1,490 research outputs found
Ward's Hierarchical Clustering Method: Clustering Criterion and Agglomerative Algorithm
The Ward error sum of squares hierarchical clustering method has been very
widely used since its first description by Ward in a 1963 publication. It has
also been generalized in various ways. However there are different
interpretations in the literature and there are different implementations of
the Ward agglomerative algorithm in commonly used software systems, including
differing expressions of the agglomerative criterion. Our survey work and case
studies will be useful for all those involved in developing software for data
analysis using Ward's hierarchical clustering method.Comment: 20 pages, 21 citations, 4 figure
Patient and health care professional decision-making to commence and withdraw from renal dialysis: A systematic review of qualitative research
Background and objectives. To ensure decisions to start and stop dialysis in end stage kidney disease are shared, the factors that affect patients and healthcare professionals in making such decisions need to be understood. This systematic review aims to explore how and why different factors mediate the choices about dialysis treatment. Design, setting, participants, and measurements. Medline, Embase, CINAHL and PsychINFO were searched for qualitative studies of factors that affect patientsâ and/or healthcare professionalsâ decisions to commence or withdraw from dialysis. A thematic synthesis was conducted. Results. Of 494 articles screened, 12 studies (conducted: 1985-2014) were included. These involved 206 predominantly haemodialysis patients and 64 healthcare professionals (age range: patients 26-93; professionals 26-61 years). (i) Commencing dialysis: patients based their choice on âgut-instinctâ as well as deliberating the impact of treatment on quality-of-life and survival. How individuals coped with decision-making was influential, some tried to take control of the problem of progressive renal failure, whilst others focussed on controlling their emotions. Healthcare professionals weighed-up biomedical factors and were led by an instinct to prolong life. Both patients and healthcare professionals described feeling powerless. (ii) Dialysis withdrawal: Only after prolonged periods of time on dialysis, were the realities of life on dialysis fully appreciated and past choice questioned. By this stage however patients were physically treatment dependent. Similar to commencing dialysis, individuals coped with treatment withdrawal in a problem or emotion-controlling way. Families struggled to differentiate choosing versus allowing death. Healthcare teams avoided and queried discussions regarding dialysis withdrawal. Patients however missed the dialogue they experienced during pre-dialysis education. Conclusions. Decision-making in end stage kidney disease is complex, dynamic, and evolves over time and towards death. The factors at work are multi-faceted and operate differently for patients and health professionals. More training and research on open-communication and shared decision-making is needed
Degenerating families of dendrograms
Dendrograms used in data analysis are ultrametric spaces, hence objects of
nonarchimedean geometry. It is known that there exist -adic representation
of dendrograms. Completed by a point at infinity, they can be viewed as
subtrees of the Bruhat-Tits tree associated to the -adic projective line.
The implications are that certain moduli spaces known in algebraic geometry are
-adic parameter spaces of (families of) dendrograms, and stochastic
classification can also be handled within this framework. At the end, we
calculate the topology of the hidden part of a dendrogram.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure
Fast, Linear Time Hierarchical Clustering using the Baire Metric
The Baire metric induces an ultrametric on a dataset and is of linear
computational complexity, contrasted with the standard quadratic time
agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm. In this work we evaluate
empirically this new approach to hierarchical clustering. We compare
hierarchical clustering based on the Baire metric with (i) agglomerative
hierarchical clustering, in terms of algorithm properties; (ii) generalized
ultrametrics, in terms of definition; and (iii) fast clustering through k-means
partititioning, in terms of quality of results. For the latter, we carry out an
in depth astronomical study. We apply the Baire distance to spectrometric and
photometric redshifts from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey using, in this work,
about half a million astronomical objects. We want to know how well the (more
costly to determine) spectrometric redshifts can predict the (more easily
obtained) photometric redshifts, i.e. we seek to regress the spectrometric on
the photometric redshifts, and we use clusterwise regression for this.Comment: 27 pages, 6 tables, 10 figure
Mumford dendrograms and discrete p-adic symmetries
In this article, we present an effective encoding of dendrograms by embedding
them into the Bruhat-Tits trees associated to -adic number fields. As an
application, we show how strings over a finite alphabet can be encoded in
cyclotomic extensions of and discuss -adic DNA encoding. The
application leads to fast -adic agglomerative hierarchic algorithms similar
to the ones recently used e.g. by A. Khrennikov and others. From the viewpoint
of -adic geometry, to encode a dendrogram in a -adic field means
to fix a set of -rational punctures on the -adic projective line
. To is associated in a natural way a
subtree inside the Bruhat-Tits tree which recovers , a method first used by
F. Kato in 1999 in the classification of discrete subgroups of
.
Next, we show how the -adic moduli space of
with punctures can be applied to the study of time series of
dendrograms and those symmetries arising from hyperbolic actions on
. In this way, we can associate to certain classes of dynamical
systems a Mumford curve, i.e. a -adic algebraic curve with totally
degenerate reduction modulo .
Finally, we indicate some of our results in the study of general discrete
actions on , and their relation to -adic Hurwitz spaces.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure
Decision boundaries using Bayes factors: the case of cloud masks
We assess the use of an approximation to the Bayes factor for objectively assessing spatial segmentation models. The Bayes factor allows us to automatically determine thresholds, in multidimensional feature space, for such objectives as cloud mask definition. We compare our results with a cloud map currently provided as a data product
Network Resources for Astronomers
The amount of data produced by large observational facilities and space
missions has led to the archiving and on-line accessibility of much of this
data, available to the entire astronomical community. This allows a much wider
multi-frequency approach to astronomical research than previously possible.
Here we provide an overview of these services, and give a basic description of
their contents and possibilities for accessing them. Apart from services
providing observational data, many of those providing general information, e.g.
on addresses, bibliographies, software etc. are also described. The field is
rapidly growing with improved network technology, and our attempt to keep the
report as complete and up-to-date as possible will inevitably be outdated
shortly. We will endeavor to maintain an updated version of this document
on-line.Comment: 53 pages; uuencoded compressed PostScript; includes one table, no
figures; Lyon-41 (Aug'94) and ESO-1033 (Sept'94), to appear in PASP, November
1994 issu
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