Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Investigation of Standard and Ensemble Based Classification Techniques for the Prediction of Hospitalization Duration

An Investigation of Standard and Ensemble Based Classification Techniques for the Prediction of Hospitalization Duration Samaneh Sheikh-Nia University of Guelph, 2012 Advisors: Dr. G. Gréwal Dr. S. Areibi In any health-care system, early identification of individuals who are most at risk of developing an illness is vital, not only to ensure that a patient is provided with the appropriate treatment, but also to avoid the considerable costs associated with unnecessary hospitalization. To achieve this goal there is a need for a breakthrough prediction method that is capable of dealing with a real world medical data which is inherently complex. In this study, we show how standard classification algorithms can be employed collectively to predict the length of stay in a hospital of a patient in the upcoming year, based on their medical history. Multiple classifiers are used to perform the prediction task, since real world medical data is significantly complex making the classification task very challenging. The data is voluminous, consists of wide range of class values some of which with a few instances, and it is highly unbalanced making the classification of minority classes very difficult. We propose two Sequential Ensemble Classification (SEC) schemes, one based on an ensemble of homogeneous classifiers, and a second based on a heterogeneous ensemble of classifiers, in three hierarchical granularity levels. The goal of using this system is to provide increased performance over the standard classifiers. This method is highly beneficial when dealing with complex data which is multi-class and highly unbalanced.
Impaired pre-competition wellbeing measures can negatively impact running performance in developmental youth female soccer players

This study aimed to determine the association between pre-competition perceived player wellbeing measures and subsequent relative and peak running performance of developmental youth female soccer players (n = 15, age: 16 ± 1 years). Total distance (TD), high-speed (> 3.5 m/s) (HSRD) and very high-speed (> 5.3 m/s) running (VHSRD) were expressed using 1-, 2- and 5-minute epochs and relative (per minute) calculations. Fatigue, sleep quality, upper and lower-body muscle soreness, stress, and mood wellbeing measures were collected via a self-reported questionnaire (1–5 Likert scale). Menstrual cycle phase was collected via a calendar-based countback method. Results demonstrated that reductions in stress was associated with decreased relative and peak TD in all epochs (p = 0.008–0.040), relative and peak HSRD (p = 0.006–0.039) in 2- and 5-minute epochs as well as VHSRD in 2-minute epochs (p = 0.026). For example, a one-point reduction of ‘normal’ to ‘relaxed’ is associated with a decrease of 7 m/min in peak TD for 1-minute epochs. One-point increase in fatigue (e.g., ‘normal’ to ‘more tired than normal’) displayed a decrease of 7 m/min peak TD for 2-minute (p = 0.048) and 9 m/min for 5-minute (p = 0.007) rolling epochs. Likewise, one-point increase in lower-body muscle-soreness (e.g., ‘normal’ to ‘increase in soreness/tightness’) was associated with a reduction of 6 m/min peak VHSRD for 1-minute epochs (p = 0.034). Results suggest that perceived player wellbeing can influence running performance. However, the magnitude of the change in player wellbeing should be considered in a practical sense.
Supporting educators’ emotional work with infants and their families around transitions at the start of the day

ABSTRACT This article describes the professional development program, Baby Playspace Learning (BPL), and evaluates its capacity to build close relationships between educators, parents, their infants and infant peers during the morning transitions in ECEC settings. Using a pre-post design, video recordings of 20 (10 pre and 10 post) morning transitions were collected across a 12-month period and analysed for developing closeness, by measuring the frequency of triangular interactions, educators’ use of relational language and physical availability (sitting down, being still and holding infants in a curled position to relax). All measures of closeness increased significantly post-test, indicating that BPL created more opportunities for building closeness between all parties. BPL can enhance educator professionalism by showing educators how to engage in practices that help them to realise close relationships in a group setting. This gives parents, infants and infant peers the experience of belonging to a secure base culture where closeness is valued.
Spectral Methods for Fractional Arfima Processes

Riassunto: Nel presente lavoro, nella finalita di stimare il parametro di lunga memoria di un processo ARIMA frazionale, ci si avvale di metodologie basate sulla decomposizione ortogonale del processo temporale. In particolare si propone un’integrazione dell’analisi di Fourier con l’espansione di Karhunen-Loeve e con la trasformata discreta wavelet al fine di migliorare le proprieta campionarie degli stimatori basati sull’approssimazione della densita spettrale alle basse frequenze.
Underwater Image Quality Improvement via Color, Detail, and Contrast Restoration

