Search results for "SCALE"
showing 10 items of 5180 documents
Assessing the quality of studies in meta-research: Review/guidelines on the most important quality assessment tools
2020
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses pool data from individual studies to generate a higher level of evidence to be evaluated by guidelines. These reviews ultimately guide clinicians and stakeholders in health-related decisions. However, the informativeness and quality of evidence synthesis inherently depend on the quality of what has been pooled into meta-research projects. Moreover, beyond the quality of included individual studies, only a methodologically correct process, in relation to systematic reviews and meta-analyses themselves, can produce a reliable and valid evidence synthesis. Hence, quality of meta-research projects also affects evidence synthesis reliability. In this overview…
Opportunities and challenges of combined effect measures based on prioritized outcomes
2013
Many authors have proposed different approaches to combine multiple endpoints in a univariate outcome measure in the literature. In case of binary or time-to-event variables, composite endpoints, which combine several event types within a single event or time-to-first-event analysis are often used to assess the overall treatment effect. A main drawback of this approach is that the interpretation of the composite effect can be difficult as a negative effect in one component can be masked by a positive effect in another. Recently, some authors proposed more general approaches based on a priority ranking of outcomes, which moreover allow to combine outcome variables of different scale levels. …
Sparse relative risk regression models
2020
Summary Clinical studies where patients are routinely screened for many genomic features are becoming more routine. In principle, this holds the promise of being able to find genomic signatures for a particular disease. In particular, cancer survival is thought to be closely linked to the genomic constitution of the tumor. Discovering such signatures will be useful in the diagnosis of the patient, may be used for treatment decisions and, perhaps, even the development of new treatments. However, genomic data are typically noisy and high-dimensional, not rarely outstripping the number of patients included in the study. Regularized survival models have been proposed to deal with such scenarios…
Entropic descriptor of a complex behaviour
2009
We propose a new type of entropic descriptor that is able to quantify the statistical complexity (a measure of complex behaviour) by taking simultaneously into account the average departures of a system's entropy S from both its maximum possible value Smax and its minimum possible value Smin. When these two departures are similar to each other, the statistical complexity is maximal. We apply the new concept to the variability, over a range of length scales, of spatial or grey-level pattern arrangements in simple models. The pertinent results confirm the fact that a highly non-trivial, length-scale dependence of the entropic descriptor makes it an adequate complexity-measure, able to disting…
Bayesian joint ordinal and survival modeling for breast cancer risk assessment
2016
We propose a joint model to analyze the structure and intensity of the association between longitudinal measurements of an ordinal marker and time to a relevant event. The longitudinal process is defined in terms of a proportional-odds cumulative logit model. Time-to-event is modeled through a left-truncated proportionalhazards model, which incorporates information of the longitudinal marker as well as baseline covariates. Both longitudinal and survival processes are connected by means of a common vector of random effects. General inferences are discussed under the Bayesian approach and include the posterior distribution of the probabilities associated to each longitudinal category and the …
Multiscale Granger causality
2017
In the study of complex physical and biological systems represented by multivariate stochastic processes, an issue of great relevance is the description of the system dynamics spanning multiple temporal scales. While methods to assess the dynamic complexity of individual processes at different time scales are well-established, multiscale analysis of directed interactions has never been formalized theoretically, and empirical evaluations are complicated by practical issues such as filtering and downsampling. Here we extend the very popular measure of Granger causality (GC), a prominent tool for assessing directed lagged interactions between joint processes, to quantify information transfer a…
Vortex length, vortex energy and fractal dimension of superfluid turbulence at very low temperature
2010
By assuming a self-similar structure for Kelvin waves along vortex loops with successive smaller scale features, we model the fractal dimension of a superfluid vortex tangle in the zero temperature limit. Our model assumes that at each step the total energy of the vortices is conserved, but the total length can change. We obtain a relation between the fractal dimension and the exponent describing how the vortex energy per unit length changes with the length scale. This relation does not depend on the specific model, and shows that if smaller length scales make a decreasing relative contribution to the energy per unit length of vortex lines, the fractal dimension will be higher than unity. F…
A generalization of the inhomogeneity measure for point distributions to the case of finite size objects
2008
The statistical measure of spatial inhomogeneity for n points placed in chi cells each of size kxk is generalized to incorporate finite size objects like black pixels for binary patterns of size LxL. As a function of length scale k, the measure is modified in such a way that it relates to the smallest realizable value for each considered scale. To overcome the limitation of pattern partitions to scales with k being integer divisors of L we use a sliding cell-sampling approach. For given patterns, particularly in the case of clusters polydispersed in size, the comparison between the statistical measure and the entropic one reveals differences in detection of the first peak while at other sca…
Decomposable multiphase entropic descriptor
2013
To quantify degree of spatial inhomogeneity for multiphase materials we adapt the entropic descriptor (ED) of a pillar model developed to greyscale images. To uncover the contribution of each phase we introduce the suitable 'phase splitting' of the adapted descriptor. As a result, each of the phase descriptors (PDs) describes the spatial inhomogeneity attributed to each phase-component. Obviously, their sum equals to the value of the overall spatial inhomogeneity. We apply this approach to three-phase synthetic patterns. The black and grey components are aggregated or clustered while the white phase is the background one. The examples show how the valuable microstuctural information related…
Local Asymptotic Normality for Shape and Periodicity in the Drift of a Time Inhomogeneous Diffusion
2017
We consider a one-dimensional diffusion whose drift contains a deterministic periodic signal with unknown periodicity $T$ and carrying some unknown $d$-dimensional shape parameter $\theta$. We prove Local Asymptotic Normality (LAN) jointly in $\theta$ and $T$ for the statistical experiment arising from continuous observation of this diffusion. The local scale turns out to be $n^{-1/2}$ for the shape parameter and $n^{-3/2}$ for the periodicity which generalizes known results about LAN when either $\theta$ or $T$ is assumed to be known.