March brings March Madness, the annual conclusion to the U.S. men's college basketball season with two single elimination basketball tournaments showcasing the best college teams in the country. Almost as mad is the plethora of office pools across the country where the object is to pick a priori...

A Hidden Markov Model with mean reverting characteristics is considered as a model for financial time series, particularly interest rates. The optimal filter for the state of the hidden Markov chain is obtained. A number of auxiliary filters are obtained that enable the parameters of the model...

A general framework for analysing trading rules is presented. We discuss different return concepts and different statistical processes for returns. We then concentrate on moving average trading rules and show, in the case of moving average models of length two, closed form expressions for the...

This paper considers single-item inventory systems with immediate delivery and no economies of scale. Bounds are provided on the value loss relative to optimal cost for restricting attention to the class of inventory stocking policies that behave myopically up to a specified stopping time. The...

In this paper we develop a semi-Markov formulation for modelling transitions of physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants between different settings and locations within a geographic area. The model predicts the supply of primary care providers over a planning horizon. We then...