Basel II imposes regulatory capital on banks related to the default risk of their credit portfolio. Banks using an internal rating approach compute the regulatory capital from pooled probabilities of default. These pooled probabilities can be calculated by clustering credit borrowers into different buckets and computing the mean PD for each bucket. The clustering problem can become very complex...

Behavior analysis of credit cardholders is one of the main research topics in credit card portfolio management. Usually, the cardholder’s behavior, especially bankruptcy, is measured by a score of aggregate attributes that describe cardholder’s spending history. In real-life practice, statistics and neural networks are the major players to calculate such a score system for prediction. Recently,...

OBJECTIVES Sleep disturbance, pain, anxiety, depression, and low energy/fatigue, the SPADE pentad, are the most prevalent and co-occurring symptoms in the general population and clinical practice. Co-occurrence of SPADE symptoms may produce additive impairment and negatively affect treatment response, potentially undermining patients' health and functioning. The purpose of this paper is to dete...

A simple distance measure has been applied to the author clustering problem to determine which documents are written by the same author. This simple distance measure works with the probability distribution of character sequences of a document, making it insensitive to language differences. The top most frequent features k, where k is chosen to be 300, determine the distribution where punctuatio...

The most widely used measure of trait narcissism is the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), which can provide both total and subscale scores. However, with a length of 40 items, this measure may not be ideal in settings in which time or participant attention may limit the types of measures that can be administered. In response, Ames, Rose, and Anderson (2006) created the NPI-16, which pro...

Measurement scholar Samuel Messick, defines validity as “an integrated evaluative judgment of the degree to which empirical evidence and theoretical rationales support the adequacy and appropriateness of inferences and actions based on test scores. . . ” (p. 13). Messick’s definition of validity differed from those of previous validity theorists in that he acknowledged that test scores often af...

BACKGROUND Patient-centered health care is a central component of current health policy agendas. Shared decision making (SDM) is considered to be the pinnacle of patient engagement and methods to promote this are becoming commonplace. However, the measurement of SDM continues to prove challenging. Reviews have highlighted the need for a patient-reported measure of SDM that is practical, valid, ...

FCM-type cluster validation is a technique for searching for the optimal fuzzy partition, in which the number of clusters is evaluated by considering the degree of overlapping of fuzzy memberships, cluster compactness or cluster separation. In this paper, a new approach for FCM-type cluster validation in fuzzy co-clustering is proposed. Because fuzzy co-clustering does not use cluster prototype...

BACKGROUND This paper evaluates psychometric properties of a recently developed measure focusing on the health-related quality of life (HRQL) of long-term cancer survivors, the Quality of Life in Adult Survivors scale (QLACS), in a sample of breast cancer survivors. This represents an important area of study, given the large number of breast cancer patients surviving many years post diagnosis. ...