Background Maximising the happiness and life satisfaction [i.e. subjective well-being (SWB)] of citizens is a fundamental goal of international governmental organizations' policies. In order to decide what policies should be pursued in order to improve SWB there is a need to identify what the key drivers of SWB are. However, to date most studies have been conducted in unrepresentative samples o...

Two learning algorithms were recently proposed – Herding and Fast Persistent Contrastive Divergence (FPCD) – which share the following interesting characteristic: they exploit changes in the model parameters while sampling in order to escape modes and mix better, during the sampling process that is part of the learning algorithm. We justify such approaches as ways to escape modes while approxim...

Current psychiatric nosology depicts posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a discrete diagnostic category. However, only one study has examined the latent structure of PTSD, and this study suggested that PTSD may be more accurately conceptualized as an extreme reaction to traumatic life events rather than a discrete clinical syndrome. To build on the existing literature base, the present rese...

Background: Maximising the happiness and life satisfaction (i.e., subjective wellbeing) of citizens is a fundamental goal of international governmental organizations’ policies. In order to decide what policies should be pursued in order to improve subjective well-being (SWB) there is a need to identify what the key drivers of SWB are. However, to date most studies have been conducted in unrepre...

Dependencies between educational test items can be represented as quasi-orders on the item set of a knowledge domain and used for an efficient adaptive assessment of knowledge. One approach to uncovering such dependencies is by exploratory algorithms of item tree analysis (ITA). There are several methods of ITA available. The basic tool to compare such algorithms concerning their quality are la...

Abstract We study people’s subjective models of the macroeconomy and shed light on their attentional foundations. To do so, we measure beliefs about effects macroeconomic shocks unemployment inflation, providing respondents with identical information parameters previous realizations variables. Within samples 6,500 US households 1,500 experts, are widely dispersed, even directional shocks, there...

Given the dramatic increase in the prevalence of obesity and the serious health and economic consequences, the scientific community, health professionals and health agencies are looking for the best strategies to prevent/ fight this trend. In order to plan the most appropriate intervention measures the first step is to identify the associated factors of obesity. This paper presents the results ...