A stochastically curtailed two-arm randomised phase II trial design for binary outcomes

Randomised controlled trials are considered the gold standard in trial design. However, phase II oncology trials with a binary outcome are often single-arm. Although a number of reasons exist for choosing a single-arm trial, the primary reason is that single-arm designs require fewer participants than their randomised equivalents. Therefore, the development of novel methodology that makes randomised designs more efficient is of value to the trials community. This article introduces a randomised two-arm binary outcome trial design that includes stochastic curtailment (SC), allowing for the possibility of stopping a trial before the final conclusions are known with certainty. In addition to SC, the proposed design involves the use of a randomised block design, which allows investigators to control the number of interim analyses. This approach is compared with existing designs that also use early stopping, through the use of a loss function comprised of a weighted sum of design characteristics. Comparisons are also made using an example from a real trial. The comparisons show that for many possible loss functions, the proposed design is superior to existing designs. Further, the proposed design may be more practical, by allowing a flexible number of interim analyses. One existing design produces superior design realisations when the anticipated response rate is low. However, when using this design, the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis is sensitive to misspecification of the null response rate. Therefore, when considering randomised designs in phase II, we recommend the proposed approach be preferred over other sequential designs.     

A dimensionality reduction method of continuous dependent variables based supervised Laplacian eigenmaps

Dimensionality reduction is one of the important preprocessing steps in high-dimensional data analysis. In this paper we propose a supervised manifold learning method, it makes use of the information of continuous dependent variables to distinguish intrinsic neighbourhood and extrinsic neighbourhood of data samples, and construct two graphs according to these two kinds of neighbourhoods. Following the idea of Laplacian eigenmaps, we reveal that on the low-dimensional manifold the neighbourhood structure can be preserved or even improved. Our approach has two important characteristics: (i) it uses dependent variables to find an informative low-dimensional projection which is robust to noisy independent variables and (ii) the objective function simultaneously enlarges the distance between dissimilar samples and pushes similar samples close to each other according to the graph constructed with the help of continuous dependent variables. Our experiments demonstrate that the effectiveness of our method is over their traditional rivals.     

《论语》之“仁”

孔子的学术风格是坚定保留古已有之的华夏文化精神。华夏文化精神的价值指向是血族的“生生”,即指向血族的生存繁衍。“仁”深刻反映这价值指向。后世往往只从道德哲学角度理解仁,肯定大大缩小其意义。“仁”即“生生”,“生生”即“仁”,可从易学求得证明。《论语》中有关“仁”的重要命题都应从“仁即生生”的角度予以诠释     

A General Formula for Valuing Defaultable Securities

Previous research has shown that under a suitable no‐jump condition, the price of a defaultable security is equal to its risk‐neutral expected discounted cash flows if a modified discount rate is introduced to account for the possibility of default. Below, we generalize this result by demonstrating that one can always value defaultable claims using expected risk‐adjusted discounting provided that the expectation is taken under a slightly modified probability measure. This new probability measure puts zero probability on paths where default occurs prior to the maturity, and is thus only absolutely continuous with respect to the risk‐neutral probability measure. After establishing the general result and discussing its relation with the existing literature, we investigate several examples for which the no‐jump condition fails. Each example illustrates the power of our general formula by providing simple analytic solutions for the prices of defaultable securities.     

广东省土地资源持续利用问题初探

分析了广东省土地资源的特点及利用中存在的问题,并提出了土地资源持续利用的对策     

英语进行时的修辞功能

英语进行时除了大家所熟悉的语法概念外,还具有描绘情景、委婉话语、加抒感情、动化静态等独特的修辞功能。     

Embedding latent class regression and latent class distal outcome models into cluster-weighted latent class analysis: a detailed simulation experiment

Usually in latent class (LC) analysis, external predictors are taken to be cluster conditional probability predictors (LC models with external predictors), and/or score conditional probability predictors (LC regression models). In such cases, their distribution is not of interest. Class-specific distribution is of interest in the distal outcome model, when the distribution of the external variables is assumed to depend on LC membership. In this paper, we consider a more general formulation, that embeds both the LC regression and the distal outcome models, as is typically done in cluster-weighted modelling. This allows us to investigate (1) whether the distribution of the external variables differs across classes, (2) whether there are significant direct effects of the external variables on the indicators, by modelling jointly the relationship between the external and the latent variables. We show the advantages of the proposed modelling approach through a set of artificial examples, an extensive simulation study and an empirical application about psychological contracts among employees and employers in Belgium and the Netherlands.     

沪深300股指期货上市对现货市场连续波动和跳跃波动的影响

本文采用跳-扩散随机波动率模型研究沪深300股指期货上市对现货市场波动的影响。通过MCMC方法估计模型参数,对股指期货上市前后指数连续波动和跳跃特征进行比较分析,并与股指期货各指标作比较。研究发现,股指期货的上市确实起到了稳定现货市场的作用,上市短期内现货市场波动增大,随着时间增加现货市场波动逐渐降低,但是这一稳定效果主要体现在指数波动率的连续部分。股指期货上市后,指数连续波动向均值回归速度加快,并呈现出逐渐降低的趋势;“杠杆效应”在经历短暂的消失后逐渐显现;指数跳跃波动在总波动中所占比重较高,但随着交易时间增加,指数平均跳跃次数和跳跃波动所占比重逐渐降低。     

基于Pair-Copula贝叶斯网络模型的金融危机传播效应研究

为克服传统Copula函数建模的复杂性,采用Pair-Copula贝叶斯网络方法,将Copula函数与贝叶斯网络的优势相结合,有效降低了高维Copula函数参数估计的复杂程度,解决了连续型贝叶斯网络非正态下边际分布难以控制的问题,有利于捕捉网络结点间的非对称相依结构,从而构建了国际8个代表性股票市场在次贷危机爆发前、中、后各个时期的概率网络模型,对危机在主要国际市场上的传播效应问题及传播路径识别问题进行实证研究。研究结果表明:金融危机在国际金融市场上具有明显的区域性传播特征;香港市场在金融危机发生前后一直都是亚洲市场的连接枢纽,是风险防范的关键节点;危机发生后欧洲市场与亚洲市场间的紧密程度加强;金融危机减缓了全球一体化的进程,但经济全球化的趋势势不可挡。     

考虑徐变影响的双面组合连续箱梁应力分析

研究钢 混凝土双面组合连续箱梁的徐变问题。根据混凝土徐变后的双面组合连续箱梁的截面应力自相平衡,内力仍为零这一条件,通过平衡方程得到负弯矩区截面的曲率,进而得到截面的应力计算公式;通过算例分析双面组合连续箱梁的应力重分布情况。