INTRODUCTION There is an increasing number of new oncology drugs being studied, approved and put into clinical practice based on improvement in progression-free survival, when no overall survival benefits exist. In oncology, the association between progression-free survival and health-related quality of life is currently unknown, despite its importance for patients with cancer, and the unverifi...

This paper introduces a mixed method approach for analyzing the determinants of natural latex yields and the associated spatial variations and identifying the most suitable regions for producing latex. Geographically Weighted Regressions (GWR) and Iterative Self-Organizing Data Analysis Technique (ISODATA) are jointly applied to the georeferenced data points collected from the rubber plantation...

the acute ecotoxicity of a set of mixture samples (washing powders, wastes, fuel extracts etc.) was assessed using four acute ecotoxicity assays with aquatic organisms (daphnia magna, poecilia reticulata, artemia salina and desmodesmus subspicatus). the experimental concentration-response curves were fitted by seven two-parameter sigmoid equations using non-linear regression. the regression per...

Design Decisions Procedure Scatterplots are among the most common methods for exploring and presenting data, covering a wide range of tasks and designs. The variety of scatterplot designs has created a proliferation of potential design decisions to consider when constructing a scatterplot. However, there remain many unexamined assumptions in respect to the trade-offs between these decisions. He...

Parallel coordinates and scatterplot matrices are widely used to visualize multi-dimensional data sets. But these visualization techniques are insufficient when the number of dimensions grows. To solve this problem, different approaches to preselect the best views or dimensions have been proposed in the last years. However, there are still several shortcomings to these methods. In this paper we...

Abstract The Healthcare sector is increasing in importance and relative size BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Despite relevance, the financial performance of their healthcare companies has been scarcely studied. This research fills this literature gap not only by focusing on impacts such diverse business environments providers but also proposing a novel approach to ...

BACKGROUND Geographically weighted regression (GWR) is a modelling technique designed to deal with spatial non-stationarity, e.g., the mean values vary by locations. It has been widely used as a visualization tool to explore the patterns of spatial data. However, the GWR tends to produce unsmooth surfaces when the mean parameters have considerable variations, partly due to that all parameter es...

Local polynomial smoother (LPS) is a weighted local least-squares nonparametric method. It provides a local Taylor series fit of the data at any location and can be directly used in a differential equation to provide a numerical scheme. In this article, we introduce this new nonparametric idea based on local polynomial smoother, for acquiring the numerical solution of the Bagley-Torvik fraction...

Weighted median smoothers, which were introduced by Edgemore in the context of least absolute regression over 100 years ago, have received considerable attention in signal processing during the past two decades. Although weighted median smoothers offer advantages over traditional linear finite impulse response (FIR) filters, it is shown in this paper that they lack the flexibility to adequately...