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Monitoring And Modeling Of Global Changes: A Geomatics Perspective 2015

RRP $354.99

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The chapters in this book present state-of-the-art geomatics technologies applied in global environmental studies. This text provides the latest research findings and delivers complete references to related publications. This book will motivate the undergraduate and graduate students, researchers and practitioners to better understand the environmental changes with informed solutions.

Global Change studies are increasingly considered a vital source of information to understand the Earth Environment, especially in the framework of human-induced, climate change and land use transformation. Satellite Earth Observing systems and geomatics technologies provide a unique tool to monitor and model the changes, respectively. While the range of applications and innovative techniques are always increasing, this book provides a summary of key study cases where satellite data offers critical information to understand the usefulness of the geomatics technologies and global environmental issues. Geomatics technologies provide powerful tools to model and analyze the effects of those global environmental changes towards minimizing their adverse impacts on human health and the environment.

Dynamic Modeling, Predictive Control And Performance Monitoring

RRP $29.99

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A typical design procedure for model predictive control or control performance monitoring consists of:

1. identification of a parametric or nonparametric model;
2. derivation of the output predictor from the model;
3. design of the control law or calculation of performance indices according to the predictor.

Both design problems need an explicit model form and both require this three-step design procedure. Can this design procedure be simplified? Can an explicit model be avoided? With these questions in mind the work presented in this book forms a new design paradigm that eliminates the first and second step of the above design procedure. The subjects treated include:

closed-loop subspace identification;

predictive control design;

multivariate control performance assessment.

The approach presented in this book can be considered to be "data-driven" in the sense that no traditional parametric models are used; hence, the intermediate subspace matrices, which are obtained directly from the process data and otherwise identified as a first step in the subspace identification methods, are used directly for the designs. Without using an explicit model, the design procedure is greatly simplified and the modelling error caused by parameterization is eliminated.

Statistical Monitoring Of Clinical Trials

RRP $29.95

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The approach taken in this book is to studies monitored over time, what the Central Limit Theorem is to studies with only one analysis. Just as the Central Limit Theorem shows that test statistics involving very different types of clinical trial outcomes are asymptotically normal, this book shows that the joint distribution of the test statistics at different analysis times is asymptotically multivariate normal with the correlation structure of Brownian motion ( the B-value ) irrespective of the test statistic. The so-called B-value approach to monitoring allows us to use, for different types of trials, the same boundaries and the same simple formula for computing conditional power. Although Brownian motion may sound complicated, the authors make the approach easy by starting with a simple example and building on it, one piece at a time, ultimately showing that Brownian motion works for many different types of clinical trials.

The book will be very valuable to statisticians involved in clinical trials. The main body of the chapters is accessible to anyone with knowledge of a standard mathematical statistics text. More mathematically advanced readers will find rigorous developments in appendices at the end of chapters. Reading the book will develop insight into not only monitoring, but power, survival analysis, safety, and other statistical issues germane to clinical trials.

Michael Proschan, Gordon Lan, and Janet Wittes are elected Fellows of the American Statistical Association. All have spent formative years in the Biostatistics Research Branch of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI/NIH). While there, they were intimately involved in the design and statistical monitoring of large-scale randomized clinical trials, developing methodology to aid in their monitoring. For example, Lan developed, with DeMets, the now widely-used spending function approach to group sequential designs, whose properties were further investigated by Proschan. The B-value approach used in the book was introduced in a very influential paper by Lan and Wittes. The statistical theory behind conditional power was developed by Lan, along with Simon and Halperin, and was the cornerstone for the conditional error approach to adaptive clinical trials introduced by Proschan and Hunsberger. All three authors have expertise in adaptive methodology for clinical trials.

Michael Proschan is a Mathematical Statistician at the National Institutes of Health; Gordon Lan is Senior Director of Biometrics at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development, L.L.C.; Janet Wittes is President of Statistics Collaborative, a statistical consulting company she founded in 1990.

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