Frame imperfection, non-response and unequal selection probabilities always affect survey results. In order to compensate for the effects of these problems, Devill and Särndal (1992) introduced a family of estimators called calibration estimators. In these estimators we look for weights that have minimum distance with design weights based on a distance function and satisfy calibration equa...

Lot of work has already been done for automatic text summarization. In this paper we have given a novel statistical approach to summarize the given text. In our approach extraction of relevant sentences is done which can give the actual concept of the input document in a concise form. We rank each sentence in the document by assigning a weight value to each word of the sentence and a boost fact...

This article assesses insurance uptake in three community-based health insurance (CBHI) schemes located in rural parts of two of India's poorest states and offered through women's self-help groups (SHGs). We examine what drives uptake, the degree of inclusive practices of the schemes and the influence of health status on enrolment. The most important finding is that a household's socio-economic...

In multi-attribute decision problems the decision to differentiate between alternatives will be affected by the precision with which weights are specified. Specifications are imprecise because of the uncertainty characteristic of the judgements on which weights are based. Uncertainties are from two sources, the accuracy with which judgements are articulated and the inconsistency when multiple j...

In this paper we study how global optimization methods (like genetic algorithms) can be used to train neural networks. We introduce the notion of regularity, for studying properties of the error function that expand the search space in an artiicial way. Regularities are used to generate constraints on the weights of the network. In order to nd a satissable set of constraints we use a constraint...

In 1961, Kasteleyn, Fisher, and Temperley gave a result for the number of possible tilings of a 2m× 2n checkerboard with dominoes. Their proof involves the evaluation of a complicated Pfaffian. In this thesis we investigate combinatorial strategies to evaluate the sum of evenly spaced binomial coefficients, and present steps towards a purely combinatorial proof of the 1961 result.