Within the pattern-mixture modeling framework for informative dropout, conditional linear models (CLMs) are a useful approach to deal with dropout that can occur at any point in continuous time (not just at observation times). However, in contrast with selection models, inferences about marginal covariate effects in CLMs are not readily available if nonidentity links are used in the mean struct...

BACKGROUND Retention in treatment is often highlighted as one of the key indicators of success in opioid maintenance treatment (OMT). AIMS To identify factors associated with long-term retention in opioid maintenance treatment and to analyse predictors of subsequent treatment episodes. METHODS Treatment retention and re-entry were examined for a national cohort of patients admitted to OMT i...

School dropout has significant consequences for both individuals and societies. Only 21% of adults in Mexico achieve the equivalent of a high school education. We examined the relationship between school dropout and self-reported psychiatric symptoms in a middle school in a suburb of Mexico City. We used binomial logistic regression to examine the odds ratio (OR) of school dropout associated wi...

Background Participant dropout occurs in all longitudinal studies, and if systematic, may lead to selection biases and erroneous conclusions being drawn from a study. Aims We investigated whether dropout in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents And Children (ALSPAC) was systematic or random, and if systematic, whether it had an impact on the prediction of disruptive behaviour disorders. Method...

OBJECTIVE To study the impact of mental disorders on failure in educational attainment in Mexico. METHODS Diagnoses and age of onset for each of 16 DSM-IV disorders were assessed through retrospective self-reports with the Composite International Diagnostic Instrument (CIDI) during fieldwork in 2001-2002. Survival analysis was used to examine associations between early onset DSM-IV/CIDI disor...

This study examines (a) the relation of initial treatment motivations to alcoholics' involvement in outpatient treatment and dropout and (b) the relations among patient characteristics, severity, alcohol expectancies, motivation, and treatment retention. A treatment motivation questionnaire (TMQ) was developed to assess both internalized and external motivations for treatment, as well as confid...

We recently reported the performance of the BD Max StaphSR assay for screening of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), as well as the prevalence in the U.S. of S. aureus carrying a staphylococcal cassette chromosome (SCCmec) element lacking mecA (so-called dropout mutant) (1). This assay targets the nuc and mecA/C genes and 11 sequences of the SCCmec-orfX right-extremity junction...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have received wide publicity and many institutions have invested considerable effort in developing, promoting and delivering such courses. However, there are still many unresolved questions relating to MOOCs and their effectiveness. One of the major recurring issues raised in both academic literature and the popular press is the consistently high dropout rate...

Deep learning has become the state-of-art tool in many applications, but the evaluation and training of such models is very time-consuming and expensive. Dropout has been used in order to make the computations sparse (by not involving all units), as well as to regularize the models. In typical dropout, nodes are dropped uniformly at random. Our goal is to use reinforcement learning in order to ...

Deep learning is the state-of-the-art in fields such as visual object recognition and speech recognition. This learning uses a large number of layers, huge number of units, and connections. Therefore, overfitting is a serious problem. To avoid this problem, dropout learning is proposed. Dropout learning neglects some inputs and hidden units in the learning process with a probability, p, and the...