Often, when conducting programme evaluations or studying the effects of policy changes, researchers may only have access to aggregated time series data, presented as observations spanning both the pre- and post-intervention periods. The most basic analytic model using these data requires only a single group and models the intervention effect using repeated measurements of the dependent variable...

OBJECTIVE To assess the inter-evaluator reproducibility of the Modified Merle d'Aubigné and Postel Method. METHOD Forty-five patients took part in the study, with a mean age of 57.93 (±13.35) who underwent total hip arthroplasty. All were evaluated by three researchers, who received training to standardize their criteria. The evaluation was held by the Modified Merle d'Aubigné and Postel Meth...

We present work on building a global long-tailed ranking of entities across multiple languages using Wikipedia and Freebase knowledge bases. We identify multiple features and build a model to rank entities using a ground-truth dataset of more than 10 thousand labels. The final system ranks 27 million entities with 75% precision and 48% F1 score. We provide performance evaluation and empirical e...

BACKGROUND The objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) has gained widespread use as a form of performance assessment. However, opportunities for students to participate in practice OSCEs are limited by the financial, faculty and administrative investments required. OBJECTIVES To determine the feasibility and acceptability of a student-run mock OSCE (MOSCE) as a learning experience fo...

OBJECTIVES Area-level public health interventions can be difficult to evaluate using natural experiments. We describe the use of propensity score matching (PSM) to select control local authority areas (LAU) to evaluate the public health impact of alcohol policies for (1) prospective evaluation of alcohol policies using area-level data, and (2) a novel two-stage quasi case-control design. STUD...

We propose in this paper an automatic evaluation procedure based on a metric which could provide summary evaluation without human assistance. Our system includes two metrics, which are presented and discussed. The first metric is based on a known and powerful statistical test, the χ goodness-of-fit test, and has been used in several applications. The second metric is derived from three common m...

We attempt to predict negative references in the CouchSurfing (CS) social network using an SVM classifier. The low frequency of negative references, however, makes prediction very difficult. We attempt to achieve a classifier with a high F1 score by training on data sets with varying distributions of positive and negative examples and by manipulating the decision boundary. We also explore how t...

The study of human bioscience is viewed as a crucial curriculum in allied health. Nevertheless, bioscience (and particularly physiology) is notoriously difficult for undergraduates, particularly academically disadvantaged students. So endemic are the high failure rates (particularly in nursing) that it has come to be known as "the human bioscience problem." In the present report, we describe th...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to develop criteria for the prioritization of topics for health technology assessment (HTA) in the healthcare system of Kazakhstan. METHODS Initial proposals for criteria were suggested through consultation with Ministry of Health (MoH) policy areas. These were refined through a workshop attended by HTA department staff, persons from medical universities a...

We propose the use of character n-gram F-score for automatic evaluation of machine translation output. Character ngrams have already been used as a part of more complex metrics, but their individual potential has not been investigated yet. We report system-level correlations with human rankings for 6-gram F1-score (CHRF) on the WMT12, WMT13 and WMT14 data as well as segment-level correlation fo...