Assessing the impact of natural policy experiments on socioeconomic inequalities in health

Background: The scientific evidence-base for policies to tackle health inequalities is limited. Natural policy experiments (NPE) have drawn increasing attention as a means to evaluating the effects of policies on health. Several analytical methods can be used to evaluate the outcomes of NPEs in terms of average population health, but it is unclear whether they can also be used to assess the outcomes of NPEs in terms of health inequalities. The aim of this study therefore was to assess whether, and to demonstrate how, a number of commonly used analytical methods for the evaluation of NPEs can be applied to quantify the effect of policies on health inequalities. Methods: We identified seven quantitative analytical methods for the evaluation of NPEs: regression adjustment, propensity score matching, difference-in-differences analysis, fixed effects analysis, instrumental variable analysis, regression discontinuity and interrupted time-series. We assessed whether these methods can be used to quantify the effect of policies on the magnitude of health inequalities either by conducting a stratified analysis or by including an interaction term, and illustrated both approaches in a fictitious numerical example. Results: All seven methods can be used to quantify the equity impact of policies on absolute and relative inequalities in health by conducting an analysis stratified by socioeconomic position, and all but one (propensity score matching) can be used to quantify equity impacts by inclusion of an interaction term between socioeconomic position and policy exposure. Conclusion: Methods commonly used in economics and econometrics for the evaluation of NPEs can also be applied to assess the equity impact of policies, and our illustrations provide guidance on how to do this appropriately. The low external validity of results from instrumental variable analysis and regression discontinuity makes these methods less desirable for assessing policy effects on population-level health inequalities. Increased use of the methods in social epidemiology will help to build an evidence base to support policy making in the area of health inequalities

Trends in educational inequalities in obesity in 15 European countries between 1990 and 2010

Background: The prevalence of obesity increased dramatically in many European countries in the past decades. Whether the increase occurred to the same extent in all socioeconomic groups is less known. We systematically assessed and compared the trends in educational inequalities in obesity in 15 different European countries between 1990 and 2010. Methods: Nationally representative survey data from 15 European countries were harmonized and used in a metaregression of trends in prevalence and educational inequalities in obesity between 1990 and 2010. Educational inequalities were estimated by means of absolute rate differences and relative rate ratios in men and women aged 30-64 years. Results: A statistically significant increase in the prevalence of obesity was found for all countries, except for Ireland (among men) and for France, Hungary, Italy and Poland (among women). Meta-regressions showed a statistically significant overall increase in absolute inequalities of 0.11% points [95% CI 0.03, 0.20] per year among men and 0.12% points [95% CI 0.04, 0.20] per year among women. Relative inequalities did not significantly change over time in most countries. A significant reduction of relative inequalities was found among Austrian and Italian women. Conclusion: The increase in the overall prevalence aligned with a widening of absolute but not of relative inequalities in obesity in many European countries over the past two decades. Our findings urge for a further understanding of the drivers of the increase in obesity in lower education groups particularly, and an equity perspective in population-based obesity prevention strategies.Peer reviewe

Relational Teacher Student Learning with Neural Label Embedding for Device Adaptation in Acoustic Scene Classification

In this paper, we propose a domain adaptation framework to address the device mismatch issue in acoustic scene classification leveraging upon neural label embedding (NLE) and relational teacher student learning (RTSL). Taking into account the structural relationships between acoustic scene classes, our proposed framework captures such relationships which are intrinsically device-independent. In the training stage, transferable knowledge is condensed in NLE from the source domain. Next in the adaptation stage, a novel RTSL strategy is adopted to learn adapted target models without using paired source-target data often required in conventional teacher student learning. The proposed framework is evaluated on the DCASE 2018 Task1b data set. Experimental results based on AlexNet-L deep classification models confirm the effectiveness of our proposed approach for mismatch situations. NLE-alone adaptation compares favourably with the conventional device adaptation and teacher student based adaptation techniques. NLE with RTSL further improves the classification accuracy.Comment: Accepted by Interspeech 202

Construction Heuristics for the Rectilinear Block Packing Problem

名古屋大学Nagoya University博士(情報科学)doctoral thesi

Signal-induced Brd4 release from chromatin is essential for its role transition from chromatin targeting to transcriptional regulation

Bromodomain-containing protein Brd4 is shown to persistently associate with chromosomes during mitosis for transmitting epigenetic memory across cell divisions. During interphase, Brd4 also plays a key role in regulating the transcription of signal-inducible genes by recruiting positive transcription elongation factor b (P-TEFb) to promoters. How the chromatin-bound Brd4 transits into a transcriptional regulation mode in response to stimulation, however, is largely unknown. Here, by analyzing the dynamics of Brd4 during ultraviolet or hexamethylene bisacetamide treatment, we show that the signal-induced release of chromatin-bound Brd4 is essential for its functional transition. In untreated cells, almost all Brd4 is observed in association with interphase chromatin. Upon treatment, Brd4 is released from chromatin, mostly due to signal-triggered deacetylation of nucleosomal histone H4 at acetylated-lysine 5/8 (H4K5ac/K8ac). Through selective association with the transcriptional active form of P-TEFb that has been liberated from the inactive multi-subunit complex in response to treatment, the released Brd4 mediates the recruitment of this active P-TEFb to promoter, which enhances transcription at the stage of elongation. Thus, through signal-induced release from chromatin and selective association with the active form of P-TEFb, the chromatin-bound Brd4 switches its role to mediate the recruitment of P-TEFb for regulating the transcriptional elongation of signal-inducible genes.National Natural Science Foundation of China[30930046, 30670408, 81070307]; Natural Science Foundation of Fujian[C0210005, 2010J01231]; Science Planning Program of Fujian Province[2009J1010, 2010J1008]; National Foundation for fostering talents of basic science[J1030626

Packing squares independently

Given a set of squares and a strip of bounded width and infinite height, we consider a square strip packaging problem, which we call the square independent packing problem (SIPP), to minimize the strip height so that all the squares are packed into independent cells separated by horizontal and vertical partitions. For the SIPP, we first investigate efficient solution representations and propose a compact representation that reduces the search space from $\Omega(n!)$ to $O(2^n)$, with $n$ the number of given squares, while guaranteeing that there exists a solution representation that corresponds to an optimal solution. Based on the solution representation, we show that the problem is NP-hard, and then we propose a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) to solve it. We also propose three mathematical programming formulations based on different solution representations and confirm the performance of these algorithms through computational experiments. Finally, we discuss several extensions that are relevant to practical applications.Comment: 15 page

House-price crash and macroeconomic crisis: a Hong Kong case study

The crash of house prices has become an important feature of macroeconomic crisis. We argue that the crash of house prices driven by contractionary monetary policy is not only a reaction, but also accelerates and amplifies the fluctuations of major macroeconomic variables. The impulse response of consumption to the house price shock estimated from Bayesian VAR is of same level as that of investment in Hong Kong, which is distinct from the United States. Therefore, in this paper we conduct a case study of Hong Kong in the 1997-1998 financial crisis and quantitatively analyze the mechanism by developing a general equilibrium model incorporating financial accelerator in both household and entrepreneur sectors. In addition, we introduce real estate producers in order to modify the unrealistic mechanism in existing literature. After estimating the parameters with a combination of calibration and Bayesian method, the simulated impulse responses imply that our model can explain the co-movement of house prices, consumption and investment much better than alternative ones. Moreover, the results of variance decomposition show that interest rate shock can explain most of the house price fluctuations, and a substantial fraction of fluctuations in major macroeconomic variables