To measure the relative subjective importance attached to heredity and environment, undergraduates. graduate students, and faculty were asked to predict the IQ scores of hypothetical adopted children based on the IQs of the biological mother and father, the IQs of the adoptive parents, and the socioeconomic status of the adoptive parents. Intuitive predictions of IQ were inconsistent with addit...

in most of the multi-criteria decision making problems, it is important to have necessary information about relative importance of each criteria. in this group of problems, weights measure the relative importance of preferences of each criteria in comparison with the other decision making criteria. in this research, the nise method has been used for mapping mean-variance efficient frontier. nis...

BACKGROUND Digital self-monitoring, particularly of weight, is increasingly prevalent. The associated data could be reused for clinical and research purposes. OBJECTIVE The aim was to compare participants who use connected smart scale technologies with the general population and explore how use of smart scale technology affects, or is affected by, weight change. METHODS This was a retrospec...

We consider problems associated with the construction of summary indices for a social unit (e.g., cities, states, nations). These problems are motivated by the question of how to construct a social well-being or Quality-of-Life (QOL) index that summarizes many social indicators, and that a majority of individuals can agree with. We specify a model for measuring the extent to which individuals w...

This paper addresses the task of choosing prior weights for models that are to be used for weighted model averaging. Models that are very similar to each other should usually be given smaller weights than models that are quite distinct. Otherwise, the importance of a model in the weighted average could be increased by augmenting the set of models with duplicates of the model or virtual duplicat...

Topology and weights are closely related in weighted complex networks and this is reflected in their modular structure. We present a simple network model where the weights are generated dynamically and they shape the developing topology. By tuning a model parameter governing the importance of weights, the resulting networks undergo a gradual structural transition from a module-free topology to ...

In this study, we propose a three-stage weighted sum method for identifying the group ranks of alternatives. In the first stage, a rank matrix, similar to the cross-efficiency matrix, is obtained by computing the individual rank position of each alternative based on importance weights. In the second stage, a secondary goal is defined to limit the vector of weights since the vector of weights ob...

Importance sampling-based algorithms are a popular alternative when Bayesian network models are too large or too complex for exact algorithms. However, importance sampling is sensitive to the quality of the importance function. A bad importance function often leads to much oscillation in the sample weights, and, hence, poor estimation of the posterior probability distribution. To address this p...