A look at today's US military will see them operating much beyond the scope of protecting and defending the United States. These operations now consist of, but are not limited to humanitarian aid, disaster relief, and conflict resolution. This broad spectrum of operational environments has...

Despite their success and widespread usage in industry and business, ES methods have received little attention from the statistical community. We investigate three types of statistical models that have been found to underpin ES methods. They are ARIMA models, state space models with multiple...

This dissertation deals with three problems in health care. In the first, we consider the incentives to change prices and capital levels at hospitals, using optimal control under the assumption that private payers charge higher prices if patients consume more hospital services. The main results...

Background: An important issue in prediction modeling of multivariate data is the measure of dependence structure. The use of Pearson's correlation as a dependence measure has several pitfalls and hence application of regression prediction models based on this correlation may not be an...

Using the "meme" conception (Dawkins 1976) of cultural transmission and computer simulations, an exploration is made of the relationship between agents, their beliefs about their environment, communication of those beliefs, and the global behaviours that emerge in a simple artificial society....

Very often in the history of mankind, social changes took place because a minority was successful in persuading the dominant majority of a new idea. Social psychology provides empirically well-founded theories of social influence that can explain the power of minorities at individual level. In...

There is growing advocacy for the adoption of computational methods as a substitute for, or complement to, traditional research methods, particularly for examining social phenomena derivative of organised complexity. This paper examines some of the reasons for this advocacy and the specific...