scholarly journals Predicting GPA at Age 15 in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 237802311882480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Raes

In this paper, we describe in detail the different approaches we used to predict the GPA of children at the age of 15 in the context of the Fragile Families Challenge. Our best prediction improved about 18 percent in terms of mean squared error over a naive baseline prediction and performed less than 5 percent worse than the best prediction in the Fragile Families Challenge. After discussing the different predictions we made, we also discuss the predictors that tend to be robustly associated with GPA. One remarkable predictor is related to teacher observations at the age of nine. We end with a reflection on our participation in the Fragile Families Challenge and provide some suggestions for follow-up work.

PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (12) ◽  
pp. e0243816
Author(s):  
Alberto Javier Fidalgo-Herrera ◽  
María Jesús Martínez-Beltrán ◽  
Julio Cesar de la Torre-Montero ◽  
José Andrés Moreno-Ruiz ◽  
Gabor Barton

The active cervical range of motion (aROM) is assessed by clinicians to inform their decision-making. Even with the ability of neck motion to discriminate injured from non-injured subjects, the mechanisms to explain recovery or persistence of WAD remain unclear. There are few studies of ROM examinations with precision tools using kinematics as predictive factors of recovery rate. The present paper will evaluate the performance of an artificial neural network (ANN) using kinematic variables to predict the overall change of aROM after a period of rehabilitation in WAD patients. To achieve this goal the neck kinematics of a cohort of 1082 WAD patients (55.1% females), with mean age 37.68 (SD 12.88) years old, from across Spain were used. Prediction variables were the kinematics recorded by the EBI® 5 in routine biomechanical assessments of these patients. These include normalized ROM, speed to peak and ROM coefficient of variation. The improvement of aROM was represented by the Neck Functional Holistic Analysis Score (NFHAS). A supervised multi-layer feed-forward ANN was created to predict the change in NFHAS. The selected architecture of the ANN showed a mean squared error of 308.07–272.75 confidence interval for a 95% in the Monte Carlo cross validation. The performance of the ANN was tested with a subsample of patients not used in the training. This comparison resulted in a medium correlation with R = 0.5. The trained neural network to predict the expected difference in NFHAS between baseline and follow up showed modest results. While the overall performance is moderately correlated, the error of this prediction is still too large to use the method in clinical practice. The addition of other clinically relevant factors could further improve prediction performance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 237802311881462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Stanescu ◽  
Erik Wang ◽  
Soichiro Yamauchi

This article documents an approach to predicting children’s well-being using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which are representative of births in large U.S. cities. The authors use the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) to preprocess the data. They then apply the Amelia algorithm to impute missing data. Finally, they use LASSO again for prediction with the imputed data. The authors report the performance of this approach for six outcome variables. The approach achieves the best performance for the variable material hardship. The out-of-sample mean squared error of the authors’ prediction is 0.019, the lowest among all submissions in the Fragile Families Challenge. The authors find that among variables with high predictive power, variables from mother surveys dominate. Furthermore, components of material hardship in the past strongly predict current material hardship.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Moselund Rønnow ◽  
Thor André Brøndberg Stæhr ◽  
David Høyrup Christiansen

Abstract Background Persistent shoulder pain causes considerable disruption of the individual’s life and imposes high costs on healthcare and society. Well-informed treatment and referral pathways are crucial as unsuccessful interventions and longer duration of symptoms minimizes the likelihood of success in future interventions. Although physiotherapy is generally recommended as first line treatment, no prognostic model or clinical prediction rules exists to help guide the treatment of patients with persistent shoulder pain undergoing physiotherapy. Thus, the objective of this study was to develop a prognostic model to inform clinical decision making and predict change in symptoms and function in patients with persistent shoulder pain. Methods This was a prospective cohort study of 243 patients with persistent shoulder pain referred to outpatient physiotherapy rehabilitation centres. Data was collected at baseline and six-month follow-up. The outcome was change in shoulder symptoms and function as measured by the shortened version of the Disabilities of the Arm, Shoulder and Hand questionnaire (QuickDASH) from baseline to 6 months follow up. Potential predictors were included in a multivariable linear regression model which was pruned using modified stepwise backwards elimination. Results The final model consisted of seven predictors; baseline QuickDASH score, employment status, educational level, movement impairment classification, self-rated ability to cope with the pain, health-related quality of life and pain catastrophizing. Together these variables explained 33% of the variance in QuickDASH-change scores with a model root mean squared error of 17 points. Conclusion The final prediction model explained 33% of the variance in QuickDASH change-scores at 6 months. The root mean squared error (model SD) was relatively large meaning that the prediction of individual change scores was quite imprecise. Thus, the clinical utility of the prediction model is limited in its current form. Further work needs be done in order to improve the performance and precision of the model before external validity can be examined along with the potential impact of the model in clinical practice. Two of the included predictors were novel and could be examined in future studies; movement impairment classification based on diagnosis and health-related quality of life.


