Pairwise comparisons are a well-established tool to compare weights of criteria and alternatives or, more in general, any entities. Their ultimate goal is to facilitate the search for a suitable ...weight vector. In this context, the concepts of inconsistency and inconsistency index have emerged. This manuscript has two goals. Firstly, it surveys the most relevant inconsistency indices by means of a self-contained exposition. Secondly, by analyzing recent trends and milestones it presents some conclusions and a discussion on possible directions of future research.
Pairwise comparisons between alternatives are a well-established tool to decompose decision problems into smaller and more easily tractable sub-problems. However, due to our limited rationality, the ...subjective preferences expressed by decision makers over pairs of alternatives can hardly ever be consistent. Therefore, several inconsistency indices have been proposed in the literature to quantify the extent of the deviation from complete consistency. Only recently, a set of properties has been proposed to define a family of functions representing inconsistency indices. The scope of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it expands the set of properties by adding and justifying a new one. Secondly, it continues the study of inconsistency indices to check whether or not they satisfy the above mentioned properties. Out of the four indices considered in this paper, in their present form, two fail to satisfy some properties. An adjusted version of one index is proposed so that it fulfills them.
•We consider the problem of anonymity of preferences in group decision making.•Optimization problems are devised to estimate other expert’s opinions.•Opinions which are expressed in an anonymous form ...can be indirectly disclosed.•Numerical results on random and empirical data are used to analyze this possibility.•Study the minimum number of experts to keep their opinion/preferences anonymous.
Pairwise comparisons between criteria/alternatives are a well-established methodology for group decision making. Both in the literature and in real-world applications, it is common practice to average the opinions of various experts expressed as pairwise comparisons to find a compromise solution. This paper dwells on the inverse problem: given a decision maker who knows his own preferences and the aggregate ones, we introduce and study some optimization problems to help him estimate, in the form of intervals, the preferences of the other decision makers. Since the possibility of estimating the other participants’ preferences violates the requirement of anonymity, this paper also reports the results of some numerical simulations examining the relation between the number of participants in the decision process and their anonymity. In addition to numerical simulations with randomly generated data, this manuscript reports the results of experiments on a dataset of preferences collected in a real-world survey.
Directional amplification, in which signals are selectively amplified depending on their propagation direction, has attracted much attention as key resource for applications, including quantum ...information processing. Recently, several, physically very different, directional amplifiers have been proposed and realized in the lab. In this work, we present a unifying framework based on topology to understand non-reciprocity and directional amplification in driven-dissipative cavity arrays. Specifically, we unveil a one-to-one correspondence between a non-zero topological invariant defined on the spectrum of the dynamic matrix and regimes of directional amplification, in which the end-to-end gain grows exponentially with the number of cavities. We compute analytically the scattering matrix, the gain and reverse gain, showing their explicit dependence on the value of the topological invariant. Parameter regimes achieving directional amplification can be elegantly obtained from a topological 'phase diagram', which provides a guiding principle for the design of both phase-preserving and phase-sensitive multimode directional amplifiers.
Pairwise comparisons are a well-known method for the representation of the subjective preferences of a decision maker. Evaluating their inconsistency has been a widely studied and discussed topic and ...several indices have been proposed in the literature to perform this task. As an acceptable level of consistency is closely related to the reliability of preferences, a suitable choice of an inconsistency index is a crucial phase in decision-making processes. The use of different methods for measuring consistency must be carefully evaluated, as it can affect the decision outcome in practical applications. In this paper, we present five axioms aimed at characterizing inconsistency indices. In addition, we prove that some of the indices proposed in the literature satisfy these axioms, whereas others do not, and therefore, in our view, they may fail to correctly evaluate inconsistency.
•We study the inconsistency of pairwise comparisons in group decision making.•We study the effect of the aggregation of pairwise comparisons on their consistency.•We derive general results and ...provide a complete study for well-known inconsistency indices.•We start a discussion on the meaning of inconsistency of aggregated preferences.
This paper proposes an analysis of the effects of consensus and preference aggregation on the consistency of pairwise comparisons. We define some boundary properties for the inconsistency of group preferences and investigate their relation with different inconsistency indices. Some results are presented on more general dependencies between properties of inconsistency indices and the satisfaction of boundary properties. In the end, given three boundary properties and nine indices among the most relevant ones, we will be able to present a complete analysis of what indices satisfy what properties and offer a reflection on the interpretation of the inconsistency of group preferences.
The potential predictive role of programmed death-ligand-1 (PD-L1) expression on tumor cells in the context of solid tumor treated with checkpoint inhibitors targeting the PD-1 pathway represents an ...issue for clinical research.
Overall response rate (ORR) was extracted from phase I-III trials investigating nivolumab, pembrolizumab and MPDL3280A for advanced melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and genitourinary cancer, and cumulated by adopting a fixed and random-effect model with 95% confidence interval (CI). Interaction test according to tumor PD-L1 was accomplished. A sensitivity analysis according to adopted drug, tumor type, PD-L1 cut-off and treatment line was performed.
