BACKGROUND To stop a possible outbreak of Legionnaires' disease (LD) at an early stage an outbreak detection programme was installed in The Netherlands. METHODS The programme consisted of sampling and controlling of potential sources to which LD patients had been exposed during their incubation period. Potential sources were considered to be true sources of infection if two or more LD patient...

The data used in social, behavioural, health or biological sciences may have a hierarchical structure due to the natural structure in the population of interest or due to the sampling design. Multilevel or marginal models are often used to analyse such hierarchical data. The data may include sample units selected with unequal probabilities from a clustered and stratified population. Inferences ...

the aim of this study was to investigate the relationships between attachment styles (secure, avoidant and ambivalent) and satisfying basic psychological needs of children (independence, competence and relevance) with regard to mothers’ employment status. the subjects included 409 high school students selected randomly by multi-stage cluster sampling method. instruments were: attachment styles ...

theoretically and empirically, it has been often argued that production uncertainty affects the farmers’ production efficiency. insurance can play an impactful role in reducing the uncertainty and, consequently, increasing the investment. using multilevel models, we examined the effect of agricultural insurance programs on investment in the agricultural sector of khorasan razavi province. the c...

The WHO/EPI cluster sampling method for immunization coverage surveys is part of the course for management training in EPI programmes. The application of this method, based on a framework of villages, is impractical in dispersed populations common in many countries in Africa. To make the method work under those circumstances leads to unacceptable bias, which tends to overestimate the real cover...

social and cultural family raise more than before. this article examines the role of women in family economic efficiency. to identify the components listed on the theories of resources, power, system theory and empowerment is used. sampling technique used, multi-stage stratified sampling with probability proportional to size cluster sampling is. results show that independent variables, the part...

background: current study is aimed on researching the relationship between emotional intelligence and job performance in employees of mashhad university of medical sciences in 2011-2012. methods:this is a descriptive correlational study. subjects were 200 employees of mashhad university of medical sciences, multi-stage cluster method was used for sampling. data gathering methods were bar-on emo...

We consider the problem of classification in noisy, high-dimensional, and class-imbalanced protein datasets. In order to design a complete classification system, we use a three-stage machine learning framework consisting of a feature selection stage, a method addressing noise and class-imbalance, and a method for combining biologically related tasks through a prior-knowledge based clustering. I...