BACKGROUND Information on predictors of quitting behavior among construction site tobacco users is scarce in India. Hence, this study was conducted to assess the intention of tobacco users toward quitting and its predictors with reference to sociodemographic profile. METHODOLOGY A community-based, observational study was conducted on adult 172 construction site workers in a university campus ...

The paper deals with modeling of mutual dependencies among financial assets. Its aim is to investigate the impact of different copula assumptions on optimal portfolios, when CVaR optimization is used. Strategic asset allocation perspective is supposed. It is demonstrated that copula functions enable us to separate the modeling of dependency features of financial assets from the modeling of marg...

In this paper, we propose a numerical method, the finite difference heterogeneous multi-scale method (FD-HMM), for solving multi-scale parabolic problems. Based on the framework introduced in [Commun. Math. Sci. 1 (1) 87], the numerical method relies on the use of two different schemes for the original equation, at different grid level which allows to give numerical results at a much lower cost...

Motivated by value function estimation in reinforcement learning, we study statistical linear inverse problems, i.e., problems where the coefficients of a linear system to be solved are observed in noise. We consider penalized estimators, where performance is evaluated using a matrix-weighted two-norm of the defect of the estimator measured with respect to the true, unknown coefficients. Two ob...

An increasing number of neuroimaging studies are concerned with the identification of interactions or statistical dependencies between brain areas. Dependencies between the activities of different brain regions can be quantified with functional connectivity measures such as the cross-correlation coefficient. An important factor limiting the accuracy of such measures is the amount of empirical d...

MRI provides a sensitive and specific imaging tool to detect acute ischemic stroke by means of a reduced diffusion coefficient of brain water. In a rat model of ischemic stroke, differences in quantitative T1 and T2 MRI relaxation times (qT1 and qT2) between the ischemic lesion (delineated by low diffusion) and the contralateral non-ischemic hemisphere increase with time from stroke onset. The ...

We propose diagnostics for ARIMA model fitting for time series formed by deleting observations from the data and measuring the change in the estimates of the parameters. The use of leave-one-out diagnostics is a well established tool in regression analysis. We demonstrate the efficacy of observation deletion based diagnostics for ARIMA models, addressing issues special to the time diagnostics b...

This paper addresses the problem of noise attenuation for multichannel data. The proposed filter utilizes adaptively determined data-dependent coefficients based on a novel distance measure which combines vector directional with vector magnitude filtering. The special case of color image processing is studied as an important example of multichannel signal processing. [l] R. Hopkins, “Digital te...

We study the asymptotic properties of the adaptive Lasso estimators in sparse, high-dimensional, linear regression models when the number of covariates may increase with the sample size. We consider variable selection using the adaptive Lasso, where the L1 norms in the penalty are re-weighted by data-dependent weights. We show that, if a reasonable initial estimator is available, under appropri...