background: using the method “surrogacy” in which a woman accepts to bear and deliver a child for a married couple is considered as a subsidiary method in infertility therapy. this method is relatively new in iran. objective: the purpose of this study was to evaluate the experiences of the women involved in surrogacy and to reveal some issues related to this method. materials and methods: the m...

Recently, a new surrogate method, the Small–Shuffle (SS) surrogate method, has been proposed to investigate whether there is some kind of dynamics in irregular fluctuations, even if they are modulated by long term trends or periodicities. This situation is theoretically incompatible with the assumption underlying previously proposed surrogate methods. We apply the SS surrogate method to a varie...

The objective of this study is to develop an accurate surrogate modeling method for construction of the surrogate model to represent the performance measures of the compute-intensive simulation model in reliability-based design optimization (RBDO). In addition, an assessment method for the confidence level of the surrogate model and a conservative surrogate model to account the uncertainty of t...

Studies have shown that the surrogate subgradient method, to optimize non-smooth dual functions within the Lagrangian relaxation framework, can lead to significant computational improvements as compared to the subgradient method. The key idea is to obtain surrogate subgradient directions that form acute angles toward the optimal multipliers without fully minimizing the relaxed problem. The majo...

Sample entropy can be an effective tool for the investigation of human movement variability. However, before applying the method, it can be beneficial to employ an analysis to confirm that observed data is not solely the result of stochastic processes. This can be achieved using surrogate methods. Previous investigations have used surrogate methods within human gait data, yet no appropriate met...

This paper presents a new method for designing vehicle structures for crashworthiness using surrogate models and a genetic algorithm. Inspired by the classifier ensemble approaches in pattern recognition, the method estimates the crash performance of a candidate design based on an ensemble of surrogate models constructed from the different sets of samples of finite element analyses. Multiple su...