Due to the complex imaging mechanism, underwater images often suffer from multiple degradation issues, such as color cast, blurry detail, and low contrast, which affect the extraction of valuable information. To deal with these degradation issues, a simple yet effective underwater image quality improvement method based on color, detail and contrast restoration (CDCR) is developed, which consists of three key modules: a well-preserved finding-driven color balance module (CBM), a linear saturation transformation-based discriminant function-based detail restoration module (DRM), and a transmission minimization-oriented contrast restoration module (CRM). First, the CBM explores a well-preserved channel finding and employs a channel compensation strategy to balance the color differences among three color channels. Second, the DRM uses a piecewise underwater image saturation estimation strategy, which takes the various spectral properties of water into account and designs an additional linear saturation transformation-based discriminant function to prevent the transmission from being under-estimated. At last, the CRM estimates a global backscatter light based on transmission minimization and further improves the contrast by locally removing the backscatter light of the base layer. Our restored image is appealing in its natural color, fine details, and high contrast. Extensive experiments on three underwater image enhancement datasets show that our CDCR achieves better results than state-of-the-art methods, i.e., compared with the second-best method, the average PCQI and UIQM values of our method increase by 5.7% and 0.2%, and the average Blur and DFAD values of our method decrease by 8.0% and 5.3%. Meanwhile, experiments further suggest that the rate of new visible edges and the quality of contrast restoration of our CDCR at least increase by 7.7% and 51.2% in most tested sandstorm and foggy images, respectively, which demonstrates that our method has a good generalization capability for sandstorm and foggy image restoration.
Fully distributed bipartite output formation tracking for heterogeneous singular multiagent systems on signed digraphs

This article investigates the bipartite output formation tracking problem of heterogeneous singular multiagent systems (MASs) over a signed digraph on which two types of cases without and with input saturation are considered, respectively. First, a novel formation tracking protocol is presented for heterogeneous singular MASs in the absence of input saturation constraints. In the proposed protocol, a distributed observer with adaptive updating mechanism is constructed for each follower, which does not involve global information of communication graph. Based on the observer, the designed controller addresses bipartite output formation tracking of heterogeneous singular MASs in a fully distributed fashion. Then, by the output regulation theory and low‐gain feedback technique, a low‐gain formation tracking protocol is proposed to achieve semi‐global bipartite output formation tracking for heterogeneous singular MASs subject to input saturation constraints. Finally, two simulation examples are given to illustrate the feasibility of theoretical results.
Simple Method For Control of Phosphate Level of Manure Using Magnesium Oxide

: A simple method is described for the reduction of available phosphate released from soaking manure in water. The method involves the indirect contact of magnesium oxide, MgO, with manure soaked in water for pre-specified time. Preliminary study indicated that phosphate could be removed effectively by MgO addition and the precipitation is accelerated by NH 4 Cl addition. Thus, and for economic reasons, the study was continued using only MgO. Two sets of experiments were carried out. Water was used for the extraction of manure by shaking for 2 h followed by press filtration. The aqueous phase was used for phosphate removal experiments. The weighed amount of MgO was placed in a cotton bag fixed to the stirring bar of a jar tester. The concentration of phosphate was monitored after equilibration for 0, 7, 30, 50, 89, 100, 120, 150 and 192 hours. In the other set of experiments, weighed amount of manure powder (Less than 2 mm diameter particles) was placed in 50-mL capacity capped plastic bottles (50 bottles) with various amounts of MgO: 0, 0.4, 0.8, 1.4 and 2.0% (by weight MgO:Manure) in 9 bottles each. Water was added to the bottles to make 40 mL. The bottles were shaken on a rotary shaker at 250 rpm. One set of bottles containing the different amounts of MgO was removed from the shaker after 2 hours. The other sets were removed after 7, 10, 25, 24, 36, 48, 72 and 120 hours. Phosphate was determined in the filtered aqueous samples. The first seven hours was enough to cause a removal of 65-70% of phosphate from solution. The removal of the remaining part of phosphate required as long as 9 days. It was concluded that MgO in clothing bags may be suspended and moved inside manure-water suspension for 10 hours to extract the majority of the phosphate. The remaining manure may be used for fertilization with harmless phosphate content that may not result in the growth of undesirable water environment plants. The reacted oxide in the bags can then be used later as a slowly released phosphate source (Struvite) for plant application a matter that increase the economy of the method.
Gilbert damping in binary magnetic multilayers

We present quantum mechanical calculations of the Gilbert damping constant α in ultrathin L10 [Co/NM]N superlattices and (001) fcc [Co/NM]N magnetic multilayers built of cobalt and nonmagnetic metals NM = Cu, Ag, Pd, Pt, and Au. The calculations are performed within a realistic nine-orbital tight-binding model of the band structure including spin-orbit interaction. The dependence of α on the stacking number N , ferromagnetic and nonmagnetic layer thicknesses as well as the electron scattering rate is investigated. The damping constant is shown to be the sum of a constant term (bulklike) and a 1/N term (due to external surfaces) which arise from interand intraband electronic transitions, respectively. The calculated α is found to be enhanced in the considered multilayers in comparison with its values for bulk Co and their bilayer counterparts with the same total Co thickness. The origin of this enhancement and the variation of α with the geometric structure of the multilayers are further investigated by analyzing the damping contributions from individual atomic layers. The obtained theoretical results for the damping constant are shown to be in good agreement with previous experimental observations in magnetic multilayers. In particular, the experimentally observed linear dependence on the ratio of NM (Pd or Pt) and Co layer thicknesses is reproduced in the present calculations.
Archetype of Male Supernatural Power in Pararaton and Babad Giri Kedhaton

