OBJECTIVE To use an electronic nose to identify common upper respiratory bacterial pathogens. STUDY DESIGN Controlled in vitro analysis. METHODS Swabs of bacteria were obtained from in vitro samples. The specimens were vaporized and analyzed over the organic semiconductor-based electronic nose (Cyranose 320). Data from the 32-element sensor array were subjected to principal component analys...

The concept of Fractile Graphical Analysis (FGA) was introduced by Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (see Mahalanobis, 1960). It is one of the earliest nonparametric regression techniques to compare two regression functions for two bivariate populations (X, Y ). This method is particularly useful for comparing two regression functions where the covariate (X) for the two populations are not necessari...

Distance metric learning is of fundamental interest in machine learning because the distance metric employed can significantly affect the performance of many learning methods. Quadratic Mahalanobis metric learning is a popular approach to the problem, but typically requires solving a semidefinite programming (SDP) problem, which is computationally expensive. Standard interior-point SDP solvers ...

Evaluation of the batch consistency of traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) is essential for the promotion of the development and quality control of TCMs. The aim of the present work was to develop a useful strategy via liquid chromatography and chemometrics to evaluate the batch consistency of TCM preparations. Xin-Ke-Shu (XKS) tablet was chosen as a model for this method development. Four typ...

The scaling parameter α helps maintain a balance between supervised and unsupervised learning in semi-supervised Fuzzy c-Means (ssFCM). In this study, we investigated the effects of different α values, 0.1, 0.5, 1 and 10 in Pedrycz and Waletsky’s ssFCM with various amounts of labelled data, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50% and 60% and three distance metrics, Euclidean, Mahalanobis and kernel-based on th...

ICT infrastructure investments in educational institutions have been one of the key priorities of education policy during the last decade. Despite the attention, research on the effectiveness and efficiency of ICT is inconclusive. This is mainly due to smallscale research with weak identification strategies which lack a proper control group. Using the 2011 ‘Trends in International Mathematics a...

We propose a new image segmentation technique called strings. A string is a variational deformable model that is learned from a collection of example objects rather than built from a priori analytical or geometrical knowledge. As opposed to existing approaches, an object boundary is represented by a one-dimensional multivariate curve in functional space, a feature function, rather than by a poi...

Fuzzy clustering is well known as a robust and efficient way to reduce computation cost to obtain the better results. In the literature, many robust fuzzy clustering models have been presented such as Fuzzy C-Mean (FCM) and Possibilistic C-Mean (PCM), where these methods are Type-I Fuzzy clustering. Type-II Fuzzy sets, on the other hand, can provide better performance than Type-I Fuzzy sets, es...

Statisticians face increasingly the task of analyzing large and high dimension multivariate data sets. This is due to the advances in computer technology which have facilitated greatly the collection of large data sets and, on the other hand, to the fact that most statistical experiments are multivariate in nature. One of the primary problems encountered in this task is robust estimation of loc...