BACKGROUND To identify incorrect beliefs and common knowledge about rheumatic diseases in the general population. METHODS Participants were selected during the follow-up of a representative cohort of adult population of Porto, Portugal; 1626 participants completed a questionnaire that included general knowledge items about rheumatic diseases.Discrete and continuous latent variable models were...

In this paper we propose a new approach, called a fuzzy class model for Poisson regression, in the analysis of heterogeneous count data. On the basis of fuzzy set concept and fuzzy classification maximum likelihood (FCML) procedures we create an FCML algorithm for fuzzy class Poisson regression models. Traditionally, the EM algorithm had been used for latent class regression models. Thus, the a...

Automated essay scoring with latent semantic analysis (LSA) has recently been subject to increasing interest. Although previous authors have achieved grade ranges similar to those awarded by humans, it is still not clear which and how parameters improve or decrease the effectiveness of LSA. This paper presents an analysis of the effects of these parameters, such as text preprocessing, weighting...

this study aims to examine how open innovation can be effective in changing organizational inertia to create business model innovation and improve firm performance. it also seeks to explore whether the existence of open innovation has a mediating effect and influence. this study constructs a theoretical model to explore the relationship between latent variables and uses a questionnaire to colle...

background: this study was conducted to investigate the influence of toxoplasma gondii infection on spermatic and hormonal parameters in a pilot sample of immunocompe­tent human male subjects. methods: this cross sectional, observational pilot study on 60 immunocompetent hu­man male subjects aged between 18 and 60 yr old was conducted between 2012 -2013. blind evaluation of serological markers ...

Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) has been popularly used in document analysis. However, as it is currently formulated, PLSA strictly requires the number of word latent classes to be equal to the number of document latent classes. In this paper, we propose Bi-mixture PLSA, a new formulation of PLSA that allows the number of latent word classes to be different from the number of late...