1,046 research outputs found
Ordinal Classifiers Can Fail on Repetitive Class Structures
Ordinal classifiers are constrained classification algorithms that assume a predefined (total) order of the class labels to be reflected in the feature space of a dataset. This information is used to guide the training of ordinal classifiers and might lead to an improved classification performance. Incorrect assumptions on the order of a dataset can result in diminished detection rates. Ordinal classifiers can, therefore, be used to screen for ordinal class structures within a feature representation. While it was shown that algorithms could in principle reject incorrect class orderings, it is unclear if all remaining candidate orders reflect real ordinal structures in feature space. In this work we characterize the decision regions induced by ordinal classifiers. We show that they can fulfill different criteria that might be considered as ordinal reflections. These criteria are mainly determined by the connectedness and the neighborhood of the decision regions. We evaluate them for ordinal classifier cascades constructed from binary classifiers. We show that depending on the type of base classifier they bear the risk of not rejecting non ordinal, like partial repetitive, structures
The Cards and Lottery Task: Validation of a New Paradigm Assessing Decision Making Under Risk in Individuals With Severe Obesity
Background: A growing body of research demonstrated impaired executive functions in
individuals with severe obesity, including increased sensitivity to reward and impulsive
decision making under risk conditions. For the assessment of decision making in patients
with severe obesity, studies widely used the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) or the Delay
Discounting Task (DDT), which cover short-term or long-term consequences of decisions
only. A further development originating from the field of addiction research is the Cards
and Lottery Task (CLT), in which each decision made has conflicting immediate and longterm
consequences at the same time. The present study aimed to validate the CLT in
individuals with severe obesity.
Methods: Patients with severe obesity (N = 78, 67% women, 42.9 ± 10.4 years old, body
mass index of 48.1 ± 8.3 kg/m2) were included. Convergent validity was evaluated using
the computerized Delay Discounting Task and well-established self-report questionnaires
assessing different aspects of impulsivity. For discriminant validity, CLT performance was
compared between symptom groups characterized by high versus low impulsivity. The
task’s clinical validity was evaluated based on associations with general and eating
disorder psychopathology, and body mass index. Test-retest reliability was determined by
administering the CLT in n = 31 participants without weight-loss treatment one year later.
The task’s sensitivity to change due to weight loss was evaluated by retesting n = 32
patients one year after receiving obesity surgery.
Results: The number of advantageous decisions in the CLT was significantly positively
associated with delay discounting and effortful control, and significantly negatively
correlated with behavioral impulsivity. CLT performance differed significantly between
individuals with and without symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and
between samples with severe obesity and healthy controls. Clinically, CLT performance
was significantly associated with general, but not eating disorder psychopathology. The
CLT showed moderate test-retest reliability after one year in weight-stable individuals and
was sensitive to change in those undergoing obesity surgery.
Conclusions: This study identified the CLT to be a highly promising, new complex
measure of short- and long-term decision making with good reliability and validity in
individuals with severe obesity. Future studies should assess its association with the IGT
and predictive value for real-life health behavior
Changes in visual attention towards food cues after obesity surgery: An eye-tracking study
Research documented the effectiveness of obesity surgery (OS) for long-term weight loss and improvements in medical and psychosocial sequelae, and general cognitive functioning. However, there is only preliminary evidence for changes in attentional processing of food cues after OS. This study longitudinally investigated visual attention towards food cues from pre- to 1-year post-surgery. Using eye tracking (ET) and a Visual Search Task (VST), attentional processing of food versus non-food cues was assessed in n = 32 patients with OS and n = 31 matched controls without weight-loss treatment at baseline and 1-year follow-up. Associations with experimentally assessed impulsivity and eating disorder psychopathology and the predictive value of changes in visual attention towards food cues for weight loss and eating behaviors were determined. During ET, both groups showed significant gaze duration biases to non-food cues without differences and changes over time. No attentional biases over group and time were found by the VST. Correlations between attentional data and clinical variables were sparse and not robust over time. Changes in visual attention did not predict weight loss and eating disorder psychopathology after OS. The present study provides support for a top-down regulation of visual attention to non-food cues in individuals with severe obesity. No changes in attentional processing of food cues were detected 1-year post-surgery. Further studies are needed with comparable methodology and longer follow-ups to clarify the role of biased visual attention towards food cues for long-term weight outcomes and eating behaviors after OS
Diagnostic tests in canine andrology - What do they really tell us about fertility?