Abstract: The research deals with the archetype of supernatural power in Pararaton and Babad Giri Kedhaton. How are the supernatural power archetypes portrayed in Pararaton and Babad Giri Kedhaton? The theory of archetype, Pararaton, supernatural power, and a qualitative research design are applied to answer that research problem. The Morphology discussed focuses on the difference between Hindu and Islamic traditions. The finding shows that Pararaton and Babad Giri Kedathon show male-dominated figures. The archetype of male supernatural power in Pararaton and Babad Giri Kedhaton is portrayed as shining, disciplined, and a great achievement as a king. To sum up, the two stories reflect that the heroes (Propp’s idea of a hero) are male holy figures having supernatural power as miracles. Therefore, the fabula of stories has many similarities. However, both books have different traditions so the differences influence how stories are told as the suzhet. Keywords: archetype, babad, morphology, supernatural power
Growth Curve of Brazilian Creole Chickens (Canela-Preta Breed) Raised in Two Different Rearing Systems under Tropical Climate

The objective of this study was to describe the growth curve of Brazilian Creole chickens of the Canela-Preta breed raised in two different rearing systems using non-linear growth models. A total of 400 birds were divided into two groups of 200 animals (of both genders), which were kept in confined or semi-confined systems. The confined birds were housed in an experimental masonry shed and the semi-confined animals were housed in another shed with access to pasture from 29 days of age. Birds were individually weighed every seven days during six months for determination of the growth curves of body weight using 10 non-linear models. The parameters of the models were estimated using the Gauss Newton method. The performance of the models was assessed using mean squared error (MSE), coefficient of determination (R 2 ), percentage of convergence, and residual mean absolute deviation (MAD). With the exception of the Inverse Polynomial, all the other models had R 2 values close to one. Therefore, the best models were chosen based on the lowest MSE and MAD values, with the Richards model ranking first followed by the Von Bertalanffy model. Gender and rearing system effects significantly influenced ( p< 0.05) some parameters of the Richards model. In conclusion, the Richards model was the most adequate to describe the growth of Canela-Preta chickens. Gender and rearing system significantly influenced the growth of the birds. The growth rates observed indicated that management strategies can be performed to increase the production efficiency of Canela-Preta chickens
Combining convolutional attention mechanism and residual deformable Transformer for infarct segmentation from CT scans of acute ischemic stroke patients

Background Segmentation and evaluation of infarcts on medical images are essential for diagnosis and prognosis of acute ischemic stroke (AIS). Computed tomography (CT) is the first-choice examination for patients with AIS. Methods To accurately segment infarcts from the CT images of patients with AIS, we proposed an automated segmentation method combining the convolutional attention mechanism and residual Deformable Transformer in this article. The method used the encoder-decoder structure, where the encoders were employed for downsampling to obtain the feature of the images and the decoder was used for upsampling and segmentation. In addition, we further applied the convolutional attention mechanism and residual network structure to improve the effectiveness of feature extraction. Our code is available at: https://github.com/XZhiXiang/AIS-segmentation/tree/master. Results The proposed method was assessed on a public dataset containing 397 non-contrast CT (NCCT) images of AIS patients (AISD dataset). The symptom onset to CT time was less than 24 h. The experimental results illustrate that this work had a Dice coefficient (DC) of 58.66% for AIS infarct segmentation, which outperforms several existing methods. Furthermore, volumetric analysis of infarcts indicated a strong correlation (Pearson correlation coefficient = 0.948) between the AIS infarct volume obtained by the proposed method and manual segmentation. Conclusion The strong correlation between the infarct segmentation obtained via our method and the ground truth allows us to conclude that our method could accurately segment infarcts from NCCT images.
Scattering matrixes of hexagonal ice crystals of cirrus clouds calculated for problems of radiation balance

The scattering (Mueller) matrix has been calculated for the ice crystals of cirrus clouds within the framework of both the geometrical-optics and physical-optics approximations. It is shown that the geometrical-optics solution matches its physical-optics counterpart rather well at the intervals of the zenith scattering angles between 20° – 160° except some deviations in the regions of the halos of 22° and 46°. However, the difference between these solutions is essential in the vicinity of the forward and backward scattering directions. In particular, we show that the geometrical-optical singularity known for the element M11 at the backward scattering direction is accompanied by sign-changing contributions from different ray-trajectories for other elements of the Mueller matrix that was known earlier. These sign-changing peculiarities are inherent to the physical-optics solution as well.
A New Approach to Empirical Investigation under Persistence, Endogeneity, and Heterogeneity for South Asia: Understanding of the Deeper Dynamics of the Relationship Among Income Disparity and Education

