Background The main purpose of this study was to identify factors that influence healthcare quality in the Iranian context.   Methods Exploratory in-depth individual and focus group interviews were conducted with 222 healthcare stakeholders including healthcare providers, managers, policy-makers, and payers to identify factors affecting the quality of healthcare services provided in Iranian hea...

In this paper we study the Metropolis algorithm in connection with two mean–field spin systems, the so called mean–field Ising model and the Blume–Emery–Griffiths model. In both this examples the naive choice of proposal chain gives rise, for some parameters, to a slowly mixing Metropolis chain, that is a chain whose spectral gap decreases exponentially fast (in the dimension N of the problem)....

We study the in-network computation of arbitrary functions whose computation schema is a complete binary tree, i.e., we assume that the network wants to compute a function of K operands, each of which is available at a distinct node in the network, and rather than simply collecting the K operands at a single sink node and computing the function, we want to compute the function during the proces...

the informality of possession and lack of security in residence are among the characteristics attributed to the informal settlements, as well as, they are a key to other problems’ solutions. this essay investigates some of the typical cases of iran’s informal settlements, and this intends to find out the possession conditions, as well as, the conditions necessary for the recognition of the ...

noise pollution can be considered as the most important problem of urban environmental management in mega metropolises and urban transportation is the main source of the mentioned problem. this study aims to investigate the amount of traffic noise dose received by traffic policemen in tehran; district 1 municipality. the investigation was conducted during three consecutive months in 2007 in 282...

In this paper, we study the asymptotic efficiency of the delayed rejection strategy. In particular, the efficiency of the delayed rejection Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is compared to that of the regular Metropolis algorithm. To allow for a fair comparison, the study is carried under optimal mixing conditions for each of these algorithms. After introducing optimal scaling results for the delay...

The development of an efficient MCMC strategy for sampling from complex distributions is a difficult task that needs to be solved for calculating small failure probabilities encountered in high-dimensional reliability analysis of engineering systems. Usually different variations of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm (MH) are used. However, the standard MH algorithm does generally not work in hig...