Data from 574 participants were used to assess perceptions of message, site, and sponsor credibility across four genres of websites; to explore the extent and effects of verifying web-based information; and to measure the relative influence of sponsor familiarity and site attributes on perceived credibility.The results show that perceptions of credibility differed, such that news organization w...

This paper presents a novel quality measure called robustness. The robustness measure quantifies the influence of measurement noise in the attribute values on the credibility of the classification of a case. It is assumed that the type of distribution of the noise-generating process is known. It is not simple to measure the robustness in the general situation where the noise-free distribution o...

Fuzziness plays an essential role in the real world. Fuzzy set theory has been developed very fast since it was introduced by Zadeh (1965) [1]. A fuzzy set was characterized with its membership function by Zadeh. The term fuzzy variable was fist introduced by Kaufmann (1975) [2], and then appeared in Zadeh (1978) [3] and Nahmias (1978) [4] as a fuzzy set of real numbers. In order to establish t...

Methodological problems of acupuncture trials focus on adequate placebo controls. In this trial we evaluated the use of sham laser acupuncture as a control procedure. Thirty-four healthy volunteers received verum laser (invisible infrared laser emission and red light, 45 s and 1 J per point) and sham laser (red light) treatment at three acupuncture points (LI4, LU7 and LR3) in a randomized, dou...

On the basis of the possibility measure, necessity measure, credibility measure and probability measure, chance-constrained programming models are designed to treat optimization problems with stochastic and fuzzy parameters. Then, mathematical properties of different models, for instance, crisp equivalents of uncertain functions and constraints, are discussed on condition that parameters are un...

INTRODUCTION Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) are often the outcomes of greatest importance to patients. The minimally important difference (MID) provides a measure of the smallest change in the PRO that patients perceive as important. An anchor-based approach is the most appropriate method for MID determination. No study or database currently exists that provides all anchor-based MIDs associat...

The modeling of complex risk situations imposes the existence of multiple ways to represent the risk and compare the risk situations between them. In probabilistic models, risk is described by random variables and risk situations are compared by stochastic dominance. In possibilistic or credibilistic models, risk is represented by fuzzy variables. This paper concerns three indicators of dominan...

The development of models is based on assumptions, which inevitably embed a level of uncertainty. Quantifying such uncertainty is particularly important when modeling human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine effectiveness; the natural history of infection and disease is complex, and age- and type-specific data remain scarce and incomplete. The aim of this study was to predict the impact of HPV-6/11/1...

BACKGROUND Several studies have shown that response expectancies are an important mechanism of popular psychological interventions for pain. However, there has been no research on whether response expectancies and treatment credibility independently mediate hypnotic and cognitive-behavioral pain interventions and whether the pattern of mediation is affected by experience with the interventions....