BACKGROUND Diabetes mellitus is a metabolic disorder and its subsequent complications such as retinopathy, nephropathy, ulcers, disability, and amputation increase the burden of the disease. Patient knowledge-improving programs are employed to prevent disease progression and to improve the quality of life of the patients. In this way, we need to characterize the groups of patients in urgent nee...

This study was done to optimize accuracy of predicting growth of Salmonella serovars, Escherichia coli O157:H7, and Staphylococcus aureus in temperature-abused raw beef, poultry, and bratwurst (with salt but without added nitrite). Four mathematical approaches were used with experimentally determined lag-phase duration (LPD) and growth rate (GR) values to develop 12 versions of THERM (Temperatu...

BACKGROUND Trauma is a leading global cause of death. Trauma mortality rates are higher in rural areas, constituting a challenge for quality and equality in trauma care. The aim of the study was to explore population density and transport time to hospital care as possible predictors of geographical differences in mortality rates, and to what extent choice of statistical method might affect the ...

Two analyses, cubic and piecewise random regression, were conducted to model growth of crossbred cattle from birth to about two years of age, investigating the ability of a piecewise procedure to fit growth traits without the complications of the cubic model. During a four-year period (1994-1997) of the Australian "Southern Crossbreeding Project", mature Hereford cows (N = 581) were mated ...

Constrained regression problems appear in the context of optimal nonlinear ltering, as well as in a variety of other contexts, e.g., chromatographic analysis in chemometrics and manufacturing , and spectral estimation. This paper presents novel mathematical programming algorithms for some important constrained regression problems in IR N. For brevity, we focus on four key problems, namely, loca...

We consider additive models built with trend filtering, i.e., additive models whose components are each regularized by the (discrete) total variation of their (k+1)st (discrete) derivative, for a chosen integer k ≥ 0. This results in kth degree piecewise polynomial components, (e.g., k = 0 gives piecewise constant components, k = 1 gives piecewise linear, k = 2 gives piecewise quadratic, etc.)....

In this paper an approach based on evolutionary algorithms to find Pareto optimal pair of state and control for multi-objective optimal control problems (MOOCP)'s is introduced‎. ‎In this approach‎, ‎first a discretized form of the time-control space is considered and then‎, ‎a piecewise linear control and a piecewise linear trajectory are obtained from the discretized time-control space using ...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To quantify the increase in mailed questionnaire response attributable to a monetary incentive. DESIGN A systematic search for randomised controlled trials of monetary incentives and mailed questionnaire response was conducted. For each trial identified, logistic regression was used to estimate the odds ratio for response per 0.01 dollars incentive increase. Odds ratios were p...