Prevalence of pneumococcal serotypes in carriage and disease has been described but absolute serotype colonisation densities have not been reported. 515 paediatric nasal swab DNA extracts were subjected to lytA qPCR and molecular serotyping by microarray. Absolute serotype densities were derived from total pneumococcal density (qPCR cycle threshold and standard curve) and relative abundance (mi...

This article considers deterministic computer experiments with real-valued tuning parameters which determine the accuracy of the numerical algorithm. The aim is to integrate computer outputs with different tuning parameters. Finite element method with mesh density as the tuning parameter is an important case. Novel nonstationary Gaussian process models are proposed to establish a framework cons...

Many validity measures have been proposed for evaluating clustering results. Most of these popular validity measures do not work well for clusters with different densities and/or sizes. They usually have a tendency of ignoring clusters with low densities. In this paper, we propose a new validity measure, which can deal with this situation. The performance evaluation of the validity measure comp...

There have been important changes in the United Kingdom’s (UK) fertility and immigration in the past decade, with a large share contributed by migrants from Poland. A detailed understanding of Polish migrant fertility is lacking, however, because the relevant data are not routinely collected. This paper provides new insights into the fertility patterns of Polish migrants in the UK, and compares...

Clustering has the following challenges: 1) clusters with arbitrary shapes; 2) minimal domain knowledge to determine the input parameters; 3) scalability for large data sets. Density-based clustering has been recognized as a powerful approach for discovering clusters with arbitrary shapes. However, the other two challenges still remain in most existing clustering algorithms. In this paper, we e...

With the availability of high-density marker maps and cost-effective genotyping, genomic selection methods may provide faster genetic gain than can be achieved by current selection methods based on phenotypes and the pedigree. Here we investigate some of the factors driving the accuracy of genomic selection, namely marker density and marker type (i.e., microsatellite and SNP markers), and the u...

Surrogate Modeling of Computer Experiments With Different Mesh Densities Rui Tuo, C. F. Jeff Wu & Dan Yu a Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100190 Beijing, P.R. China () b School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta 30332, GA () c Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100190 Bei...

The aim of this study is to determine the effect of environmental conditions with emphasis on the main meteorological factors (air temperature variables, sunshine hour, and humidity), on phytoplankton communities. As important primary producers in aquatic ecosystems, phytoplankton communities could be affected by several factors. Environmental factors play the major role in occurrence and diver...

Influence of three different stocking densities, vitamin C supplementation of Daphnia spp. and feeding practice (i.e. mechanical, hand) on the success of dry feed habituation of pond reared pikeperch juveniles was investigated through one month trial. Pond reared pikeperch juveniles were harvested 42 days post-fertilisation (mean individual weight 1.1 ± 0.3g) and stocked into the experim...