In this article, several well-known data-driven causality methods are revisited and comparatively evaluated. These are the Granger-Geweke Causality (GGC), the Partial Directed Coherence (PDC), the Directed Transfer Function (DTF) and the Direct Directed Transfer Function (dDTF). The robustness of the four causality measures against two degradation factors is quantitatively evaluated. ...

Climate change impact assessments on agriculture are subject to large uncertainties, as demonstrated in the present review of recent studies for Africa. There are multiple reasons for differences in projections, including uncertainties in greenhouse gas emissions and patterns of climate change; assumptions on future management, aggregation, and spatial extent; and ...

Nonsynonymous mutations in the human prion protein (HuPrP) gene contribute to the conversion of HuPrP(C) to HuPrP(Sc) and amyloid formation which in turn leads to prion diseases such as familial Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker disease. In order to better understand and predict the role of HuPrP mutations, we developed the ...

Often the loci in forensic multiplexes are selected to avoid linked loci. However linked loci have occurred in some recent commercially available multiplexes. Previously formulae have been given for both joint and conditional match probabilities for some relationships that did not account for subpopulation effects [1,2]. In this paper we ...

Recent progress in sequencing technologies makes it possible to identify rare and unique variants that may be associated with complex traits. However, the results of such efforts depend crucially on the use of efficient statistical methods and study designs. Although family-based designs might enrich a data set for familial rare ...

This study examined the factor structure, reliability, and validity of the Antisocial Process Screening Device-Self-Report (APSD-SR), the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory (YPI), and the YPI-Short Version (YPI-SV) in detained female adolescents aged 12 to 17 years. The proposed three-factor structure of the YPI and YPI-SV was replicated, whereas the proposed ...

The present article develops a theoretical framework for the structure of personality traits related to intellectual achievements. We postulate a 2-dimensional model, differentiating between 2 processes (Seek and Conquer) and 3 operations (Think, Learn, and Create). The framework was operationalized by a newly developed measure, which was validated based on ...

Although accurate measures of heritability are required to understand the pharmacogenetic basis of drug treatment response, these are generally not available, as it is unfeasible to give medications to individuals for which treatment is not indicated. Using a polygenic linear mixed modeling approach, we estimated lower bounds on the heritability ...

PURPOSE: Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to test the hypothesis whether adipocytokines are associated with the risk factor cluster that characterizes the metabolic syndrome (MetS). METHODS: Data from 134 nondiabetic subjects were analyzed using CFA. Insulin sensitivity (SI) was quantified using intravenous glucose tolerance tests, visceral fat area by ...

Modelling contagious diseases needs to include a mechanistic knowledge about contacts between hosts and pathogens as specific as possible, e.g., by incorporating in the model information about social networks through which the disease spreads. The unknown part concerning the contact mechanism can be modelled using a stochastic approach. For that ...

BACKGROUND: In recent years response rates on telephone surveys have been declining. Rates for the behavioral risk factor surveillance system (BRFSS) have also declined, prompting the use of new methods of weighting and the inclusion of cell phone sampling frames. A number of scholars and researchers have conducted studies of ...

The World Health Organization (WHO) International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS) Guidance on Characterization and Application of Physiologically Based Pharmacokinetic Models in Risk Assessment (IPCS, 2010) describes key principles for risk assessors and model developers. In the WHO Guidance, a template for model documentation was developed and a case study ...

BACKGROUND: Determinants of practice are factors that might prevent or enable improvements. Several checklists, frameworks, taxonomies, and classifications of determinants of healthcare professional practice have been published. In this paper, we describe the development of a comprehensive, integrated checklist of determinants of practice (the TICD checklist). METHODS: We performed a ...

According to recent theories of addiction, the commonly used term impulsivity comprises two factors: rash impulsiveness and reward sensitivity. The present study addresses the relevance and generalizability of this two-factor model in a clinical sample of substance use disorder patients. This was examined by examining both internal and external validity. ...

Performance in strength and power sports is greatly affected by a variety of anthropometric factors. The goal of performance normalization is to factor out the effects of confounding factors and compute a canonical (normalized) performance measure from the observed absolute performance. Performance normalization is applied in the ranking of elite ...

To achieve an insightful clustering of multivariate data, we propose subspace K-means. Its central idea is to model the centroids and cluster residuals in reduced spaces, which allows for dealing with a wide range of cluster types and yields rich interpretations of the clusters. We review the existing related clustering ...

