BACKGROUND With over 13 million cancer survivors in the United States today, second cancers are of rapidly growing importance. However, data on nontreatment risk factors for second cancers are sparse. We explored the feasibility of pooling data from cohort studies of cancer incidence to investigate second cancer etiology. METHODS We combined data from five prospective studies including more t...

When treating infertile couples by assisted reproductive technologies (ART), all aspects of their care in individual clinics should be evaluated frequently. Results should then be compared with other clinics offering similar treatment. Evaluation of possible adverse longterm outcomes can be achieved by pooling results from individual clinics in national, regional and international registers and...

Being at the same time a major staple food and a crop very sensitive to weather and price fluctuations, maize is in the core of food security challenges in Tanzania. In a country where agricultural production is mainly driven by smallholder farmers and where the exposure to weather shocks such as drought is likely to increase because of climate change, implementing an efficient and affordable i...

This paper considers a single-sourcing network design problem for a three-level supply chain. For the first time, a novel mathematical model is presented considering risk-pooling, the inventory existence at distribution centers (DCs) under demand uncertainty, the existence of several alternatives to transport the product between facilities, and routing of vehicles from distribution centers to c...

The need for quantifying the effect of resource pooling on performance of multi-processing systems arises frequently in the design of a variety of manufacturing, communication, and service systems. In this paper, we examine the effect of resource pooling and assess its impact on system performance. In particular, we provide performance bounds on the effectiveness of several pooling scenarios an...

Risk theory tells us if an insurer can effectively pool a large number of individuals to reduce the total risk, he then can provide the insurance by charging a premium close to the actuarially fair rate. There is, however, a common belief that the risk can be effectively pooled only when the random loss is independent, so that crop insurance markets cannot survive without government subsidy bec...

Over the years, supply chain reconfiguration decisions have been solely based on operational risk. Simplification strategies, such as horizontal mergers, and networking risk pooling, are conflicting paradigms that shown to improve financial performance of partners. The implication this disruption is not fully known, especially it concerns information security breach (ISB). Analysts rated ISB a ...

We seek to improve deep neural networks by generalizing the pooling operations that play a central role in current architectures. We pursue a careful exploration of approaches to allow pooling to learn and to adapt to complex and variable patterns. The two primary directions lie in (1) learning a pooling function via (two strategies of) combining of max and average pooling, and (2) learning a p...

Over 15% of the data sets catalogued in the Gene Expression Omnibus Database involve RNA samples that have been pooled before hybridization. Pooling affects data quality and inference, but the exact effects are not yet known because pooling has not been systematically studied in the context of microarray experiments. Here we report on the results of an experiment designed to evaluate the utilit...

Convolutional networks almost always incorporate some form of spatial pooling, and very often it is α × α max-pooling with α = 2. Max-pooling act on the hidden layers of the network, reducing their size by an integer multiplicative factor α. The amazing by product of discarding 75% of your data is that you build into the network a degree of invariance with respect to translations and elastic di...