2012 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ádám Csorba ◽  
Vince Láng ◽  
László Fenyvesi ◽  
Erika Michéli

Napjainkban egyre nagyobb igény mutatkozik olyan technológiák és módszerek kidolgozására és alkalmazására, melyek lehetővé teszik a gyors, költséghatékony és környezetbarát talajadat-felvételezést és kiértékelést. Ezeknek az igényeknek felel meg a reflektancia spektroszkópia, mely az elektromágneses spektrum látható (VIS) és közeli infravörös (NIR) tartományában (350–2500 nm) végzett reflektancia-mérésekre épül. Figyelembe véve, hogy a talajokról felvett reflektancia spektrum információban nagyon gazdag, és a vizsgált tartományban számos talajalkotó rendelkezik karakterisztikus spektrális „ujjlenyomattal”, egyetlen görbéből lehetővé válik nagyszámú, kulcsfontosságú talajparaméter egyidejű meghatározása. Dolgozatunkban, a reflektancia spektroszkópia alapjaira helyezett, a talajok ösz-szetételének meghatározását célzó módszertani fejlesztés első lépéseit mutatjuk be. Munkánk során talajok szervesszén- és CaCO3-tartalmának megbecslését lehetővé tévő többváltozós matematikai-statisztikai módszerekre (részleges legkisebb négyzetek módszere, partial least squares regression – PLSR) épülő prediktív modellek létrehozását és tesztelését végeztük el. A létrehozott modellek tesztelése során megállapítottuk, hogy az eljárás mindkét talajparaméter esetében magas R2értéket [R2(szerves szén) = 0,815; R2(CaCO3) = 0,907] adott. A becslés pontosságát jelző közepes négyzetes eltérés (root mean squared error – RMSE) érték mindkét paraméter esetében közepesnek mondható [RMSE (szerves szén) = 0,467; RMSE (CaCO3) = 3,508], mely a reflektancia mérési előírások standardizálásával jelentősen javítható. Vizsgálataink alapján arra a következtetésre jutottunk, hogy a reflektancia spektroszkópia és a többváltozós kemometriai eljárások együttes alkalmazásával, gyors és költséghatékony adatfelvételezési és -értékelési módszerhez juthatunk.


Author(s):  
Nadia Hashim Al-Noor ◽  
Shurooq A.K. Al-Sultany

        In real situations all observations and measurements are not exact numbers but more or less non-exact, also called fuzzy. So, in this paper, we use approximate non-Bayesian computational methods to estimate inverse Weibull parameters and reliability function with fuzzy data. The maximum likelihood and moment estimations are obtained as non-Bayesian estimation. The maximum likelihood estimators have been derived numerically based on two iterative techniques namely “Newton-Raphson” and the “Expectation-Maximization” techniques. In addition, we provide compared numerically through Monte-Carlo simulation study to obtained estimates of the parameters and reliability function in terms of their mean squared error values and integrated mean squared error values respectively.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-58
Author(s):  
Ismail Sh. Baqer

