Comparing hard and overlapping clusterings

Similarity measures for comparing clusterings is an important component, e.g., of evaluating clustering algorithms, for consensus clustering, and for clustering stability assessment. These measures have been studied for over 40 years in the domain of exclusive hard clusterings (exhaustive and mutually exclusive object sets). In the past years, the literature has proposed measures to handle more general clusterings (e.g., fuzzy/probabilistic clusterings). This paper provides an overview of these new measures and discusses their drawbacks. We ultimately develop a corrected-for-chance measure (13AGRI) capable of comparing exclusive hard, fuzzy/probabilistic, non-exclusive hard, and possibilistic clusterings. We prove that 13AGRI and the adjusted Rand index (ARI, by Hubert and Arabie) are equivalent in the exclusive hard domain. The reported experiments show that only 13AGRI could provide both a fine-grained evaluation across clusterings with different numbers of clusters and a constant evaluation between random clusterings, showing all the four desirable properties considered here. We identified a high correlation between 13AGRI applied to fuzzy clusterings and ARI applied to hard exclusive clusterings over 14 real data sets from the UCI repository, which corroborates the validity of 13AGRI fuzzy clustering evaluation. 13AGRI also showed good results as a clustering stability statistic for solutions produced by the expectation maximization algorithm for Gaussian mixture

Efficient Computation of Multiple Density-Based Clustering Hierarchies

HDBSCAN*, a state-of-the-art density-based hierarchical clustering method, produces a hierarchical organization of clusters in a dataset w.r.t. a parameter mpts. While the performance of HDBSCAN* is robust w.r.t. mpts in the sense that a small change in mpts typically leads to only a small or no change in the clustering structure, choosing a "good" mpts value can be challenging: depending on the data distribution, a high or low value for mpts may be more appropriate, and certain data clusters may reveal themselves at different values of mpts. To explore results for a range of mpts values, however, one has to run HDBSCAN* for each value in the range independently, which is computationally inefficient. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach to compute all HDBSCAN* hierarchies for a range of mpts values by replacing the graph used by HDBSCAN* with a much smaller graph that is guaranteed to contain the required information. An extensive experimental evaluation shows that with our approach one can obtain over one hundred hierarchies for the computational cost equivalent to running HDBSCAN* about 2 times.Comment: A short version of this paper appears at IEEE ICDM 2017. Corrected typos. Revised abstrac

The jailer of himself

The article analyzes the connections between electronic monitoring devices and prison, focusing on the impacts of tracking systems on the lives of monitored persons. The text is based on the analysis of legal documents, interviews and field research conducted between 2015 and 2018 with individuals submitted to electronic monitoring in the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The first movement of the article presents the development of the electronic monitoring policy in Brazil, concomitant with the increase of the country’s prison population. Following, some of the interfaces established between prison and electronic supervision are investigated. Finally, the third movement analyzes the political dimensions of electronic monitoring and the subjectivation processes triggered by them. In general, the text is motivated by the interest on the current transformations operated by the power of punishing, as well as the re-articulation of the strategies of conducts conduction mobilized by new control technologies.O artigo analisa as conexões entre os dispositivos de monitoramento eletrônico de presos e o dispositivo carcerário, com enfoque nos impactos dos sistemas de rastreamento sobre a vida de pessoas monitoradas. O texto se baseia na análise de documentos legais, entrevistas e pesquisa de campo realizadas entre 2015 e 2018 junto a presos e presas submetidos à utilização de tornozeleiras eletrônicas nos estados de São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro. No primeiro movimento do artigo, apresenta-se o desenvolvimento da política de monitoração no país, concomitante ao incremento da população prisional brasileira. Em seguida, são descritas algumas das interfaces estabelecidas entre a prisão e a supervisão eletrônica. Por fim, o terceiro movimento analisa as dimensões políticas dos dispositivos de monitoramento eletrônico e seus processos correspondentes de subjetivação. De maneira geral, o texto é motivado pelo interesse nas atuais transformações operadas pelo poder de punir, assim como na rearticulação das estratégias de condução das condutas mobilizadas pelas novas tecnologias de controle

O ornitorrinco penal: Monitoramento eletrônico nas ruínas de Pedrinhas

Baseado em pesquisa etnográfica e análise documental, o artigo analisa a implementação do monitoramento eletrônico de pessoas no Maranhão durante os anos subsequentes à série de massacres no Complexo Penitenciário de Pedrinhas. Mobilizou-se dados estatísticos sobre o crescimento da população prisional maranhense e o desenvolvimento dos programas de monitoramento entre 2014 e 2018. O texto recupera o conceito de ornitorrinco, de Chico de Oliveira, para descrever os processos de acoplamento entre o velho e o novo, o arcaico e o moderno, o imundo e o asséptico