This study experimentally explores the income disparity and education expansion association, that is, strengthening average years of schooling and shrinking schooling disparity, using a sample of South Asian nations from 1980 to 2015 with five years regular interval. South Asian economies are frequently investigated in the literature on disparity, and the World Development Report primarily focused on educational problems and expounded on a high level of learning disparity in South Asia. The dynamic panel Arellano-Bond Following current work, the study employs GMM estimating approaches to report questions of ‘persistence and endogeneity’; we notice a huge, optimistic, statistically important, and steady average years of schooling and income disparity association in South Asian economies. The average years of education are positively correlated with income disparity, which is consistent with constant or rising returns to more years of education. We also find a slight and not necessarily statistically significant positive association among educational expense and income disparity, as well as a statistically significant unfavorable relationship among income disparity and immature associates. Statistical tests show that our identification instruments and vibrant indicators are both reliable. The increase of schooling is likely to continue lowering disparity, according to policy worries. This function will decline as nations grow, but it might be strengthened by putting more effort into lowering educational quality disparities.
STDP-Driven Rewiring in Spiking Neural Networks under Stimulus-Induced and Spontaneous Activity

Mathematical and computer simulation of learning in living neural networks have typically focused on changes in the efficiency of synaptic connections represented by synaptic weights in the models. Synaptic plasticity is believed to be the cellular basis for learning and memory. In spiking neural networks composed of dynamical spiking units, a biologically relevant learning rule is based on the so-called spike-timing-dependent plasticity or STDP. However, experimental data suggest that synaptic plasticity is only a part of brain circuit plasticity, which also includes homeostatic and structural plasticity. A model of structural plasticity proposed in this study is based on the activity-dependent appearance and disappearance of synaptic connections. The results of the research indicate that such adaptive rewiring enables the consolidation of the effects of STDP in response to a local external stimulation of a neural network. Subsequently, a vector field approach is used to demonstrate the successive “recording” of spike paths in both functional connectome and synaptic connectome, and finally in the anatomical connectome of the network. Moreover, the findings suggest that the adaptive rewiring could stabilize network dynamics over time in the context of activity patterns’ reproducibility. A universal measure of such reproducibility introduced in this article is based on similarity between time-consequent patterns of the special vector fields characterizing both functional and anatomical connectomes.
Mate Discrimination Using Chemical Cues by Male Guppies

Males often perform mate choice with the aim of maximizing reproductive success. To identify profitable mates, the males of some animals are known to use visual and chemical cues derived from females. In this study, we aimed to examine mate discrimination by male guppies (Poecilia reticulata) using chemical cues received from females under different reproductive statuses, i.e., virgin females, pregnant females, females after copulation with another male, and post-partum females. We conducted a dichotomous choice experiment for each combination of chemical stimuli from females under different reproductive statuses. In experiment 1, in which females were removed from water that was subsequently used as a chemical stimulus, male preferences did not differ significantly in all combinations of chemical stimuli from females under different reproductive statuses. However, in experiment 2, in which females remained within bottles containing the water used as a chemical stimulus, with the exception of one combination of chemical stimuli, significant differences in male preferences were detected for chemical stimuli derived from females under different reproductive statuses. Overall, males generally showed a preference for chemical stimulus received from females after copulation with other males. The findings of this study indicate that male guppies can discriminate the reproductive status of females based solely on chemical cues that may disappear or degenerate within a short period of time, thereby facilitating profitable mate choice.
Techniques in micromagnetic simulation and analysis

Advances in nanofabrication now allow us to manipulate magnetic material at micro- and nanoscales. As the steps of design, modelling and simulation typically precede that of fabrication, these improvements have also granted a significant boost to the methods of micromagnetic simulations (MSs) and analyses. The increased availability of massive computational resources has been another major contributing factor. Magnetization dynamics at micro- and nanoscale is described by the Landau–Lifshitz–Gilbert (LLG) equation, which is an ordinary differential equation (ODE) in time. Several finite difference method (FDM) and finite element method (FEM) based LLG solvers are now widely use to solve different kind of micromagnetic problems. In this review, we present a few patterns in the ways MSs are being used in the pursuit of new physics. An important objective of this review is to allow one to make a well informed decision on the details of simulation and analysis procedures needed to accomplish a given task using computational micromagnetics. We also examine the effect of different simulation parameters to underscore and extend some best practices. Lastly, we examine different methods of micromagnetic analyses which are used to process simulation results in order to extract physically meaningful and valuable information.