Sharif Digital Repository

Using the potential of off-grid photovoltaic systems is a feasible way to supply electrical energy to locations which are far from the national electricity grid. In the design process of these systems, it is important to choose an appropriate capacity of these panels, since it should be able to steadily supply energy in all-weather conditions, especially cloudy days. In the conventional algorithm to design these panels and determine the capacity of these photovoltaic arrays, the number of cloudy days is not considered. Thus, in this papers, a new method is introduced in order to find out the appropriate capacity of off-grid photovoltaic arrays in the planning process of these systems. © 2019... 

This study provides a stochastic dynamic programming model with a Markov chain that explicitly focuses on the customer as well as a new model for valuing the customers in the banking industry. The proposed framework calculates individual customer’s lifetime value dynamically. The study follows a stochastic dynamic programming model that is based on the Markov chain. The deduced findings are illustrated with supplementary context from an outstanding case study. The findings underline the importance of the stochastic model for calculating customer lifetime value based on customer behavior. The presented framework provides a beneficial way for future research and valuable insight for allocating... 

Twitter as one of the most important microblogging online social networks has attracted more than 200 million users in recent years. Although there have been several attempts on characterizing the Twitter by using incomplete sampled data, they have not been very successful to estimate the characteristics of the whole network. In this paper, we characterize Twitter by sampling from its social graph and user behaviors through a random walk based sampling technique called Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS). To the best of our knowledge, for the first time RDS method and its estimator are used in order to obtain uniform unbiased estimation of several key structural and behavioral properties of... 

A double burden of malnutrition occurs when individuals, household members or communities experience both undernutrition and overweight. Here, we show geospatial estimates of overweight and wasting prevalence among children under 5 years of age in 105 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) from 2000 to 2017 and aggregate these to policy-relevant administrative units. Wasting decreased overall across LMICs between 2000 and 2017, from 8.4% (62.3 (55.1–70.8) million) to 6.4% (58.3 (47.6–70.7) million), but is predicted to remain above the World Health Organization’s Global Nutrition Target of <5% in over half of LMICs by 2025. Prevalence of overweight increased from 5.2% (30 (22.8–38.5)... 

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper. © 2020, The Author(s)  

Anemia is a globally widespread condition in women and is associated with reduced economic productivity and increased mortality worldwide. Here we map annual 2000–2018 geospatial estimates of anemia prevalence in women of reproductive age (15–49 years) across 82 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), stratify anemia by severity and aggregate results to policy-relevant administrative and national levels. Additionally, we provide subnational disparity analyses to provide a comprehensive overview of anemia prevalence inequalities within these countries and predict progress toward the World Health Organization’s Global Nutrition Target (WHO GNT) to reduce anemia by half by 2030. Our results...