Dog breeders often require breeding soundness evaluations which include andrological examinations of the genital organs, hormone measurements, and semen analyses. During the past decades, a considerable number of research results have been published, allowing diagnoses of specific andrological conditions and fertility assessment.
For specific examinations, however, no standard procedures have been defined and for some parameters different reference ranges have been published. Therefore, examination results from different facilities are difficult to compare and profound conclusions regarding health and fertility of a male dog are not always possible.
Conventional semen examination, however, is still useful in identifying deviations or no deviations from normality, especially if confounding factors are taken into account and if the exam is repeated in case of inconclusive findings. A standardization of examination procedures and reference ranges would help to harmonize the exchange of examination results and interpretation of the findings
Editorial: White matter dementia: neuropathological and neuropsychological underpinnings and state of the art diagnosis methods and treatments
Interrelations of resilience factors and their incremental impact for mental health: insights from network modeling using a prospective study across seven timepoints
Resilience can be viewed as trajectory of stable good mental health or the quick recovery of mental health during or after stressor
exposure. Resilience factors (RFs) are psychological resources that buffer the potentially negative effects of stress on mental
health. A problem of resilience research is the large number of conceptually overlapping RFs complicating their understanding.
The current study sheds light on the interrelations of RFs in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic as a use case for major disruptions.
The non-preregistered prospective study assessed a sample of 1275 German-speaking people from February 2020 to March 2021
at seven timepoints. We measured coping, hardiness, control beliefs, optimism, self-efficacy, sense of coherence (SOC), sense of
mastery, social support and dispositional resilience as RFs in February 2020, and mental health (i.e., psychopathological symptoms,
COVID-19-related rumination, stress-related growth) at all timepoints. Analyses used partial correlation network models and latent
growth mixture modeling (LGMM). Pre-pandemic RFs were strongly interrelated, with SOC being the most central node. The
strongest associations emerged between coping using emotional support and social support, SOC and sense of mastery, and
dispositional resilience and self-efficacy. SOC and active coping were negatively linked. When we examined RFs as predictors of
mental health trajectories, SOC was the strongest predictor of psychopathological symptoms and rumination, while trajectories of
stress-related growth were predicted by optimism. Subsequent network analyses, including individual intercepts and slopes from
LGMM, showed that RFs had small to moderate associations with intercepts but were unrelated to slopes. Our findings provide
evidence for SOC playing an important role in mental distress and suggest further examining SOC’s incremental validity. However,
our results also propose that RFs might be more important for stable levels of mental health than for adaptation processes over
time. The differential associations for negative and positive outcomes support the use of multidimensional outcomes in resilience
research
FĂĽr wen gebe ich mein Urteil ab? Der systematische Einfluss des Fragebogenadressaten auf Kausalattributionsgewichtungen bei geschlossenen Antwortformaten
Die Fragebogenforschung belegt, dass Respondenten durch Kontextinformationen eines Fragebogens systematisch in ihrem Antwortverhalten beeinflusst werden. So zeigten Norenzayan und Schwarz (1999), dass Probanden bei freier Antwortmöglichkeit eher persönlichkeitsbezogene Ursachen zur Erklärung von Straftaten nennen, wenn der Fragebogen scheinbar von einem Institut für Persönlichkeitsforschung (verglichen mit einem Institut für Sozialforschung) erstellt wurde. Hierzu diskutierte Erklärungen sind einerseits Konversationsmaximen, die einen Bezug zwischen Adressat und Gesagtem induzieren, andererseits kognitive Primings, die selektive kognitive Aktivierungen und damit Verfügbarkeiten bedingen sollen. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht diese Erklärungsalternativen, indem sie erstmals in einem analogen Studiendesign persönlichkeitsbezogene und soziale Gründe in geschlossenen Antwortformaten vorgibt und gewichten lässt. Mögliche Gewichtungsunterschiede sind somit nicht mittels kognitiver Verfügbarkeit erklärbar. Eine Kovarianzanalyse (Alter, Geschlecht und die Big-Five-Persönlichkeitsdimensionen als Kovariaten) belegt im Einklang mit den Konversationsmaximen eine signifikant stärkere Bedeutungszuschreibung für persönlichkeitsbezogene Ursachen unter der Bedingung „Institut für Persönlichkeitsforschung“ im Vergleich zu „Institut für Sozialforschung“ und einer Kontrollbedingung („Institut für Kriminologie“)
