Related papers: Application of a Second-order Stochastic Optimizat…
In last decades optimization and control of complex systems that possessed various conflicted objectives simultaneously attracted an incremental interest of scientists. This is because of the vast applications of these systems in various…
Business optimization is becoming increasingly important because all business activities aim to maximize the profit and performance of products and services, under limited resources and appropriate constraints. Recent developments in…
Background: The proportional odds (PO) model is the most common analytic method for ordinal outcomes in randomised controlled trials. While parameter estimates obtained under departures from PO can be interpreted as an average odds ratio,…
In previous work, we developed the scaled SIS process, which models the dynamics of SIS epidemics over networks. With the scaled SIS process, we can consider networks that are finite-sized and of arbitrary topology (i.e., we are not…
Many machine learning and optimization algorithms can be cast as instances of stochastic approximation (SA). The convergence rate of these algorithms is known to be slow, with the optimal mean squared error (MSE) of order $O(n^{-1})$. In…
We introduce the Stochastic Correlated Obstacle Scene (SCOS) problem, a navigation setting with spatially correlated obstacles of uncertain blockage status, realistically constrained sensors that provide noisy readings and costly…
We consider the problem of preparing for a disaster season by determining where to open warehouses and how much relief item inventory to preposition in each. Then, after each disaster, prepositioned items are distributed to demand nodes…
With a rapid increase in volume and complexity of data sets, there is a need for methods that can extract useful information, for example the relationship between two data sets measured for the same persons. The Partial Least Squares (PLS)…
Two-stage stochastic optimization is a framework for modeling uncertainty, where we have a probability distribution over possible realizations of the data, called scenarios, and decisions are taken in two stages: we make first-stage…
Mass public quarantining, colloquially known as a lock-down, is a non-pharmaceutical intervention to check spread of disease. This paper presents ESOP (Epidemiologically and Socio-economically Optimal Policies), a novel application of…
The rapid worldwide spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) demonstrated the potential threat an infectious disease poses in a closely interconnected and interdependent world. Here we introduce a probabilistic model which…
Nonstationary non-Gaussian spatial data are common in many disciplines, including climate science, ecology, epidemiology, and social sciences. Examples include count data on disease incidence and binary satellite data on cloud mask…
The spatial scan statistic is widely used in epidemiology and medical studies as a tool to identify hotspots of diseases. The classical spatial scan statistic assumes the number of disease cases in different locations have independent…
Evolutionary computing, particularly genetic algorithm (GA), is a combinatorial optimization method inspired by natural selection and the transmission of genetic information, which is widely used to identify optimal solutions to complex…
Leveraging planning during learning and decision-making is central to the long-term development of intelligent agents. Recent works have successfully combined tree-based search methods and self-play learning mechanisms to this end. However,…
Stochastic compartmental models are prevalent tools for describing disease spread, but inference under these models is challenging for many types of surveillance data when the marginal likelihood function becomes intractable due to missing…
We develop a first-order (pseudo-)gradient approach for optimizing functions over the stationary distribution of discrete-time Markov chains (DTMC). We give insights into why solving this optimization problem is challenging and show how…
The estimation from available data of parameters governing epidemics is a major challenge. In addition to usual issues (data often incomplete and noisy), epidemics of the same nature may be observed in several places or over different…
We propose combined allocation, assignment, sequencing, and scheduling problems under uncertainty involving multiple operation rooms (ORs), anesthesiologists, and surgeries, as well as methodologies for solving such problems. Specifically,…
In this paper we enhance Generalized Self-Adapting Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (GAPSO), initially introduced at the Parallel Problem Solving from Nature 2018 conference, and to investigate its properties. The research on GAPSO is…