1,720,974 research outputs found

    Multi-state models for hospitalizations of heart failure patients in Trieste

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    In Italy, heart failure (HF) is the most common clinical diagnosis among people over 65 and about 80,000 new cases per year are recorded [1]. This is a chronic condition whose incidence is strictly connected with age. A very flexible tool for modelling the chronic nature of this disease is multi-state model. Multi-state models are based on continuous time stochastic process, that can have Markov or semi-Markov property. In this presentation we show a multi-state model in which the states are the admission from and discharge to the first five hospitalizations, and death, an absorbing state. This representation aims at describing the main characteristics of heart failure patients’ hospitalization progression considering various covariates recorded

    Robust Methods for Detecting Spontaneous Activations in fMRI Data

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    Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a technique for mea- suring brain activity. The outcomes of fMRI measurements are complex data that can be interpreted as multivariate time series, recorded at different brain locations, usu- ally across subjects. The literature has been mainly concerned with task-based fMRI analysis, which focuses on the response to controlled exogenous stimuli. Neverthe- less, resting state fMRI (RfMRI) analysis, dealing with spontaneous brain activity, is considered the key to understand the neuronal organisation of the brain. The aim of this paper is to identify spontaneous neural activations and to estimate the brain response function in RfMRI data, called Hemodynamic Response Function (HRF). To this purpose, we apply an existing method based on a normality assumption for the data generating process and we consider a novel, more general method, based on robust filtering. Finally, we compare the neural activations and HRF estimates for two specific patients

    Feature selection for imbalanced data with deep sparse autoencoders ensemble

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    Class imbalance is a common issue in many domain applications of learning algorithms. Oftentimes, in the same domains it is much more relevant to correctly classify and profile minority class observations. This need can be addressed by feature selection (FS), that offers several further advantages, such as decreasing computational costs, aiding inference and interpretability. However, traditional FS techniques may become suboptimal in the presence of strongly imbalanced data. To achieve FS advantages in this setting, we propose a filtering FS algorithm ranking feature importance on the basis of the reconstruction error of a deep sparse autoencoders ensemble (DSAEE). We use each DSAE trained only on majority class to reconstruct both classes. From the analysis of the aggregated reconstruction error, we determine the features where the minority class presents a different distribution of values w.r.t. the overrepresented one, thus identifying the most relevant features to discriminate between the two. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm in several experiments, both simulated and on high-dimensional datasets of varying sample size, showcasing its capability to select relevant and generalizable features to profile and classify minority class, outperforming other benchmark FS methods. We also briefly present a real application in radiogenomics, where the methodology was applied successfully

    Non-parametric frailty Cox models for hierarchical time-to-event data.

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    We propose a novel model for hierarchical time-to-event data, for example, healthcare data in which patients are grouped by their healthcare provider. The most common model for this kind of data is the Cox proportional hazard model, with frailties that are common to patients in the same group and given a parametric distribution. We relax the parametric frailty assumption in this class of models by using a non-parametric discrete distribution. This improves the flexibility of the model by allowing very general frailty distributions and enables the data to be clustered into groups of healthcare providers with a similar frailty. A tailored Expectation-Maximization algorithm is proposed for estimating the model parameters, methods of model selection are compared, and the code is assessed in simulation studies. This model is particularly useful for administrative data in which there are a limited number of covariates available to explain the heterogeneity associated with the risk of the event. We apply the model to a clinical administrative database recording times to hospital readmission, and related covariates, for patients previously admitted once to hospital for heart failure, and we explore latent clustering structures among healthcare providers

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods
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