Out of Control: Growth and Indirect Discrimination in Ada and Canyon Counties' Rental Processes

Minimal research has been done on race in evictions and the rental process, and those studies that have been performed have been limited to narrow geographical regions (Thomas, 2017; Desmond, 2016). Additionally, research hasn’t been extended to Idaho, a state that is recognized for its rapid population growth. Research on evictions’ impact on New Americans is essentially nonexistent. Employing the Naïve Bayes Model, a modification of the Naïve Bayes Model, and content analysis of interviews, this study sought to uncover the impact of racial discrimination and growth in the eviction process. The results proved that black and Latinx minorities are evicted at higher rates than their white and Asian counterparts and that a lack of tenant protections and rapidly increasing housing prices, among other things, have played pivotal roles in Idaho’s eviction rates, specifically of racial minorities.

Machine Learning increases efficiency and timeliness of National Procedural Clinical Standards KPI reporting (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Background: Quality Assurance activities are frequently dependent on manual assessment of text-based records. Increasingly, these records have digital structures that may be amenable to computer analysis. We used the Australian Commission for Safety and Quality in Healthcare (ACSQHC) National Clinical Care Colonoscopy standard reporting requirement as a proof of concept for an analytics process to streamline and reduce manual reporting overheads. The endoscopy unit performs approximately 4,500 colonoscopies (mainly outpatient) per year. Quarterly reporting of colonoscopy outcomes requires approximately 30 hours of manual data abstraction, collation and combination from a variety of electronic databases. The most time consuming is manual retrieval and abstraction of histopathology records from the EMR. OBJECTIVE 1. To reduce the manual overheads of quarterly National Standards KPI reporting for colonoscopy compliance using an automated data pipeline and Artificial Intelligence tools. 2. The service also wished to minimise the risk of failure to follow up in new cancer diagnoses for outpatient colonoscopies. 3. To develop a data and analytic pipeline that would be easily re-purposed for additional standards, audit and research projects. METHODS A data pipeline and analysis environment were established in the hospitals’ secure Microsoft Azure databricks resource. A Training data set of 1000 colonoscopies was extracted using from the procedural Provation database using the the ProvationMD ® reporting tool and linked to relevant histopathology reports provided from the Clinical Research Data Warehouse (CRDW). The Machine Learning (ML) training data set was created when histopathological reports were manually coded by Gastroenterology Registrars & nurses into the following categories: Adenoma Clinically Significant Sessile Serrated Adenoma Cancer Adequate Bowel Preparation Complete examination A variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) & ML models were assessed and refined to minimize error rate. Sensitivity was prioritised for the diagnosis of Cancer to minimize missed cases. Reporting to clinicians and quality co-ordinators was established using Microsoft Power BI. RESULTS The Naïve Bayes model for multinomial data resulted in high accuracy, but impacted recall. Sensitivity improved using a virtual ensemble approach, layering models within the processing pipeline and maximised using Microsoft’s ® Text Analytics – Healthcare NLP model with our custom Naïve Bayes model. F1 scores between 0.89 and 0.93 were achieved. The algorithm checks daily for new data and performs the analysis. Quarterly analysis and reporting time decreased from 30 hours to less than 5 minutes and reports can now be continuously updated in the Microsoft Power BI reporting portal. CONCLUSIONS Advanced analytic techniques can be deployed for mandatory quality reporting in a secure, cloud based, hospital data domain. The cost was far less than the manual processes it replaces. Reporting is more timely as it is automated. The potential for training such algorithms for other QA reporting is high. Text based research and audit within the free text domain of the EMR clinical documentation also becomes possible. CLINICALTRIAL Not applicable

A novel dissolved oxygen prediction model based on enhanced semi-naive Bayes for ocean ranches in northeast China

A challenge of achieving intelligent marine ranching is the prediction of dissolved oxygen (DO). DO directly reflects marine ranching environmental conditions. Through accurate DO predictions, timely human intervention can be made in marine pasture water environments to avoid problems such as reduced yields or marine crop death due to low oxygen concentrations in the water. We use an enhanced semi-naive Bayes model for prediction based on an analysis of DO data from marine pastures in northeastern China from the past three years. Based on the semi-naive Bayes model, this paper takes the possible values of a DO difference series as categories, counts the possible values of the first-order difference series and the difference series of the interval before each possible value, and selects the most probable difference series value at the next moment. The prediction accuracy is optimized by adjusting the attribute length and frequency threshold of the difference sequence. The enhanced semi-naive Bayes model is compared with LSTM, RBF, SVR and other models, and the error function and Willmott’s index of agreement are used to evaluate the prediction accuracy. The experimental results show that the proposed model has high prediction accuracy for DO attributes in marine pastures.

Frequentist and Bayesian Approaches for Understanding Route Choice of Drivers under Stop-and-Go Traffic

Driving in congested traffic is a nuisance that not only results in longer travel times, but also triggers frustration and impatience among drivers. A few studies have modeled the effects of congested traffic in the resulting route choice behavior of car drivers. The studies used frequentist models such as discrete choice models to analyze large samples. However, these studies did not compare the inferences obtained from the frequentist and Bayesian approaches, particularly for datasets which are not sufficiently large. It has been shown by researchers that Bayesian models perform well, especially when the sample size is small. Thus, this paper develops and compares a multinomial logit (frequentist) and a Naïve Bayes (Bayesian) model on a mid-sized dataset of size around 100 participants which was obtained from a driving simulator experiment to understand driver’s route choice under stop-and-go traffic. The results show that the prediction power of the Naïve Bayes model is much higher than the multinomial logit model (MNL). The Naïve Bayes model is also found to perform better than machine learning algorithms like the decision tree model. The findings from this study will be useful to researchers and practitioners as they should test both the approaches and select the appropriate model, particularly in the case of seemingly large datasets.