The primary goal of the research reported in this thesis is to identify what criteria are responsible for the good performance of a heuristic rule evaluation function in a greedy top-down covering algorithm both in classification and regression. We first argue that search heuristics for inductive rule learning algorithms typically trade off consistency and coverage, and we investigate this trad...

Simulation tools can provide valuable information for daylighting system design while optimization methods can determine feasible solutions from a number of uncertain design parameters. However, optimization methods allow for limited interactivity and only consider several performance criteria. Therefore, to utilize experts’ domain knowledge, this research presents a rule-based expert system ba...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the new version of Iranian EFL junior high school textbook (Prospect1) from the teachers’ perspectives. The participants included90experienced English teachers (42 females and 48 males) randomly selected from different junior high schools in different districts of Gilan province, Iran. The evaluation of the textbook was conducted quantitatively through a 5-...

This paper presents an open-source application for evaluating competing clinical trial (CT) designs using simulations. The S4 system of classes and methods is utilized. Using object-oriented programming provides extensibility through careful, clear interface specification; using R, an open-source widely-used statistical language, makes the application extendible by the people who design CTs: bi...