298 research outputs found

    Priority setting in the German healthcare system: results from a discrete choice experiment

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    Worldwide, social healthcare systems must face the challenges of a growing scarcity of resources and of its inevitable distributional effects. Explicit criteria are needed to define the boundaries of public reimbursement decisions. As Germany stands at the beginning of such a discussion, more formalised priority setting procedures seem in order. Recent research identified multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) as a promising approach to inform and to guide decision-making in healthcare systems. In that regard, this paper aims to analyse the relative weight assigned to various criteria in setting priority interventions in Germany. A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was employed in 2015 to elicit equity and efficiency preferences of 263 decision makers, through six attributes. The experiment allowed us to rate different policy interventions based on their features in a composite league table (CLT). As number of potential beneficiaries, severity of disease, individual health benefits and cost-effectiveness are the most relevant criteria for German decision makers within the sample population, the results display an overall higher preference towards efficiency criteria. Specific high priority interventions are mental disorders and cardiovascular diseases

    A Web application to search a large repository of taxonomic relations from the Web

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    Taxonomic relations (also known as isa or hypernymy relations) represent one of the key building blocks of knowledge bases and foundational ontologies and provide a fundamental piece of information for many text understanding applications. Despite the availability of very large knowledge bases, however, some Natural Language Processing and Semantic Web applications (e.g., Ontology Learning) still require automatic isa relation harvesting techniques to cope with the coverage of domain-specific and long-tail terms. In this paper, we present a web application to directly query a very large repository of isa relations automatically extracted from the Common Crawl (the largest publicly available crawl of the Web). Our resource can be also downloaded for research purposes and accessed programmatically (we additionally release a Java application programming interface for this purpose)

    Commentary : A decomposition of the outlier detection problem into a set of supervised learning problems

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    This article discusses the material in relation to iForest (Liu et al. in ACM Trans Knowl Discov Data 6(1):3, 2012) reported in a recent Machine Learning Journal paper by Paulheim and Meusel (Mach Learn 100(2–3):509–531, 2015). It presents an empirical comparison result of iForest using the default parameter settings suggested by its creator (Liu et al. 2012) and iForest using the settings employed by Paulheim and Meusel (2015). This comparison has an impact on the conclusion made by Paulheim and Meusel (2015). © 2016, The Author(s)

    Investigation of the focus shift due to compensation process for low energy ion beam transport

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    In magnetic Low Energy Beam Transport (LEBT) sections space charge compensation helps to enhance the transportable beam current and to reduce emittance growth due to space charge forces. For pulsed beams the time neccesary to establish space charge compensation is of great interest for beam transport. Particularly with regard to beam injection into the first accelerator section (e.g. RFQ) investigation of effects on shift of the beam focus due to space charge compensation are very important. The achieved results helps to obviate a mismatch into the first RFQ. To investigate the space charge compensation due to residual gas ionization, time resolved measurements using pulsed ion beams were performed at the LEBT system at the IAP and at the CEA-Saclay injektion line. A residual gas ion energy analyser (RGIA) equiped with a channeltron was used to measure the potential destribution as a function of time to estimate the rise time of compensation. For time resolved measurements (delta t min=50ns) of the radial density profile of the ion beam a CCD-camera was applied. The measured data were used in a numerical simulation of selfconsistant eqilibrium states of the beam plasma [1] to determine plasma parameters such as the density, the temperature, the kinetic and potential energy of the compensation electrons as a function of time. Measurements were done using focused proton beams (10keV, 2mA at IAP and 92keV, 62mA at CEA-Saclay) to get a better understanding of the influence of the compensation process. An interpretation of the acquired data and the achieved results will be presented

    An Agricultural Harvest Knowledge Survey to Distinguish Types of Expertise

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    Gaining insight into the unique characteristics of participants during user research is a valuable tool for both recruitment and understanding differences within the target population. This work describes an agricultural harvest knowledge survey that was created for user research studies that observed experienced combine operators driving a combine simulator in virtual crop fields. Two variations of the survey were designed, utilized, and evaluated in two separate studies. Both studies found a difference between low and high knowledge operators' performance on the knowledge survey in addition to performance differences. Based on the success of this survey as a population segmentation tool, the authors recommend three criteria for the design of future knowledge surveys in other domains: 1) use real world scenarios, 2) ensure question are neither too difficult nor too easy, and 3) ask the minimum number of questions to identify operator knowledge successfully. Future research aims to create a tool that can discern between system experts (with deep understanding of the system) and practice experts (who primarily have the wisdom of experience).This is a manuscript of a proceeding published as Meusel, Chase, Chase Grimm, Stephen Gilbert, and Greg Luecke. "An Agricultural Harvest Knowledge Survey to Distinguish Types of Expertise." In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting 60, no. 1 (2016): 2048-2052. DOI: 10.1177/1541931213601465. Posted with permission.</p
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