the relationship between the count data y and numerous covariates x through a generalized linear model (GLM), such as explaining the road crash counts from the geometry and environmental factors. This paper proposes a hierarchical Bayesian method to deal with the negative binomial GLM. The Negative Binomial distribution is preferred for modeling nonne...

In this study, a new informative prior is developed for the scale parameter of the mixture of Laplace distribution when data is censored and can be used to model various real world problems. The basic proposal is to merge both informative and non-informative priors for improvement of prior information. There are many real world problems in which investigator has different opinion than prior inf...

BACKGROUND Bovine tuberculosis, bTB, is classified by the WHO as one of the seven neglected zoonontic diseases that cause animal health problems and has high potential to infect humans. In the West Bank, bTB was not studied among animals and the prevalence of human tuberculosis caused by M. bovis is unknown. Therefore, the aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence of bTB among cattle and...

OF THE DISSERTATION Efficient Model-based Exploration in Continuous State-space Environments by Ali Nouri Dissertation Director: Michael L. Littman The impetus for exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) is decreasing uncertainty about the environment for the purpose of better decision making. As such, exploration plays a crucial role in the efficiency of RL algorithms. In this dissertation,...

In modeling environmental interfaces regarded as biophysical complex systems, one of the main tasks is to create an operative interface with the external environment. The interface should provide a robust and prompt translation of the vast diversity of external physical and/or chemical changes into a set of signals that are understandable for a biophysical entity. Although the organization of a...

The strontium ion, in water-soluble forms, is one of the major pollutant in drinking water. Therefore, a simple, rapid, selective, and sensitive potentiometric carbon paste electrode was developed to measure strontium ion in real samples with complex matrices. To prepare the potentiometric sensor, a synthetic ligand ((E)-4-(((2-amino-4-chlorophenyl)imino)methyl)-5-(hydroxymethyl)-2-methyl pyrid...

T he relationship between the price of oil and the level of economic activity is a fundamental empirical issue in macroeconomics. In this research, by using a multivariate GARCH-in-Mean VAR, we try to investigate direct effects of uncertainty of oil price on macroeconomics of Iran by using annually data from 1965 to 2013.Results show that uncertainty about oil prices had a negative a...