• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.40 no.1 s.174
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• pp.39-50
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• 2007

This paper presents applications of the log-linear ROCOF(rate-of-occurrence-of-failure) and the Weibull ROCOF to model the failure rate of individual cast iron pipes in a water distribution system and provides a method of estimating the economically optimal replacement time of the pipes using the 'modified time-scale'. The performance of the two ROCOFs is examined using the maximized log-likelihood estimates of the ROCOFs for the two types of failure data: 'failure-time data' and 'failure-number data'. The optimal replacement time equations for the two models are developed by applying the 'modified time-scale' to ensure the numerical convergence of the estimated values of the model parameters. The methodology is applied to the case study water distribution cast iron pipes and it is found that the log-linear ROCOF has better modeling capability than the Weibull ROCOF when the 'failure-time data' is used. Furthermore, the 'failure-time data' is determined to be more appropriate for both ROCOFs compared to the 'failure-number data' in terms of the ROCOF modeling performances for the water mains under study, implying that recording each failure time results in better modeling of the failure rate than recording failure numbers in some time intervals.

• Journal of Veterinary Clinics
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.77-81
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• 2007

Diagnostic performance of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for detecting Dirofilaria immitis in dogs was evaluated when no gold standard test was employed. An enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay test kit (SnapTM, IDEXX, USA) with unknown parameters was also employed. The sensitivity and specificity of the PCR from two-population model were estimated by using both maximum likelihood using expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm and Bayesian method, assuming conditional independence between the two tests. A total of 266 samples, 133 samples in each trial, were randomly retrieved from the heartworm database records during the year 2002-2004 in a university animal hospital. These data originated from the test results of military dogs which were brought for routine medical check-up or testing for heartworm infection. When combined 2 trials, sensitivity and specificity of the PCR was 96.4-96.7% and 97.6-98.8% in EM and 94.4-94.8% and 97.1-98% in Bayesian. There were no statistical differences between estimates. This finding indicates that the PCR assay could be useful screening tool for detecting heartworm antigen in dogs. This study was provided further evidences that Bayesian approach is an alternative approach to draw better inference about the performance of a new diagnostic test in case when either gold test is not available.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.35 no.11
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• pp.111-119
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• 2019

The high-speed railway system is mainly composed of tunnel, bridge, and viaduct to meet the straightness needed for keeping the high speed up to 400 km/s. Seismic fragility for the high-speed railway infrastructure can be assessed as two ways: one way is studying each element of infrastructure analytically or numerically, but it requires lots of research efforts due to wide range of railway system. On the other hand, empirical method can be used to access the fragility of an entire system efficiently, which requires case history data. In this study, we collect the 2004 M_W 6.6 Niigata earthquake case history data to develop empirical seismic fragility function for a railway system. Five types of intensity measures (IMs) and damage levels are assigned to all segments of target system for which the unit length is 200 m. From statistical analysis, probability of exceedance for a certain damage level (DL) is calculated as a function of IM. For those probability data points, log-normal CDF is fitted using MLE method, which forms fragility function for each damage level of exceedance. Evaluating fragility functions calculated, we observe that T=3.0 spectral acceleration (SA_T3.0) is superior to other IMs, which has lower standard deviation of log-normal CDF and low error of the fit. This indicates that long-period ground motion has more impacts on railway infrastructure system such as tunnel and bridge. It is observed that when SA_T3.0 = 0.1 g, P(DL>1) = 2%, and SA_T3.0 = 0.2 g, P(DL>1) = 23.9%.