The option to obtain a General Education Development (GED) certificate changes the incentives facing high school students. This paper evaluates the effect of three different GED policy innovations on high school graduation rates. A six point decrease in the GED pass rate due to an increase in passing standards produced a 1.3 point decline in overall dropout rates. The introduction of a GED cert...

Crowdsourcing environments have shown promise in solving diverse tasks in limited cost and time. This type of business model involves both the expert and nonexpert workers. Interestingly, the success of such models depends on the volume of the total number of workers. But, the survival of the fittest controls the stability of these workers. Here, we show that the crowd workers who fail to win j...

We analyze dropout in deep networks with rectified linear units and the quadratic loss. Our results expose surprising differences between the behavior of dropout and more traditional regularizers like weight decay. For example, on some simple data sets dropout training produces negative weights even though the output is the sum of the inputs. This provides a counterpoint to the suggestion that ...

Recurrent Neural Networks are very powerful computational tools that are capable of learning many tasks across different domains. However, it is prone to overfitting and can be very difficult to regularize. Inspired by Recurrent Dropout [1] and Skip-connections [2], we describe a new and simple regularization scheme: Stochastic Dropout. It resembles the structure of recurrent dropout, but offer...

Deep Neural Networks often require good regularizers to generalize well. Dropout is one such regularizer that is widely used among Deep Learning practitioners. Recent work has shown that Dropout can also be viewed as performing Approximate Bayesian Inference over the network parameters. In this work, we generalize this notion and introduce a rich family of regularizers which we call Generalized...

Dropout of sport is an issue in sport and public health domains. The aim of this study was to identify the potential dropout reasons of school athletes and to examine if their perception of dropout was affected by the previous dropout experience. There were 50 subjects who were divided into two groups based on their previous dropout experience (Dropout Group=22, No Dropout Group=28). They fille...

Diet attrition and failure of long term treatment are very frequent in obese patients. This study aimed to identify pre-treatment variables determining dropout and to customise the characteristics of those most likely to abandon the program before treatment, thus making it possible to modify the therapy to increase compliance. A total of 146 outpatients were consecutively enrolled; 73 patients ...

BACKGROUND This study focused on the predictors of therapy dropout in a naturalistic sample of patients with borderline pathology receiving dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) in an inpatient setting. We assumed that the change of the therapist between DBT-briefing and start of DBT-treatment as well as comorbid posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and childhood trauma history were associated wit...

Dropout is a simple but effective technique for learning in neural networks and other settings. A sound theoretical understanding of dropout is needed to determine when dropout should be applied and how to use it most effectively. In this paper we continue the exploration of dropout as a regularizer pioneered by Wager et al. We focus on linear classification where a convex proxy to the misclass...

OBJECTIVE Disagreement exists over whether permissive minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) laws affected underage adolescents (e.g., those age 17 years with the MLDA of 18). We used MLDA changes during the 1970s and 1980s as a natural experiment to investigate how underage exposure to permissive MLDA affected high school dropout. METHOD MLDA exposure was added to two data sets: (a) the 5% public...