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The Syndromic versus Laboratory Diagnosis of Sexually Transmitted Infections in Resource-Limited Settings
Full text linkSexually transmitted infections (STIs) are highly prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, where there is a severe HIV epidemic. Thus, accurate recognition and diagnosis of STIs are essential for successful HIV prevention programs in the region. Due to lack of trained personnel and adequate laboratory infrastructure in the region, information regarding the profile of STIs relies essentially on self-reported or physician-diagnosed symptoms. The main objective of the study was to assess the effectiveness of the syndromic diagnosis of STIs, which is often used as a proxy for laboratory diagnosis of STIs in sub-Saharan Africa and other resource-limited settings. The study builds on previously collected data from a community-based survey in Northern Tanzania. We found no significant agreements between patient-reported STIs symptoms and laboratory-confirmed STIs tests. The reported STIs symptoms had high specificity (range = 85–99%) and poor sensitivity (range = 2–17%). Knowledge gained from our study will have significant public health implications, and can help improve the syndromic diagnosis of STIs.Version of Recor
Estimation of two ordered bivariate mean residual life functions
No full textSituations occur frequently in which the mean residual life (mrl) functions of two populations must be ordered. For example, if a mechanical device is improved, the mrl function for the improved device should not be less than that of the original device. Also, mrl functions for medical patients should often be ordered depending on the status of concomitant variables. This paper proposes nonparametric estimators of the bivariate mrl function under a mrl ordering. The estimators are shown to be asymptotically unbiased, strongly uniformly consistent and weakly convergent to a bivariate Gaussian process. The estimators are shown to be the projections, in a sense to be made precise, of the empirical mrl function onto an appropriate convex set of mrl functions. In the one-sample problem, the new estimators dominate the empirical mrl function in terms of risk with respect to a wide class of loss functions.Survival function Mean residual life function Mean residual life ordering Asymptotic properties Admissibility Loss function
Nonparametric estimation of bivariate mean residual life function
No full textIn survival analysis the additional lifetime that an object survives past a time t is called the residual life function of the object. Mathematically speaking if the lifetime of the object is described by a random variable T then the random variable R(t) = [T - t| T > t] is called the residual life random variable. The quantity e(t) = E( R(t)) = E[T - t|T > t] is called the mean residual lifetime (mrl) function or the life expectancy at age t.
There are numerous situations where the bivariate mrl function is important. Times to death or times to initial contraction of a disease may be of interest for litter mate pairs of rats or for twin studies in humans. The time to a deterioration level or the time to reaction of a treatment may be of interest in pairs of lungs, kidneys, breasts, eyes or ears of humans. In reliability, the distribution of the lifelengths of a particular pair of components in a system may be of interest. Because of the dependence among the event times, we can not get reliable results by using the univariate mrl function on each event times in order to study the aging process. The bivariate mrl function is useful in analyzing the joint distribution of two event times where these times are dependent.
In recent years, though considerable attention has been paid to the univariate mrl function, relatively little research has been devoted to the analysis of the bivariate mrl function. The specific contribution of this dissertation consists in proposing, and examining the properties of, nonparametric estimators of the bivariate mean residual life function when a certain order among such functions exists. That is, we consider the problem of nonparametric estimation of a bivariate mrl function when it is bounded from above by another known or unknown mrl function. The estimators under such an order constraint are shown to perform better than the empirical mrl function in terms of mean squared error. Moreover, they are shown to be projections, onto an appropriate space, of the empirical mean residual life function. Under suitable technical conditions, the asymptotic theory of these estimators is derived. Finally, the procedures are applied to a data set on bivariate survival. More specifically, we have used the Diabetic Retinopathy Study (DRS) data to illustrate our estimators. In this data set, the survival times of both left and right eyes are given for two groups of patients: juvenile and adult diabetics. Thus, it seems natural to assume that the mrl for the juvenile diabetics be longer than the mrl of the adult diabetics. Under this assumption, we calculated the estimators of the mrl function for each group. We have also calculated the empirical mrl functions of the two groups and compared them with the estimators of the mrl function obtained under the above assumption
Estimation of two ordered bivariate mean residual life functions
No full textAbstractSituations occur frequently in which the mean residual life (mrl) functions of two populations must be ordered. For example, if a mechanical device is improved, the mrl function for the improved device should not be less than that of the original device. Also, mrl functions for medical patients should often be ordered depending on the status of concomitant variables. This paper proposes nonparametric estimators of the bivariate mrl function under a mrl ordering. The estimators are shown to be asymptotically unbiased, strongly uniformly consistent and weakly convergent to a bivariate Gaussian process. The estimators are shown to be the projections, in a sense to be made precise, of the empirical mrl function onto an appropriate convex set of mrl functions. In the one-sample problem, the new estimators dominate the empirical mrl function in terms of risk with respect to a wide class of loss functions
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Full text link“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
Full text linkWe 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
Full text linkWe 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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