BACKGROUND We explored the impact of transient cART started during the primary HIV-infection (PHI) on the long-term immunologic and virologic response on cART resumption, by comparison with treatment initiation during the chronic phase of HIV infection (CHI). METHODS We analyzed data on 1450 patients enrolled during PHI in the ANRS PRIMO cohort between 1996 and 2013. "Treatment resumption" wa...

The increase in the variety of websites, ranging from information-intensive portal, through social media, to shopping website, has afforded consumers unprecedented opportunity to make informed purchase decisions. Anecdotal evidence indicates that consumers do spend considerable amount of effort visiting various online outlets, such as the social media websites, prior to committing to a purchase...

Balance-sheet data offer a potentially large number of candidate predictors of corporate financial failure. In this paper we provide a novel predictor selection procedure based on non-parametric regression and classification tree method (CART) and test its performance within a standard logit model. We show that a simple logit model with dummy variables created in accordance with the nodes of es...

This paper describes an approach to generating prosody parameters for Mandarin Chinese text-to-speech system. The Chinese fundamental frequency contour is decomposed into two parts, a global intonation contour and a syllable level tone contour. The global intonation contour is converted to pitch target labels in corpus. It is predicted by first predicting pitch target labels using statistical m...

OBJECTIVES To estimate life expectancy over 25 years in HIV-positive people and to compare their life expectancy with recent estimates for the general population, by education. METHODS Patients aged 20 years or older enrolled in the Swiss HIV Cohort Study 1988-2013 were eligible. Patients alive in 2001 were matched to up to 100 Swiss residents, by sex, year of birth, and education. Life expec...

BACKGROUND Modifications to combination antiretroviral drug therapy (CART) regimens can occur for a number of reasons, including adverse drug effects. We investigated the frequency of and reasons for antiretroviral drug modifications (ADM) during the first 3 years after initiation of CART, in a closed cohort of CART-naïve adult patients who started treatment in the period 1998-2007 in Croatia. ...

BACKGROUND The benefits of continuing antiretroviral therapy are questionable in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) type 1-infected patients with profound immunodeficiency and multiple treatment failure due to viral resistance. METHODS From the French Hospital Database on HIV, we selected 12,765 patients with a CD4(+) cell count <200 cells/mm(3) who received a combination antiretroviral thera...

Propensity score weighting is sensitive to model misspecification and outlying weights that can unduly influence results. The authors investigated whether trimming large weights downward can improve the performance of propensity score weighting and whether the benefits of trimming differ by propensity score estimation method. In a simulation study, the authors examined the performance of weight...

This paper introduces a tree-based model that combines aspects of CART (Classification and Regression Trees) and STR (Smooth Transition Regression). The model is called the Smooth Transition Regression Tree (STR-Tree). The main idea relies on specifying a parametric nonlinear model through a tree-growing procedure. The resulting model can be analyzed as a smooth transition regression with multi...

Cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript (CART) is a new anorectic peptide found in the brain and periphery. It is closely associated with leptin, an anorectic agent saturably transported across the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Using multiple time-regression analysis, we found that CART has a rapid rate of entry into brain from blood. However, there was no self-inhibition with CART, even whe...