BACKGROUND The Banff Patella Instability Instrument (BPII) is a disease-specific, patient-reported, quality-of-life outcome measure designed to assess patients with patellofemoral instability. The iterative assessment of the validity, reliability, and responsiveness of a health-related patient-reported outcome measure is vital to the development of a high-quality evaluation tool. PURPOSE To a...

BACKGROUND Since there is no established measure for autism in India, we evaluated the diagnostic accuracy, reliability and validity of Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS). METHODS Children and adolescents suspected of having autism were identified from the unit's database. Scale and item level scores of CARS were collected and analyzed. Sensitivity, specificity, likelihood ratios and predic...

BACKGROUND The Aspects of Wheelchair Mobility Test (AWMT) was developed for use in a repeated measures format to provide comparative effectiveness data on mobility facilitated by different wheelchair types. It has been used in preliminary studies to compare the mobility of wheelchairs designed for low-resource areas and is intended to be simple and flexible enough so as to be used in low-techno...

The internal validity of an observational study is enhanced by only comparing sets of treated and control subjects which have sufficient overlap in their covariate distributions. Methods have been developed for defining the study population using propensity scores to ensure sufficient overlap. However, a study population defined by propensity scores is difficult for other investigators to under...

This report presents our solution to PAKDD 2007 Data Mining Competition, which details the steps to develop the customer growth model to identify cross-selling opportunities. This model is able to score the propensity of a credit card customer to take up a home loan with the finance company. We first describe the data preparation steps in detail. Then, the home loan customer growth model is pro...

Although field studies reveal that some forensic evaluators tend to assign higher psychopathy measure scores to sexual offenders than others, the extent to which these findings apply to psychopathy measure scoring in other contexts is unclear. And no study has examined the impact of evaluator differences in scoring on predictive validity. We used data from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment...

Cluster validity indexes have been used to evaluate the fitness of partitions produced by clustering algorithms. This paper presents a new validity index for fuzzy clustering called a partition coefficient and exponential separation (PCAES) index. It uses the factors from a normalized partition coefficient and an exponential separation measure for each cluster and then pools these two factors t...