Mechatronic design is traditionally supported through domain-specific design activities throughout the product development process. The partitioning into domain-specific problems leads to a situation where product properties influence each other, hence giving rise to dependencies. These dependencies play a key role in prediction of properties and as a result, in the decision making process. The...

This paper hypothesizes that chunking plays important role in reducing dependency distance and dependency crossings. Computer simulations, when compared with natural languages, show that chunking reduces mean dependency distance (MDD) of a linear sequence of nodes (constrained by continuity or projectivity) to that of natural languages. More interestingly, chunking alone brings about less depen...

Cost-sensitive learning is an important issue in both data mining and machine learning, in that it deals with the problem of learning from decision systems relative to a variety of costs. In this paper, we introduce a hierarchy of cost-sensitive decision systems from a test cost perspective. Two major issues are addressed with regard to test cost dependency. The first is concerned with the comm...

To evaluate the performance of speaker recognition systems, a detection cost function defined as a weighted sum of the probabilities of type I and type II errors is employed. The speaker datasets may have data dependency due to multiple uses of the same subjects. Using the standard errors of the detection cost function computed by means of the two-layer nonparametric two-sample bootstrap method...

OBJECTIVES To estimate and compare the costs of informal and formal care provided to adults with long term neurological conditions and to identify characteristics associated with these costs. DESIGN Cross-sectional postal questionnaire survey. PARTICIPANTS Family carers of 282 adults with sudden onset, progressive and stable/intermittent conditions were recruited through UK-wide voluntary o...

OBJECTIVES To compare costs and outcome of occupational therapy-led assessment with social worker-led assessment of older people, in terms of their independence and quality of life. DESIGN Cost-effectiveness analysis alongside a randomised controlled trial. The analysis took viewpoints of health services and patients. The primary outcome measure for cost-effectiveness was dependency using the...

The issue of a multicast search for a group of users is discussed in this study. Given the condition that the search is over only after all the users in the group are found, this problem is called the Conference Call Search (CCS) problem. The goal is to design efficient CCS strategies under delay and bandwidth constraints. While the problem of tracking a single user has been addressed by many s...