Individual and combined effects of aw and incorporation of selected concentrations of Mexican oregano essential oil on the time to growth (TTG) of Aspergillus niger intentionally inoculated into dried tomatoes were studied during storage at 25°C for 100days. For aw 0.96, 1000ppm of Mexican oregano essential oil inhibited A. niger ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The oral anticoagulant phenprocoumon, similar to other vitamin K antagonists, is characterized by pronounced interindividual variability in the doses needed to achieve the desired therapeutic effect. Previous studies assessed the effect of genetic and demographic covariates on empirical dose requirements of phenprocoumon to enable individualized dose prediction. ...

When phenotypic, but no genotypic data are available for relatives of participants in genetic association studies, previous research has shown that family-based imputed genotypes can boost the statistical power when included in such studies. Here, using simulations, we compared the performance of two statistical approaches suitable to model imputed genotype ...

BACKGROUND: The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is a tool to measure the risk for mental disorders in children. The aim of this study is to describe the diagnostic efficiency and internal structure of the SDQ in the sample of children studied in the Spanish National Health Survey 2006. METHODS: ...

We studied the latent factor structure of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) under the light of Multidimensional Item Response Theory models. Under a Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo setting, we chose the most adequate model, estimated its parameters and verified its fit to the data. An evaluation of the inventory ...

In this study, we introduce a Bayesian approach to address uncertainty of microbial recoveries from hollow-fiber ultrafilters (HFUF) and to determine any sources of uncertainty. Microbial recoveries were measured under twenty conditions, including two types of water, two types of ultrafilters, and five types of microorganisms. The probability distributions of ...

Standard linear regression is commonly used for genetic association studies of quantitative traits. This approach may not be appropriate if the trait, on its original or transformed scales, does not follow a normal distribution. A rank-based nonparametric approach that does not rely on any distributional assumptions can be an attractive ...

In the analysis of cancer studies with high-dimensional genomic measurements, integrative analysis provides an effective way of pooling information across multiple heterogeneous datasets. The genomic basis of multiple independent datasets, which can be characterized by the sets of genomic markers, can be described using the homogeneity model or heterogeneity model. ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Many attempts have been made to predict the warfarin maintenance dose in patients beginning warfarin therapy using a descriptive model based on multiple linear regression. Here we report the first attempt to develop a comprehensive mechanistic model integrating in vitro-in vivo extrapolation (IVIVE) with a pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic model ...

BACKGROUND: The development of reliable and culturally sensitive measures of attributes of the built and social environment is necessary for accurate analysis of environmental correlates of physical activity in low-income countries, that can inform international evidence-based policies and interventions in the worldwide prevention of physical inactivity epidemics. This study systematically ...

Using support vector machine (SVM) ranking, a complex multi-class prediction task has been investigated involving sets of compounds that were active against closely related targets and represented all possible combinations of single-, dual, and triple-target activities. Standard SVM models were not capable of differentiating compounds with overlapping yet distinct activity ...

BACKGROUND: In China, the reference population of genotyped Holstein cattle is relatively small with to date, 80 bulls and 2091 cows genotyped with the Illumina 54 K chip. Including genotyped Holstein cattle from other countries in the reference population could improve the accuracy of genomic prediction of the Chinese Holstein ...

OBJECTIVES: To examine the concordance between clinicians and men diagnosed with prostate cancer on a clinician-derived pathophysiological classification of the following self-reported urinary complications: storage (irritative), voiding (obstructive), and leakage/incontinence. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Fourteen urology experts classified 37 urinary function questionnaire items into 3 primary conceptual dimensions (e.g., storage [irritative], ...

As a tribute to E.H. Snoussi for his essential mathematical formalization of the logic approach to qualitatively described gene networks, this note presents some thoughts on the relationships between logical parameters and time delays in asynchronous logic.

Estimating haplotype frequencies is important in e.g. forensic genetics, where the frequencies are needed to calculate the likelihood ratio for the evidental weight of a DNA profile found at a crime scene. Estimation is naturally based on a population model, motivating the investigation of the Fisher-Wright model of evolution for ...

We developed a model for evaluating the environmental risk of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) to aquatic organisms. The model is based on fuzzy theory and uses information provided by international experts through a questionnaire. It has been tested in two case studies for a particular type of POPs: brominated flame ...

Indirect genetic effects (IGE) occur when the genotype of an individual affects the phenotypic trait value of another conspecific individual. IGEs can have profound effects on both the magnitude and the direction of response to selection. Models of inheritance and response to selection in traits subject to IGEs have been ...

PURPOSE: The accuracy of predicting conversion from early-stage age-related macular degeneration (AMD) to the advanced stages of choroidal neovascularization (CNV) or geographic atrophy (GA) was evaluated to determine whether inclusion of clinically relevant genetic markers improved accuracy beyond prediction using phenotypic risk factors alone. DESIGN: Cohort study. PARTICIPANTS: White, non-Hispanic ...

