Cancer screening uptake: association with individual characteristics, geographic distribution, and time trends in Italy.

Background: In Italy, organized screening programmes invite the vast majority of the population for cervical and breast cancer, and about one half of the population for colorectal cancer. Programme activity and quality are closely monitored. Nevertheless, there is a vast spontaneous activity, both public and private, for which information on service and coverage is missing.

Resolving statistical uncertainty in correlation dimension estimation.

In this paper we propose a novel method for obtaining standard errors and confidence intervals for the correlation dimension estimated on an observed chaotic time series. This method is based on the U-Statistics theory and an ingenious combination of the moving block and parametric bootstrap procedures. We test the method on the basis of computer simulations for both clean and noisy series.