Educators need to understand how students are identified as at risk for reading problems. This study found that the classification and regression tree (CART) model—a type of predictive modeling that presents results in an easy-to-interpret “tree” format—predicted poor performance on the reading comprehension subtest of the Stanford Achievement Test as accurately as the logistic regression model...

This paper presents applications of five famous learning methods for Thai phrase break prediction. Phrase break prediction is particularly important for our Thai text-to-speech synthesizer (TTS), where input Thai text has no word and sentence boundary. The learning methods include a POS sequence model, CART, RIPPER, SLIPPER and neural network. Features proposed for the learning machines can be ...

In this study, we propose a nonlinear model-following control for underactuated systems. A model-following control design is based on the virtual constrains. The concept of virtual constraints control proposed by Shiriaev et. al. The model-following control is useful to realize the tracking system to a given reference model. In underactuated systems, a modelfollowing control for fullactuated sy...

The problems of database imbalance and factor interaction make modelling of segment duration in text-to-speech systems a challenging task. We therefore propose a probabilistic Bayesian belief network (BN) approach to tackle data sparsity and factor interaction problems. The belief network approach makes good estimations in cases of missed or incomplete data. Also, it captures factor interaction...

A better understanding of changes in HIV-1 population genetics with combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) is critical for designing eradication strategies. We therefore analyzed HIV-1 genetic variation and divergence in patients' plasma before cART, during suppression on cART, and after viral rebound. Single-genome sequences of plasma HIV-1 RNA were obtained from HIV-1 infected patients pri...

BACKGROUND Adolescents have been identified as a high-risk group for poor adherence to and defaulting from combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) care. However, data on outcomes for adolescents on cART in resource-limited settings remain scarce. METHODS We developed an observational study of patients who started cART at The AIDS Service Organization (TASO) in Uganda between 2004 and 2009. ...

Cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript (CART) has stimulatory effects on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis through direct effects on hypophysiotropic CRH neurons. Recently CART-containing axons have been demonstrated to densely innervate the hypophysiotropic CRH neurons. Based on the sources of the CART-immunoreactive (IR) innervation of the paraventricular nucleus, the putative or...

Consonant duration is influenced by a number of linguistic factors such as the consonant’s identity, within-word position, stress level of the previous and following vowels, phrasal position of the word containing the target consonant, its syllabic position, identity of the previous and following segments. In our work, consonant duration is predicted from a Bayesian belief network (BN) consisti...

Cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript (CART) is an anorexigenic peptide widely expressed in the central, peripheral, and enteric nervous systems. CART is also expressed in endocrine cells, including beta-cells during rat development and delta-cells of adult rats. We examined the effect of CART 55-102 on islet hormone secretion, using INS-1(832/13) cells and isolated rat islets. In addit...

Background The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Zambian Ministry of Health set out new guidelines on combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) in 2013 expanding the eligibility criteria for patients with HIV. Objectives The primary objective were to determine when cART was initiated in HIV-positive outpatients according to clinical and immunological criteria, and to identify what propo...