Sequential Allocation and Balancing Prognostic Factors in a Psychiatric Clinical Trial

In controlled clinical trials, each of several prognostic factors should be balanced across the trial arms. Traditional restricted randomization may be proved inadequate especially with small sample sizes. In psychiatric disorders such as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), small trials prevail. Therefore, procedures to minimize the chance of imbalance between treatment arms are advisable. This paper describes a minimization procedure specifically designed for a clinical trial that evaluates treatment efficacy for OCD patients. Aitchison's compositional distance was used to calculate vectors for each possibility of allocation in a covariate adaptive method. Two different procedures were designed to allocate patients in small blocks or sequentially one-by-one. Partial results of this allocation procedure as well as simulated ones are shown. In the clinical trial for which this procedure was developed, the balancing between treatment arms was achieved successfully. Simulations of results considering different arrival order of patients showed that most of the patients are allocated in a different treatment arm if arrival order is modified. Results show that a random factor is maintained with the random arrival order of patients. This specific procedure allows the use of a large number of prognostic factors for the allocation decision and was proved adequate for a psychiatric trial design

Energy in an Expanding Universe in the Teleparallel Geometry

The main purpose of this paper is to explicitly verify the consistency of the energy-momentum and angular momentum tensor of the gravitational field established in the Hamiltonian structure of the Teleparallel Equivalent of General Relativity (TEGR). In order to reach these objectives, we obtained the total energy and angular momentum (matter plus gravitational field) of the closed universe of the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW). The result is compared with those obtained from the pseudotensors of Einstein and Landau-Lifshitz. We also applied the field equations (TEGR) in an expanding FLRW universe. Considering the stress energy-momentum tensor for a perfect fluid, we found a teleparallel equivalent of Friedmann equations of General Relativity (GR).Comment: 19 pages, no figures. Revised in view of Referee's comments. Version to appear in the Brazilian Journal of Physic

Space-time Torsion and Neutrino Oscillations in Vacuum

The objective of this study is to verify the consistency of the prescription of alternative minimum coupling (connection) proposed by the Teleparallel Equivalent to General Relativity (TEGR) for the Dirac equation. With this aim, we studied the problem of neutrino oscillations in Weitzenbock space-time in the Schwarzschild metric. In particular, we calculate the phase dynamics of neutrinos. The relation of spin of the neutrino with the space-time torsion is clarified through the determination of the phase differences between spin eigenstates of the neutrinos.Comment: 07 pages, no figure

Comparative Enumeration Gene Expression

This paper is about differential gene expression measured by transcript counting methods such as SAGE or MPSS. It introduces two significance tests for detection of differential expressed tags: frequentist and Bayesian. Under the frequentist view, it is proposed a test that computes the critical level as a function of each tag total frequency. Under the Bayesian view the Full Bayesian Significance Test is used considering the logistic normal distribution. The two proposed significance levels, the frequentist and the Bayesian, are compared for a data set with four libraries. The linking function between them is a Beta distribution function with mean 0.39 and standard deviation 0.30

Angular Momentum of the BTZ Black Hole in the Teleparallel Geometry

We carry out the Hamiltonian formulation of the three- dimensional gravitational teleparallelism without imposing the time gauge condition, by rigorously performing the Legendre transform. Definition of the gravitational angular momentum arises by suitably interpreting the integral form of the constraint equation Gama^ik=0 as an angular momentum equation. The gravitational angular momentum is evaluated for the gravitational field of a rotating BTZ black hole.Comment: 17 pages, no figures, v2: some misprints corrected, Ref.s added, Eq.s revised, submitted to General Relativity and Gravitatio

Bayesian Analysis of Simple Random Densities

A tractable nonparametric prior over densities is introduced which is closed under sampling and exhibits proper posterior asymptotics.Comment: 19 pages; 6 figure