BACKGROUND Vocal cord dysfunction is often misdiagnosed and mistreated as asthma, which can lead to increased and unnecessary medication use and increased health care utilization. OBJECTIVE To develop a valid scoring index that could help distinguish vocal cord dysfunction from asthma. METHODS We compared the demographics, comorbidities, clinical symptoms, and symptom triggers of subjects w...

Williams et al. (1976) have suggested the use of Guttman scaling for scoring an index of disability. Two examples confirm the applicability of this method in the context of survey research. One of these examples is of a disablement scale widely employed in local authority social services research. For the purpose of survey assessment of disabled populations, the precise choice of scaling method...

The performance of credit scoring models is determined by the used features. The relevant features for credit scoring usually are determined unsystematic and dominate by arbitrary trial. This paper presents a comparative study of four feature selection methods, which use data mining approach in reducing the feature space. The final results show that among the four feature selection methods, the...

In this paper we focus on event extraction from Tamil news article. This system utilizes a scoring scheme for extracting and grouping event-specific sentences. Using this scoring scheme eventspecific clustering is performed for multiple documents. Events are extracted from each document using a scoring scheme based on feature score and condition score. Similarly event specific sentences are clu...

Automatic home respiratory polygraphy (HRP) scoring functions can potentially confirm the diagnosis of sleep apnoea-hypopnoea syndrome (SAHS) (obviating technician scoring) in a substantial number of patients. The result would have important management and cost implications. The aim of this study was to determine the diagnostic cost-effectiveness of a sequential HRP scoring protocol (automatic ...

INTRODUCTION In sub-Saharan Africa, vital signs are a feasible option for monitoring critically ill patients. We assessed how admission vital signs data predict in-hospital mortality among patients with sepsis. In particular, we assessed whether vital signs data can be incorporated into a prognostic index with reduced segmentation in the values of included variables. METHODS Subjects were pat...

It is shown that the multiple alignment problem with SP-score is NP-hardforeachscoringmatrixinabroadclassM that includes most scoring matrices actually used in biological applications. The problem remains NP-hard even if sequences can only be shifted relative to each other and no internal gaps are allowed. It is also shown that there is a scoring matrix M 0 such that the multiple alignment prob...

Abstract In Bayesian Networks (BNs), the direction of edges is crucial for causal reasoning and inference. However, Markov equivalence class considerations mean it not always possible to establish edge orientations, which why many BN structure learning algorithms cannot orientate all from purely observational data. Moreover, latent confounders can lead false positive edges. Relatively few metho...