Mining the optimal clustering of people’s characteristics of health care choices

In Asian countries, there has been a multi-choice healthcare environment for many years. In Taiwan, people’s multiple health care seeking behavior has resulted in much heavier financial burden of National Health Insurance Program (NHIP) in recent years: investigating the characteristics of people who use multiple health care resources has gained increasing importance for health authorities. In this study, we investigated the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics which underlined people’s choice of health care by using a population representative database. A novel methodology which incorporated k-means cluster analysis with v-fold cross-validation into Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) is proposed. This novel methodology can help us to find the optimal attribute clustering of multiple health care utilization. By using this methodology, researchers not only can avoid the ambiguities of identifying clusters resulted from the traditional hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA), but also can provide more solid and evidence-based analysis for health policy making.     

Introduction to the Geometer’s Angle

Geometer Rachel Fletcher introduces the Geometer’s Angle, a column in the Nexus Network Journal dedicated to geometrical constructions, the procedures for drawing them, their use, significance and symbolism.     

The impact of mobility,risk, and cost on the users’ intention to adopt mobile payments

Information Systems and e-Business Management - With the development of mobile communication technology and the wide application of intelligent devices, mobile payments with great commercial...     

From briefing,through scenario,to debriefing: the maritime instructor’s work during simulator-based training

Simulator-based training in maritime education is an illustrative and paradigmatic example of how the introduction of high-end technologies creates new challenges for instructors: using simulators in educational settings for teaching skills that must be transferred to a professional work practice. This study draws on ethnographic fieldwork and video recordings of learning activities in a maritime navigation course to investigate the instructional challenges and opportunities for connecting general learning lessons to practical situations in different phases of simulator-based training. In particular, taking on a situated action approach, the research questions concern how the participants are orienting towards general instructions from the prospective briefing phase in the subsequent scenario and debriefing phases of training, considering how the social and material resources in the simulator environment organize the learning activities. The results show that connecting the general to the specifics of navigational situations is a continuous instructional achievement that is maintained throughout all stages of training, from briefing, through scenario, to debriefing. Hence, the results are stressing the importance for both in-scenario instructions and post-simulation debriefing in order to facilitate learning towards a profession. Moreover, the results emphasize how technologies in the simulator environment offer opportunities for instructors to continuously monitor, correct and assess the students’ activities towards the learning outcomes.     

Stronge’s hypothesis-based solution to the planar collision-with-friction problem

This paper deals with collision with friction. Differential equations governing a one-point collision of planar, simple non-holonomic systems are generated. Expressions for quantities of interest (e.g., normal and tangential impulses, normal and tangential relative velocities of the colliding points, and the change of the system mechanical energy), are written for five types of collision (i.e., sticking in compression, forward sliding, etc.) associated with Stronge’s collision hypothesis and Coulomb’s coefficient of friction, in conjunction with a two-integration procedure. These expressions, together with Routh’s semi-graphical method are used to show that the algebraic signs of four configuration-related parameters span five cases of system configuration. For each, the ratio between the tangential and normal components of the velocity of approach, called α, determine the type of collision which, once found, allows the evaluation of the changes in the motion variables. The analysis of these cases indicates that an algebraic, Stronge’s hypothesis-based solution to the planar collision-with-friction problem always exists, and is unique, coherent and energy consistent. Finally, substitutions are found which transform the Stronge’s hypothesis-based solution to a Poisson’s hypothesis-based and to a Newton’s hypothesis-based solutions appearing in the literature.     

Justification for the Use of Cohen’s Kappa Statistic in Experimental Studies of NLP and Text Mining

Modern metrics for evaluating agreement coefficients between the experimental results and expert opinion are compared, and the possibility of using these metrics in experimental research in automatic text processing by machine learning methods is assessed. The choice of Cohen’s kappa coefficient as a measure of expert opinion agreement in the NLP and Text Mining problems is justified. An example of using Cohen’s kappa coefficient for evaluating the level of agreement between the opinion of an expert and the results of ML classification and the measure of agreement of expert opinions in the alignment of sentences of the Kazakh-Russian parallel corpus is given. Based on this analysis, it is proved that Cohen’s kappa coefficient is one of the best statistical methods for determining the level of agreement in experimental studies due to its ease of use, computing simplicity, and high accuracy of the results.

     

An inquiry into the applicability of Kantorovich’s idea to the thermodynamic optimization

A feasible region is employed to describe unknown parameters in thermodynamic models. The method is based on interval estimation of experimental observations, and it is applied to thermodynamic optimization of liquid phase in Ag–Mg system. A final feasible region is an overlapping area among all feasible regions calculated from different groups of data. A discussion of computational advantages on this method suggests that it is a promising method for parameter estimation, but its limitations require more studies on problems such as non-linear inequalities, multi-dimensional visualization and uncertainties in experimental conditions.     

Two-agent single-machine scheduling to minimize the weighted sum of the agents’ objective functions

Scheduling with two competing agents on a single machine has become a popular research topic in recent years. Most research focuses on minimizing the objective function of one agent, subject to the objective function of the other agent does not exceed a given limit. In this paper we adopt a weighted combination approach to treat the two-agent single-machine scheduling problem. The objective that we seek to minimize is the weighted sum of the total completion time of the jobs of one agent and the total tardiness of the jobs of the other agent. We provide two branch-and-bound algorithms to solve the problem. In addition, we present a simulated annealing and two genetic algorithms to obtain near-optimal solutions. We report the results of the computational experiments conducted to test the performance of the proposed algorithms.