Prognosis of Lung Cancer Mortality in West Germany: A Case Study in Bayesian Prediction. (REVISED, January 2000)

We apply a generalized Bayesian age-period-cohort (APC) model to a dataset on lung cancer mortality in West Germany, 1952-1996. Our goal is to predict future deaths rates until the year 2010, separately for males and females. Since age and period is not measured on the same grid, we propose a generalized APC-model where consecutive cohort parameters represent strongly overlapping birth cohorts. This approach results in a rather large number of parameters, where standard algorithms for statistical inference by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods turn out to be computationally intensive. We propose a more efficient implementation based on ideas of block sampling from the time series literature. We entertain two different formulations, penalizing either first or second differences of age, period and cohort parameters. To assess the predictive quality of both formulations, we first forecast the rates for the period 1987-1996 based on data until 1986. A comparison with the actual observed rates is made based on quantities related to the predictive deviance. Predictions of lung cancer mortality until 2010 both for males and females are finally reported

Abrupt carbon release at the onset of the Bølling/Allerød: Permafrost thawing with inter-hemispheric impact

Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) during the last deglaciation (∼18–10 kyr BP) switched around 14.6 kyr BP from a rather gradual rise to an abrupt jump, which is recorded in ice cores as an increase of 10 ppmv in less than two centuries. So far the source of that CO2 excursion could not be identified and the climatic implications are largely unknown. Here we use highly resolved U/Th dated atmospheric ∆14C from Tahiti corals as independent age control for CO2 changes. This provides a temporal framework to show that the northern high latitude warming into the Bølling/Allerød occurred quasi-synchronous to this CO2 rise within a few decades. Furthermore we show that an abrupt release (within two centuries) of long-term immobile nearly 14C-free carbon (∼125 PgC) from thawing permafrost might explain the observed anomalies in atmospheric CO2 and ∆14C, in line with CH4 and biomarker records from ice and sediment cores. In transient climate simulations we show that the abrupt carbon release in the northern high latitudes and associated CO2 changes bear the potential to modulate Antarctic temperature. These findings are in agreement with the observed onset of the Antarctic Cold Reversal about two centuries after the beginning of the Bølling/Allerød, as detected in independent annual layer-counted ice cores from both hemispheres. Based on the timing, magnitude, origin and the inter-hemispheric impact we speculate that this abrupt deglacial release of long-term stored carbon via thawing permafrost might have provided the final push out of the last ice age

Exploring Outliers in Crowdsourced Ranking for QoE

Outlier detection is a crucial part of robust evaluation for crowdsourceable assessment of Quality of Experience (QoE) and has attracted much attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose some simple and fast algorithms for outlier detection and robust QoE evaluation based on the nonconvex optimization principle. Several iterative procedures are designed with or without knowing the number of outliers in samples. Theoretical analysis is given to show that such procedures can reach statistically good estimates under mild conditions. Finally, experimental results with simulated and real-world crowdsourcing datasets show that the proposed algorithms could produce similar performance to Huber-LASSO approach in robust ranking, yet with nearly 8 or 90 times speed-up, without or with a prior knowledge on the sparsity size of outliers, respectively. Therefore the proposed methodology provides us a set of helpful tools for robust QoE evaluation with crowdsourcing data.Comment: accepted by ACM Multimedia 2017 (Oral presentation). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1407.763

Energy evolution in time-dependent harmonic oscillator

The theory of adiabatic invariants has a long history, and very important implications and applications in many different branches of physics, classically and quantally, but is rarely founded on rigorous results. Here we treat the general time-dependent one-dimensional harmonic oscillator, whose Newton equation $\ddot{q} + \omega^2(t) q=0$ cannot be solved in general. We follow the time-evolution of an initial ensemble of phase points with sharply defined energy $E_0$ at time $t=0$ and calculate rigorously the distribution of energy $E_1$ after time $t=T$, which is fully (all moments, including the variance $\mu^2$) determined by the first moment $\bar{E_1}$. For example, $\mu^2 = E_0^2 [(\bar{E_1}/E_0)^2 - (\omega (T)/\omega (0))^2]/2$, and all higher even moments are powers of $\mu^2$, whilst the odd ones vanish identically. This distribution function does not depend on any further details of the function $\omega (t)$ and is in this sense universal. In ideal adiabaticity $\bar{E_1} = \omega(T) E_0/\omega(0)$, and the variance $\mu^2$ is zero, whilst for finite $T$ we calculate $\bar{E_1}$, and $\mu^2$ for the general case using exact WKB-theory to all orders. We prove that if $\omega (t)$ is of class ${\cal C}^{m}$ (all derivatives up to and including the order $m$ are continuous) $\mu \propto T^{-(m+1)}$, whilst for class ${\cal C}^{\infty}$ it is known to be exponential $\mu \propto \exp (-\alpha T)$.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figure

On the available evidence for the temperature dependence of soil organic carbon

International audienceTwo recent papers by Knorr et al. (2005) and Fang et al. (2005) provide variations of model fitting conducted in the former study. Knorr et al. (2005) suggested that more recalcitrant fractions of soil organic carbon (SOC) could be more sensitive to temperature. Fang et al. (2005) argue that this is an implication of the choice of model used. Further, Reichstein et al. (2005) point out that the evidence for a stronger temperature sensitivity of recalcitrant soil carbon mainly rests on an analysis of data provided by Kätterer et al. (1998) and argue for a different selection criterion to exclude short-term incubations. Here, we explain why the model used by Knorr et al. (2005) is the simplest multi-pool model that can fit the available data and is at the same time fully consistent with the concept of "pools", as opposed to some of the model formulations proposed by Fang et al. (2005). It is also pointed out that the criterion proposed by Reichstein et al. (2005) uses posterior information to determine inclusion of experimental data, a practice that should be avoided. We conclude that the original analysis of Knorr et al. (2005) as well as the one added by Fang et al. (2005) indicate that there is a serious possibility that recalcitrant SOC reacts more to temperature changes than labile SOC

Critical behavior of the frustrated antiferromagnetic six-state clock model on a triangular lattice

We study the anti-ferromagnetic six-state clock model with nearest neighbor interactions on a triangular lattice with extensive Monte-Carlo simulations. We find clear indications of two phase transitions at two different temperatures: Below $T_I$ a chirality order sets in and by a thorough finite size scaling analysis of the specific heat and the chirality correlation length we show that this transition is in the Ising universality class (with a non-vanishing chirality order parameter below $T_I$). At $T_{KT}(<T_I)$ the spin-spin correlation length as well as the spin susceptibility diverges according to a Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) form and spin correlations decay algebraically below $T_{KT}$. We compare our results to recent x-ray diffraction experiments on the orientational ordering of CF$_3$Br monolayers physisorbed on graphite. We argue that the six-state clock model describes the universal feature of the phase transition in the experimental system and that the orientational ordering belongs to the KT universality class.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure

Few-photons model of the optical emission of semiconductor quantum dots

The Jaynes-Cummings model provides a well established theoretical framework for single electron two level systems in a radiation field. Similar exactly solvable models for semiconductor light emitters such as quantum dots dominated by many particle interactions are not known. We access these systems by a generalized cluster expansion, the photon-probability-cluster-expansion: a reliable approach for few photon dynamics in many body electron systems. As a first application, we discuss vacuum Rabi flopping and show that their amplitude determines the number of electrons in the quantum dot.Comment: Paper slightly shortened. Accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter