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Radiotherapy is one of the major forms in cancer treatment. The patient is irradiated with high-energetic photons or charged particles with the primary goal of delivering sufficiently high doses to the tumor tissue while simultaneously sparing the surrounding healthy tissue. The inverse search for the treatment plan giving the desired dose distribution is done by means of numerical optimization [11, Chapters 3-5]. For this purpose, the aspects of dose quality in the tissue are modeled as criterion functions, whose mathematical properties also affect the type of the corresponding optimization problem. Clinical practice makes frequent use of criteria that incorporate volumetric and spatial information about the shape of the dose distribution. The resulting optimization problems are of global type by empirical knowledge and typically computed with generic global solver concepts, see for example [16]. The development of good global solvers to compute radiotherapy optimization problems is an important topic of research in this application, however, the structural properties of the underlying criterion functions are typically not taken into account in this context.
We present a parsimonious multi-asset Heston model. All single-asset submodels follow the well-known Heston dynamics and their parameters are typically calibrated on implied market volatilities. We focus on the calibration of the correlation structure between the single-asset marginals in the absence of sucient liquid cross-asset option price data. The presented model is parsimonious in the sense that d(d􀀀1)=2 asset-asset cross-correlations are required for a d-asset Heston model. In order to calibrate the model, we present two general setups corresponding to relevant practical situations: (1) when the empirical cross-asset correlations in the risk neutral world are given by the user and we need to calibrate the correlations between the driving Brownian motions or (2) when they have to be estimated from the historical time series. The theoretical background, including the ergodicity of the multidimensional CIR process, for the proposed estimators is also studied.
In the literature, there are at least two equivalent two-factor Gaussian models for the instantaneous short rate. These are the original two-factor Hull White model (see [3]) and the G2++ one by Brigo and Mercurio (see [1]). Both these models first specify a time homogeneous two-factor short rate dynamics and then by adding a deterministic shift function '(·) fit exactly the initial term structure of interest rates. However, the obtained results are rather clumsy and not intuitive which means that a special care has to be taken for their correct numerical implementation.
Territory design and districting may be viewed as the problem of grouping small geographic areas into larger geographic clusters called territories in such a way that the latter are acceptable according to relevant planning criteria. The availability of GIS on computers and the growing interest in Geo-Marketing leads to an increasing importance of this area. Despite the wide range of applications for territory design problems, when taking a closer look at the models proposed in the literature, a lot of similarities can be noticed. Indeed, the models are many times very similar and can often be, more or less directly, carried over to other applications. Therefore, our aim is to provide a generic application-independent model and present efficient solution techniques. We introduce a basic model that covers aspects common to most applications. Moreover, we present a method for solving the general model which is based on ideas from the field of computational geometry. Theoretical as well as computational results underlining the efficiency of the new approach will be given. Finally, we show how to extend the model and solution algorithm to make it applicable for a broader range of applications and how to integrate the presented techniques into a GIS.