Twenty trials (1,475 patients) were identified. A significant interaction (p<0.0001) according to tumor PD-L1 expression was found in the overall sample with an ORR of 34.1% (95% CI 27.6-41.3%) in the PD-L1 positive and 19.9% (95% CI 15.4-25.3%) in the PD-L1 negative population. ORR was significantly higher in PD-L1 positive in comparison to PD-L1 negative patients for nivolumab and pembrolizumab, with an absolute difference of 16.4% and 19.5%, respectively. A significant difference in activity of 22.8% and 8.7% according to PD-L1 was found for melanoma and NSCLC, respectively, with no significant difference for genitourinary cancer.
Overall, the three antibodies provide a significant differential effect in terms of activity according to PD-L1 expression on tumor cells. The predictive value of PD-L1 on tumor cells seems to be more robust for anti-PD-1 antibody (nivolumab and pembrolizumab), and in the context of advanced melanoma and NSCLC.
The new category of MiT family translocation renal cell carcinoma has been included into the World Health Organization (WHO) classification in 2016. The MiT family translocation renal cell carcinoma ...comprises Xp11 translocation renal cell carcinoma harboring
gene fusions and t(6;11) renal cell carcinoma harboring
gene fusion. At the beginning, they were recognized in childhood; nevertheless, it has been demonstrated that these neoplasms can occur in adults as well. In the nineties, among Xp11 renal cell carcinoma,
,
, and
(
) were the first genes recognized as partners in
rearrangement. Recently, many other genes have been identified, and a wide spectrum of morphologies has been described. For this reason, the diagnosis may be challenging based on the histology, and the differential diagnosis includes the most common renal cell neoplasms and pure epithelioid PEComa/epithelioid angiomyolipoma of the kidney. During the last decades, many efforts have been made to identify immunohistochemical markers to reach the right diagnosis. To date, staining for PAX8, cathepsin K, and melanogenesis markers are the most useful identifiers. However, the diagnosis requires the demonstration of the chromosomal rearrangement, and fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) is considered the gold standard. The outcome of Xp11 translocation renal cell carcinoma is highly variable, with some patients surviving decades with indolent disease and others dying rapidly of progressive disease. Despite most instances of t(6;11) renal cell carcinoma having an indolent clinical course, a few published cases demonstrate aggressive behavior. Recently, renal cell carcinomas with
amplification have been described in connection with t(6;11) renal cell carcinoma. Those tumors appear to be associated with a more aggressive clinical course. For the aggressive cases of MiT family translocation carcinoma, the optimal therapy remains to be determined; however, new target therapies seem to be promising, and the search for predictive markers is mandatory.
This paper presents a tri-objective Optimal Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) Placement (OPP) strategy that is focused on the minimization of i) the total number of PMU channels, ii) the maximum state ...estimation uncertainty based only on high-rate PMU data and iii) the sensitivity of state estimation to line parameter tolerances. The proposed formulation keeps into account system observability with and without contingencies due to single-line and PMU faults. Also, it includes the effect of possible zero-injection buses and a-priori constraints on both the number of PMU channels and the type of PMU measurements performed at each bus. Due to the nonlinear combinatorial nature of the proposed OPP problem, this is solved through a custom implementation of the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II). The analysis of the proposed OPP strategy is focused on distribution systems. The placement results obtained using four test systems of different size show that increasing the number of buses instrumented with PMUs and/or the number of PMU channels beyond given thresholds just leads to larger costs with negligible further reductions in both state estimation uncertainty and sensitivity to line parameters tolerances. Moreover, if PMUs with just two three-phase channels are used, we can avoid instrumenting between 30% and 40% of buses with a minor impact on state estimation performance even in the case of contingencies. This percentage can be slightly increased if multi-channel PMUs are used. However, this choice generally is not profitable.
Eosinophilic, solid and cystic (ESC) renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is characterized by a solid and cystic architecture with cells showing abundant eosinophilic cytoplasm with hobnail arrangement and a ...cytokeratin 7-negative/cytokeratin 20-positive immunophenotype. Recent studies have suggested that bi-allelic events affecting TSC genes might play an important role for such tumors. However, only indirect evidence of the clonal origin of TSC mutation has been gathered so far. Therefore, in this paper we aimed to perform multi-regional tumor sampling molecular analysis in four ESC RCC cases that had been completely embedded, three sporadic and one occurring in a patient with tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC). Histologically, the 4 cases showed cystic and solid architecture and cells with abundant eosinophilic cytoplasm with cytoplasmic stippling and round to oval nuclei. Immunohistochemistry showed at least focal expression of cytokeratin 20 in all tissue samples and negative cytokeratin 7, as well as diffuse positivity for S100A1 and at least focal expression of cathepsin K in three out of four cases. The sporadic cases showed the same somatic TSC1 mutations in all tissue samples analyzed, while the TSC-associated case showed the same TSC1 alteration in both normal tissue and all tumor samples analyzed, proving the germline nature of the alteration. In conclusion, our data demonstrate that clonal TSC loss is a key event in ESC RCC and support considering ESC RCC as an entity given its distinct morphologic, immunophenotypical and molecular characteristics.
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