Review of AdS/CFT Integrability: An Overview
This is the introductory chapter of a review collection on integrability in
the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. In the collection we present an
overview of the achievements and the status of this subject as of the year
2010.Comment: 31 pages, v2: reference added, references to other chapters updated,
v3: footnote 1 on location of references added, v4: minor changes, references
added, accepted for publication in Lett. Math. Phys, v5: minor corrections,
links to chapters updated, attached IntAdS.pdf with all chapters in one file,
see http://arxiv.org/src/1012.3982/anc/IntAdS.pdf or
http://www.phys.ethz.ch/~nbeisert/IntAdS.pd
Folyóirat vagy gyűjteményes kötet? (Csokonai Diétai Magyar Múzsája)
BACKGROUND: The complex interplay between viral replication and host immune response during infection remains poorly understood. While many viruses are known to employ anti-immune strategies to facilitate their replication, highly pathogenic virus infections can also cause an excessive immune response that exacerbates, rather than reduces pathogenicity. To investigate this dichotomy in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), we developed a transcriptional network model of SARS-CoV infection in mice and used the model to prioritize candidate regulatory targets for further investigation. RESULTS: We validated our predictions in 18 different knockout (KO) mouse strains, showing that network topology provides significant predictive power to identify genes that are important for viral infection. We identified a novel player in the immune response to virus infection, Kepi, an inhibitory subunit of the protein phosphatase 1 (PP1) complex, which protects against SARS-CoV pathogenesis. We also found that receptors for the proinflammatory cytokine tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFα) promote pathogenesis, presumably through excessive inflammation. CONCLUSIONS: The current study provides validation of network modeling approaches for identifying important players in virus infection pathogenesis, and a step forward in understanding the host response to an important infectious disease. The results presented here suggest the role of Kepi in the host response to SARS-CoV, as well as inflammatory activity driving pathogenesis through TNFα signaling in SARS-CoV infections. Though we have reported the utility of this approach in bacterial and cell culture studies previously, this is the first comprehensive study to confirm that network topology can be used to predict phenotypes in mice with experimental validation
Strongly Correlated Quantum Fluids: Ultracold Quantum Gases, Quantum Chromodynamic Plasmas, and Holographic Duality
Strongly correlated quantum fluids are phases of matter that are
intrinsically quantum mechanical, and that do not have a simple description in
terms of weakly interacting quasi-particles. Two systems that have recently
attracted a great deal of interest are the quark-gluon plasma, a plasma of
strongly interacting quarks and gluons produced in relativistic heavy ion
collisions, and ultracold atomic Fermi gases, very dilute clouds of atomic
gases confined in optical or magnetic traps. These systems differ by more than
20 orders of magnitude in temperature, but they were shown to exhibit very
similar hydrodynamic flow. In particular, both fluids exhibit a robustly low
shear viscosity to entropy density ratio which is characteristic of quantum
fluids described by holographic duality, a mapping from strongly correlated
quantum field theories to weakly curved higher dimensional classical gravity.
This review explores the connection between these fields, and it also serves as
an introduction to the Focus Issue of New Journal of Physics on Strongly
Correlated Quantum Fluids: from Ultracold Quantum Gases to QCD Plasmas. The
presentation is made accessible to the general physics reader and includes
discussions of the latest research developments in all three areas.Comment: 138 pages, 25 figures, review associated with New Journal of Physics
special issue "Focus on Strongly Correlated Quantum Fluids: from Ultracold
Quantum Gases to QCD Plasmas"
(http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/focus/Focus%20on%20Strongly%20Correlated%20Quantum%20Fluids%20-%20from%20Ultracold%20Quantum%20Gases%20to%20QCD%20Plasmas
- …