The relative lack of epidemiological studies of natural populations is partly due to the difficulty of obtaining samples that are both large enough and representative of the population. Here, we present the result of an epidemiological study (December 1992-August 1995) of feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) in a free-roaming population of domestic cats (Felis catus), with a special emphasis on ...

This is a timely piece of work given the emphasis being placed on the patient in the process of health policy formulation and service design and commissioning. Duncan et al. therefore ask a very relevant and important question about the validation of patient and service user involvement and in particular the qualification of representative groups that purport to voice the views of people with a...

Agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis was used to group similar spectra from a large database of samples. Based on angles between reflectance vectors of members of a cluster, a reflectance vector was selected as representative of that cluster. Representative samples were grouped together and stored as new calibration targets. Simulated wide-band imaging with glass filters was performed us...

In this study, we address the regression problem on set-valued samples that appear in applications. To solve this problem, we propose a support vector regression approach for set-valued samples that generalizes the classical e-support vector regression. First, an initial representative point (or an element) for every set-valued sample is selected, and a weighted distance between the initial rep...

Nearest neighbor classifiers that use all the training samples for classification require large memory and demand large online testing computation. To reduce the memory requirements and the computation cost, many algorithms have been developed that perform nearest neighbor classification using only a small number of representative samples obtained from the training set. We call the classificati...

We compare six definitions of the concept of “representative user,” including interpretations based in statistics, grounded theory, political theory and design practice. This participatory poster invites conference participants to contribute their own interpretations.

BACKGROUND A national multimedia campaign was launched in January 2010, to increase the proportion of young people tested for chlamydia. This study aimed to evaluate the impact of the campaign on the coverage and positivity within the National Chlamydia Screening Programme (NSCP) in England. METHOD An interrupted time series of anonymised NCSP testing reports for England for a 27 month period...