Recent Mortality Trend Reversal in Russia: Are Regions Following the Same Tempo?

After several decades of negative trends and short-term fluctuations, life expectancy has been increasing in Russia since 2004. Between 2003 and 2014, the length of life rose by 6.6 years among males and by 4.6 years among females. While positive trends in life expectancy are observed in all regions of Russia, these trends are unfolding differently in different regions. First, regions entered the phase of life expectancy growth at different points in time. Second, the age- and cause-specific components of the gains in life expectancy and the number of years added vary noticeably. In this paper, we apply decomposition techniques—specifically, the stepwise replacement algorithm—to examine the age- and cause-specific components of the changes in inter-regional disparities during the current period of health improvement. The absolute inter-regional disparities in length of life, measured by the population-weighted standard deviation, decreased slightly between 2003 and 2014, from 3.3 to 3.2 years for males, and from 2.0 to 1.8 years for females. The decomposition of these small changes by ages and causes of death shows that these shifts were the result of diverse effects of mortality convergence at young and middle ages, and of mortality divergence at older ages. With respect to causes of death, the convergence is mainly attributable to external causes, while the inter-regional divergence of trends is largely determined by cardiovascular diseases. The two major cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, are currently pioneering mortality improvements in Russia and are making the largest contributions to the inter-regional divergence.     

An intuitive risk factors search algorithm: usage of the Bayesian network technique in personalized medicine

The article focuses on the application of the Bayesian networks (BN) technique to problems of personalized medicine. The simple (intuitive) algorithm of BN optimization with respect to the number of nodes using naive network topology is developed. This algorithm allows to increase the BN prediction quality and to identify the most important variables of the network. The parallel program implementing the algorithm has demonstrated good scalability with an increase in the computational cores number, and it can be applied to the large patients database containing thousands of variables. This program is applied for the prediction for the unfavorable outcome of coronary artery disease (CAD) for patients who survived the acute coronary syndrome (ACS). As a result, the quality of the predictions of the investigated networks was significantly improved and the most important risk factors were detected. The significance of the tumor necrosis factor-alpha gene polymorphism for the prediction of the unfavorable outcome of CAD for patients survived after ACS was revealed for the first time.     

Detecting anomalies in fibre systems using 3-dimensional image data

Statistics and Computing - We consider the problem of detecting anomalies in the directional distribution of fibre materials observed in 3D images. We divide the image into a set of scanning...     

Losses of Expected Lifetime in the United States and Other Developed Countries: Methods and Empirical Analyses

Patterns of diversity in age at death are examined using e ^†, a dispersion measure that equals the average expected lifetime lost at death. We apply two methods for decomposing differences in e ^†. The first method estimates the contributions of average levels of mortality and mortality age structures. The second (and newly developed) method returns components produced by differences between age- and cause-specific mortality rates. The United States is close to England and Wales in mean life expectancy but has higher life expectancy losses and lacks mortality compression. The difference is determined by mortality age structures, whereas the role of mortality levels is minor. This is related to excess mortality at ages under 65 from various causes in the United States. Regression on 17 country-series suggests that e ^† correlates with income inequality across countries but not across time. This result can be attributed to dissimilarity between the age- and cause-of-death structures of temporal mortality reduction and intercountry mortality variation. It also suggests that factors affecting overall mortality decrease differ from those responsible for excess lifetime losses in the United States compared with other countries. The latter can be related to weaknesses of health system and other factors resulting in premature death from heart diseases, amenable causes, accidents and violence.     

The Recent Mortality Decline in Russia: Beginning of the Cardiovascular Revolution?

The health situation in Russia has often been characterized as a long‐running crisis. From the 1960s until the beginning of the 2000s, the declining life expectancy trend was substantially interrupted only twice: once in the mid‐1980s as a result of Gorbachev's anti‐alcohol campaign, and again at the end of the 1990s as a result of the “rebound” effect following the dramatic rise in mortality associated with the acute socioeconomic crisis. In both cases, the progress made proved to be short‐lived. A third mortality decline in Russia began in 2003 and is still ongoing. We investigate the components and driving forces of this new development, in particular the role played by cardiovascular diseases. Using cause‐specific mortality data, we identify the main features of the recent improvements and compare these features with those observed in selected European countries, specifically France, Poland, and Estonia. Our aim is to gauge whether the features of the improvements in these countries are similar to those of the recent advancements made in Russia. Although the recent improvements in Russia have features in common with initial stages of prior mortality declines in other countries and may support optimism about the future, a return to mortality stagnation cannot be ruled out.     

THE UNEQUAL ENFORCEMENT OF LIBERALIZATION: EVIDENCE FROM RUSSIA'S REFORM OF BUSINESS REGULATION

We document the unequal enforcement of liberalization reform of business regulation across Russian regions with different governance institutions, which leads to unequal effects of liberalization. National liberalization laws were enforced more effectively in subnational regions with more transparent government, a more informed population, a higher concentration of industry, and stronger fiscal autonomy. As a result, liberalization had a substantial positive effect on the performance of small firms and the growth of the official small business sector in regions with stronger governance institutions. In contrast, in regions with weaker governance institutions, we observe no effect of reform and, in some cases, even a negative effect.     

Monopolistic Competition: Beyond the Constant Elasticity of Substitution

We propose a model of monopolistic competition with additive preferences and variable marginal costs. Using the concept of “relative love for variety,” we provide a full characterization of the free‐entry equilibrium. When the relative love for variety increases with individual consumption, the market generates pro‐competitive effects. When it decreases, the market mimics anti‐competitive behavior. The constant elasticity of substitution is the only case in which all competitive effects are washed out. We also show that our results hold true when the economy involves several sectors, firms are heterogeneous, and preferences are given by the quadratic utility and the translog.     

Simulation of Infinitely Divisible Random Fields

Two methods to approximate infinitely divisible random fields are presented. The methods are based on approximating the kernel function in the spectral representation of such fields, leading to numerical integration of the respective integrals. Error bounds for the approximation error are derived and the approximations are used to simulate certain classes of infinitely divisible random fields.     

Partnership Context of First Births in Russia: The Enduring Significance of Marriage

European Journal of Population - While cohabitation and non-marital childbearing have been increasing in Russia since 1990, the share of marital first births that are conceived prior to marriage...     

Improvements to MCS algorithm for the maximum clique problem

In this paper we present improvements to one of the most recent and fastest branch-and-bound algorithm for the maximum clique problem—MCS algorithm by Tomita et al. (Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Algorithms and Computation, WALCOM’10, pp. 191–203, 2010). The suggested improvements include: incorporating of an efficient heuristic returning a high-quality initial solution, fast detection of clique vertices in a set of candidates, better initial colouring, and avoiding dynamic memory allocation. Our computational study shows some impressive results, mainly we have solved p_hat1000-3 benchmark instance which is intractable for MCS algorithm and got speedups of 7, 3000, and 13000 times for gen400_p0.9_55, gen400_p0.9_65, and gen400_p0.9_75 instances correspondingly.