In this paper, we examine the possibility of quickly deciding whether or not an instance of a binary knapsack problem is difficult for branch and bound algorithms. We first observe that the distribution of the objective function values is smooth and unimodal. We define a measure of difficulty of...

We propose a penalized splines based method to predict the pathological stage of localized prostate cancer. A combination of prostate specific antigen, Gleason histological score, and clinical stage from a cohort study of 834 prostate cancer patients are used to build the penalized splines...