Effect of paternal education about complementary feeding of infants in Kisumu county, Kenya

Improved health of infants is dependent on the supportive role of the fathers. There is limited research done in Kenya on father involvement and how it affects feeding practices of the infant. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact on complementary feeding practice of nutrition education targeted to the father. A randomized control trial was conducted with 290 father-mother pairs recruited into the study. The mothers, who were six months pregnant and receiving antenatal services at Kisumu County Hospital, provided the contact point for recruitment of the fathers who were engaged in this study. The consenting mothers provided information of the ‘expectant father’ who were later contacted and invited to go to the hospital together with the mother. Consent was obtained from the study participants in a written form. Randomization was done to the father-mother pairs and eventually, each group had 145 pairs. The pairs in the intervention group were educated on complementary feeding while the other pairs in the control group did not get any intervention. Post-natal, feeding on solids and semi-solids of the infants were assessed at six months and at nine months of age. Qualitative assessment through focus group discussions were done to obtain information on fathers’ support towards complementary feeding. Overall analysis was done on 278 pairs with 12 lost to follow up. Introduction to solids and semi-solids had been done by a majority (96.7%) by six months of the infant’s age in both groups. Solid and semi-solid foods were introduced significantly earlier in the control group and compared to the intervention group (chi-square test; p<0.01). Minimum acceptable diet was significantly higher in the intervention group than the control group (chi-square test; p<0.01). In conclusion, giving fathers information on complementary feeding influences their support towards infant feeding, resulting in positive outcomes in complementary feeding practices.Key words: Father, Involvement, Infant, Complementary feeding, Nutrition Education, Kisumu, Keny

A learning strategy for developing neural networks using repetitive observations

Neural networks can model system behaviors by learning past system observations. As system observations are usually collected by human judgments, physical experiments or sensor measures, they can be inherently imprecise and inconsistent over time. System behaviors can be learned more completely from repetitive observations. However, repetitive observations can be very different due to system or measurement uncertainty. If abnormal observations are used for developing neural networks, spurious behaviors can be learnt and the neural networks are likely to generate spurious prediction. If abnormal observations are excluded, important system behaviors can partially be ignored. In this paper, a novel strategy is proposed to develop neural networks by learning repetitive observations. Numerous neural networks are developed individually based on either abnormal or normal observations. The predictions generated based on the individual neural networks are integrated to a single prediction. Analytical proof indicates that the overall observation uncertainty involved on the proposed learning strategy is less than the uncertainty involved on the general ones. As less uncertainty is involved, more effective learning can be performed on the proposed strategy. Two case studies are conducted in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed learning strategy, where the two case studies are involved data collection from either sensor measures or human evaluations. Numerical results indicate that the proposed strategy can generate better neural networks which have higher fitting capability to captured observations and higher generalization capability to uncaptured samples