BACKGROUND: Tens of millions of patients worldwide suffer from avoidable disabling injuries and death every year. Measuring the safety climate in health care is an important step in improving patient safety. The most commonly used instrument to measure safety climate is the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ). The aim of the ...

Background This paper introduces a new constrained model and the corresponding algorithm, called unsupervised Bayesian linear unmixing (uBLU), to identify biological signatures from high dimensional assays like gene expression microarrays. The basis for uBLU is a Bayesian model for the data samples which are represented as an additive mixture of ...

BACKGROUND: The reliable and valid measurement of attitudes towards condom use are essential to assist efforts to design population specific interventions aimed at promoting positive attitude towards, and increased use of condoms. Although several studies, mostly in English speaking western world, have demonstrated the utility of condom attitude scales, very ...

The structured-population model has been widely used to study the spatial transmission of epidemics in human society. Many seminal works have demonstrated the impact of human mobility on the epidemic threshold, assuming that the contact pattern of individuals is mixing homogeneously. Inspired by the recent evidence of location-related factors in ...

In Sweden, a unique data set has been compiled with breast cancer incidence in all sisterships with at least two sisters born between 1932 and 2001, and the effect of family history has been analyzed by standard epidemiological methods. Such data are ideal to explore the validity of existing models ...

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to develop the Menopausal Representation Questionnaire (MRQ) using confirmatory factor analysis. METHODS: We examined the MRQ using a descriptive cross-sectional design. We recruited 228 women aged between 45 and 64 years (mean [SD], 55.6 [5.2] y). Most of them were non-Hispanic white (63.4%), ...

An estimated 80 million birds are killed by colliding with vehicles on U. S. roads each year [1], and millions more die annually in Europe [2] and elsewhere. Losses to vehicles are a serious problem for which various changes in roadway design and maintenance have been proposed [3]. Yet, given ...

BACKGROUND: Developing countries in South Asia, such as Bangladesh, bear a disproportionate burden of diarrhoeal diseases such as Cholera, Typhoid and Paratyphoid. These seem to be aggravated by a number of social and environmental factors such as lack of access to safe drinking water, overcrowdedness and poor hygiene brought about ...

Collection efficiency of gunshot residues (GSR) as a function of the type of fabric was evaluated. For this set of experiments, fabrics with differences in their sheddability were exposed to shootings. The samples were then stubbed to collect GSR following a standard procedure for SEM/EDX analysis. The results show a ...

PURPOSE: This study aims to evaluate the validity of current measurement models for the control, autonomy, self-realisation, and pleasure (CASP) measure of quality of life (QoL)-a second-order four-factor CASP-19 model and a second-order three-factor CASP-12 version-in a recent population survey. A previous large sample study did not report good fit ...

In this paper we present a versatile new software tool for the simulation and analysis of stochastic models of population phylodynamics and chemical kinetics. Models are specified via an expressive and human-readable XML format, and can be used as the basis for generating either single population histories or large ensembles ...

In relative terms, Spanish motorcyclists are more likely to be involved in crashes than other drivers and this tendency is constantly increasing. The objective of this study is to identify the factors that are related to being an offender in motorcycle accidents. A binary logit model is used to differentiate ...

Morphology of extant felids is regarded as highly conservative. Most previous studies have focussed on skull morphology, so a vacuum exists about morphofunctional variation in postcranium and its role in structuring ensembles of felids in different continents. The African felid ensemble is particularly rich in ecologically specialized felids. We studied ...

Abstract The search phase is a critical component of foraging behavior, affecting interspecific competition and community dynamics. Nevertheless, factors determining interspecific variation in search efficiency are still poorly understood. We studied differences in search efficiency between the lappet-faced vulture (Torgos tracheliotus; LFV) and the white-backed vulture (Gyps africanus; WBV) foraging ...

BACKGROUND: Darunavir is a potent protease inhibitor of HIV. To enhance its pharmacokinetic profile, darunavir must be co-administered with ritonavir. There is wide inter-patient variability in darunavir pharmacokinetics among HIV-infected individuals, however. Darunavir is a known substrate for influx transporters, such as the 1A2 and the 1B1 members of the ...

Credible ecological risk assessments often need to include analysis of population-level impacts. In the present study, a predictive model was developed to investigate population dynamics for white sucker (Catostomus commersoni) exposed to pulp mill effluent at a well-studied site in Jackfish Bay, Lake Superior. The model uniquely combines a Leslie ...