We consider continuous state, continuous action batch reinforcement learning where the goal is to learn a good policy from a sufficiently rich trajectory generated by some policy. We study a variant of fitted Q-iteration, where the greedy action selection is replaced by searching for a policy in a restricted set of candidate policies by maximizing the average action values. We provide a rigorou...

It has been more than ninety years since the classical square-root EOQ formula was given by Harris (1913). Yet there is no continuous-review stochastic inventory model published in the literature with a general enough demand, whose optimal policy would reduce to the square-root formula in the absence of the stochastic components of the underlying demand. Why? In this paper, we surmise the reaso...

Systematic reviews have become an important methodology in the United Kingdom by which research informs health policy, and their use now extends beyond evidence-based medicine to evidence-based public health and, particularly, health inequalities policies. This article reviews the limitations of systematic reviews as stand-alone tools for this purpose and suggests a complementary approach to ma...

abstract introduction: critical thinking skills as thinking and judging self-regulation are purposeful and result in solving problems and making appropriate decisions. therefore, the importance of this subject and its role in the nursing profession and the clinical decision, this study was done to compare critical thinking skills of nursing students in continuous licentiate and bachelor- licent...

OBJECTIVE We updated and expanded a previous systematic literature review examining the impact of tobacco control interventions on socioeconomic inequalities in smoking. METHODS We searched the academic literature for reviews and primary research articles published between January 2006 and November 2010 that examined the socioeconomic impact of six tobacco control interventions in adults: tha...

BACKGROUND Increasing the availability of health workers in remote and rural areas through improved health workforce recruitment and retention is crucial to population health. However, information about the costs of such policy interventions often appears incomplete, fragmented or missing, despite its importance for the sound selection, planning, implementation and evaluation of these policies....

This paper reviews the historical development of public health policies in Brazil and the insertion of oral health in this context. Since 1988, Brazil established a Unified National Health System ("Sistema Unico de Saúde"--SUS), which was conceived to assure access to health actions and services, including oral health. However, a history of lack of access to health services and the health probl...

IN THE LAST FEW MONTHS, science policy has become a major focus of attention in our nation’s capital. Numerous major reports and studies examining current science policies have been published, and several other high profile studies are currently under way. Thoughtful reviews of the nation’s research policies were completed by economist Kenneth Brown and political scientist Donald Stokes (1). Th...