The aim of the present study was to analyze the instruction of the Judo coach immediately before the competition, in the process of preparation for the fights, looking to (1) study the coherency between the information which the coach transmits and that which the athlete retains; (2) identify the correlation between the coherency, the extension and the number of ideas conveyed by the coach; (3)...

OBJECTIVE On 11 March 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake struck off Japan. Although some studies showed that the earthquake increased the risk of pneumonia death, no study reported whether and how much a tsunami increased the risk. We examined the risk for pneumonia death after the earthquake/tsunami. DESIGN This is an ecological study. SETTING Data on population and pneumonia deaths obt...

Women who enter pregnancy at a weight above or below normal weight, defined as a body mass index (BMI) of 18.5-24.9 (calculated as weight in kg/height in m2), are more likely to experience adverse pregnancy outcomes and to have infants who experience adverse health outcomes. For example, prepregnancy underweight (BMI <18.5) increases the risk for small-for-gestational-age births, whereas prepre...

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among persons aged 10-24 years in the United States and accounted for 5,178 deaths in this age group in 2012. Firearm, suffocation (including hanging), and poisoning (including drug overdose) are the three most common mechanisms of suicide in the United States. Previous reports have noted that trends in suicide rates vary by mechanism and by age grou...

BACKGROUND According to recent International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards, the limit of detection (LoD) of an assay should be estimated taking both type I (alpha) and II (beta) errors into account. The suggested procedure, however, supposes gaussian distributions of both blank and sample measurements and a linear calibration curve. In clinical chemistry, asymmetric, nongauss...

The authors discuss the applicability of nonparametric item response theory (IRT) models to the construction and psychometric analysis of personality and psychopathology scales, and they contrast these models with parametric IRT models. They describe the fit of nonparametric IRT to the Depression content scale of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory--2 (J. N. Butcher, W. G. Dahlstrom...

In clinical trials nonparametric analysis methods are sometimes used to assess the differences between treatment groups. Most people use either the NPAR1WAY procedure or the FREQ procedure to perform nonparametric analysis. However, no procedures currently exist within SAS software to produce a nonparametric estimate of the difference between treatment groups or a confidence interval to assess ...

A convenient way of modelling complex interactions is by employing graphs or networks which correspond to conditional independence structures in an underlying statistical model. One main class of models in this regard are Bayesian networks, which have the drawback of making parametric assumptions. Bayesian nonparametric mixture models offer a possibility to overcome this limitation, but have ha...

This paper develops a nonparametric option pricing theory and numerical method for European, American and path-dependent derivatives. In contrast to the nonparametric curve fitting techniques commonly seen in the literature, this nonparametric pricing theory is more in line with the canonical valuation method developed Stutzer (1996) for pricing options with only a sample of asset returns. Unli...