A two Level Image Quality enhancement is proposed in this paper. In the first level, Dualistic Sub-Image Histogram Equalization DSIHE method decomposes the original image into two sub-images based on median of original images. The second level deals with spikes shaped noise that may appear in the image after processing. We presents three methods of image enhancement GHE, LHE and proposed DSIHE that improve the visual quality of images. A comparative calculations is being carried out on above mentioned techniques to examine objective and subjective image quality parameters e.g. Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio PSNR values, entropy H and mean squared error MSE to measure the quality of gray scale enhanced images. For handling gray-level images, convenient Histogram Equalization methods e.g. GHE and LHE tend to change the mean brightness of an image to middle level of the gray-level range limiting their appropriateness for contrast enhancement in consumer electronics such as TV monitors. The DSIHE methods seem to overcome this disadvantage as they tend to preserve both, the brightness and contrast enhancement. Experimental results show that the proposed technique gives better results in terms of Discrete Entropy, Signal to Noise ratio and Mean Squared Error values than the Global and Local histogram-based equalization methods


Geosciences ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 329
Author(s):  
Mahdi O. Karkush ◽  
Mahmood D. Ahmed ◽  
Ammar Abdul-Hassan Sheikha ◽  
Ayad Al-Rumaithi

The current study involves placing 135 boreholes drilled to a depth of 10 m below the existing ground level. Three standard penetration tests (SPT) are performed at depths of 1.5, 6, and 9.5 m for each borehole. To produce thematic maps with coordinates and depths for the bearing capacity variation of the soil, a numerical analysis was conducted using MATLAB software. Despite several-order interpolation polynomials being used to estimate the bearing capacity of soil, the first-order polynomial was the best among the other trials due to its simplicity and fast calculations. Additionally, the root mean squared error (RMSE) was almost the same for the all of the tried models. The results of the study can be summarized by the production of thematic maps showing the variation of the bearing capacity of the soil over the whole area of Al-Basrah city correlated with several depths. The bearing capacity of soil obtained from the suggested first-order polynomial matches well with those calculated from the results of SPTs with a deviation of ±30% at a 95% confidence interval.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 1237
Author(s):  
Ivan Pisa ◽  
Antoni Morell ◽  
Ramón Vilanova ◽  
Jose Lopez Vicario

Industrial environments are characterised by the non-lineal and highly complex processes they perform. Different control strategies are considered to assure that these processes are correctly performed. Nevertheless, these strategies are sensible to noise-corrupted and delayed measurements. For that reason, denoising techniques and delay correction methodologies should be considered but, most of these techniques require a complex design and optimisation process as a function of the scenario where they are applied. To alleviate this, a complete data-based approach devoted to denoising and correcting the delay of measurements is proposed here with a two-fold objective: simplify the solution design process and achieve its decoupling from the considered control strategy as well as from the scenario. Here it corresponds to a Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP). However, the proposed solution can be adopted at any industrial environment since neither an optimization nor a design focused on the scenario is required, only pairs of input and output data. Results show that a minimum Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) improvement of a 63.87% is achieved when the new proposed data-based denoising approach is considered. In addition, the whole system performance show that similar and even better results are obtained when compared to scenario-optimised methodologies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 7612
Author(s):  
Mahdis sadat Jalaee ◽  
Alireza Shakibaei ◽  
Amin GhasemiNejad ◽  
Sayyed Abdolmajid Jalaee ◽  
Reza Derakhshani

Coal as a fossil and non-renewable fuel is one of the most valuable energy minerals in the world with the largest volume reserves. Artificial neural networks (ANN), despite being one of the highest breakthroughs in the field of computational intelligence, has some significant disadvantages, such as slow training, susceptibility to falling into a local optimal points, sensitivity of initial weights, and bias. To overcome these shortcomings, this study presents an improved ANN structure, that is optimized by a proposed hybrid method. The aim of this study is to propose a novel hybrid method for predicting coal consumption in Iran based on socio-economic variables using the bat and grey wolf optimization algorithm with an artificial neural network (BGWAN). For this purpose, data from 1981 to 2019 have been used for modelling and testing the method. The available data are partly used to find the optimal or near-optimal values of the weighting parameters (1980–2014) and partly to test the model (2015–2019). The performance of the BGWAN is evaluated by mean squared error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE), standard deviation error (STD), and correlation coefficient (R^2) between the output of the method and the actual dataset. The result of this study showed that BGWAN performance was excellent and proved its efficiency as a useful and reliable tool for monitoring coal consumption or energy demand in Iran.


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