Battlegrounds: mobilizing humanitarian discourses in São Paulo detention centers

The text presented here, based on ethnographic research conducted in institutions of social control in São Paulo, such as prisons, juvenile detention units, and custodial and psychiatric treatment hospitals, is an attempt to examine, in spaces of confinement that operate as battlefields, the distinct uses that are intrinsic to the lexicon of human rights. Starting from the power struggles that play out in spaces of detention, we focus on two important vectors: (1) the activation of the discourse of human rights as a tactic of struggle, mobilized by adolescents who dispute for control over internment spaces; and (2) the continuum between the legal lexicon and forms of institutional violence, where the humanitarian discourse is intertwined with the practice of torture in São Paulo detention facilities. In this analysis, it is important to shed light on the distortions, uses and mobilizations that permeate human rights discourses, a prism that allows us to pass from law as a promise of pacification to politics as permanent war.O texto que ora apresentamos, tendo como base pesquisas etnográficas realizadas em instituições de controle social de São Paulo, tais como prisões, unidades de internação para adolescentes e hospitais de custódia e tratamento psiquiátrico, consiste em uma tentativa de perscrutar, em espaços de confinamento que operam como campos de batalha, os distintos agenciamentos intrínsecos à gramática dos direitos humanos. Tomando como ponto de partida os jogos de poder travados em espaços de reclusão, importa prospectar dois vetores: (1) o acionamento da gramática dos direitos humanos como tática de luta, mobilizada por adolescentes que disputam o controle de espaços de internação, e (2) o continuum entre o léxico jurídico e as formas de violência institucional, em que o discurso humanitário se articula às práticas de tortura em unidades prisionais paulistas. No horizonte analítico, importa lançar luz sobre torções, agenciamentos e mobilizações que atravessam os discursos dos direitos humanos, prisma que possibilita a passagem do direito como promessa de pacificação à política como guerra permanente

The Area Under the ROC Curve as a Measure of Clustering Quality

The Area Under the the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) Curve, referred to as AUC, is a well-known performance measure in the supervised learning domain. Due to its compelling features, it has been employed in a number of studies to evaluate and compare the performance of different classifiers. In this work, we explore AUC as a performance measure in the unsupervised learning domain, more specifically, in the context of cluster analysis. In particular, we elaborate on the use of AUC as an internal/relative measure of clustering quality, which we refer to as Area Under the Curve for Clustering (AUCC). We show that the AUCC of a given candidate clustering solution has an expected value under a null model of random clustering solutions, regardless of the size of the dataset and, more importantly, regardless of the number or the (im)balance of clusters under evaluation. In addition, we elaborate on the fact that, in the context of internal/relative clustering validation as we consider, AUCC is actually a linear transformation of the Gamma criterion from Baker and Hubert (1975), for which we also formally derive a theoretical expected value for chance clusterings. We also discuss the computational complexity of these criteria and show that, while an ordinary implementation of Gamma can be computationally prohibitive and impractical for most real applications of cluster analysis, its equivalence with AUCC actually unveils a much more efficient algorithmic procedure. Our theoretical findings are supported by experimental results. These results show that, in addition to an effective and robust quantitative evaluation provided by AUCC, visual inspection of the ROC curves themselves can be useful to further assess a candidate clustering solution from a broader, qualitative perspective as well.Comment: 37 pages, 5 figures, submitted for publicatio

Impacto da reeducação funcional respiratória na pessoa com derrame pleural : Uma revisão sistemática da literatura

Introdução: O derrame pleural define-se como a acumulação anormal de líquido no espaço pleural, podendo ser causado por um significativo número de situações patológicas e originar importantes complicações, dependendo o seu tratamento da causa e da dimensão do derrame. A reeducação funcional respiratória, levada a efeito pelos enfermeiros especialistas em enfermagem de reabilitação, ao englobar um conjunto de técnicas que atuam na respiração com implicações diretas na mecânica alveolar, é vista como uma intervenção potenciadora da redução dos sintomas e otimização da funcionalidade. Neste contexto, o objetivo deste estudo pretende determinar de que forma a reeducação funcional respiratória tem impacto nas pessoas com derrame pleural. Métodos: Foi realizada uma revisão sistemática da literatura sobre estudos que avaliavam o impacto da reeducação funcional respiratória no derrame pleural. Fez-se pesquisa na PUBMED, EBSCO, Google Académico e SciELO de estudos publicados entre janeiro de 2008 e maio de 2017 que foram posteriormente avaliados, respeitando os critérios de inclusão e exclusão previamente estabelecidos. Resultados: Três estudos preencheram os critérios de inclusão, cujos resultados revelam que em pessoas com derrame pleural pretende-se, com a reeducação funcional respiratória, impedir a formação de aderências pleurais, evitar a limitação da mobilidade toraco-pulmonar e diafragmática; impedir ou corrigir as posições antiálgicas defeituosas e as suas consequências, impedir as deformações posturais como a retração do hemitórax comprometido e limitação da articulação escápulo-umeral; incentivar a expansão pulmonar e promover a reabsorção do derrame pleural com a finalidade de melhorar a performance pulmonar. Também as evidências encontradas nos permitiram elaborar um plano de intervenção direccionado à pessoa com derrame pelural. Conclusão: O programa de reeducação funcional respiratória é uma mais-valia como tratamento coadjuvante, trazendo benefícios significativos para as pessoas ao nível da performance pulmonar, assim como na diminuição do tempo de internamento. Palavras-chave: Reabilitação Respiratória, Exercícios Respiratórios; Reeducação Funcional Respiratória, Derrame Pleural.Abstract Introduction: Pleural effusion is defined as the abnormal accumulation of fluid in the pleural space, which can be caused by a significant number of pathological conditions and cause major complications, depending on the treatment of the cause and size of the effusion. Respiratory functional reeducation, carried out by nurses specialized in rehabilitation nursing, encompassing a set of breathing techniques with direct implications in alveolar mechanics, is seen as an intervention that enhances the reduction of symptoms and optimization of functionality. In this context, the aim of this study is to determine how functional respiratory reeducation affects people with pleural effusion. Methods: A systematic review of the literature on studies evaluating the impact of respiratory functional reeducation on pleural effusion was carried out. PUBMED, EBSCO, Google Scholar and SciELO were searched for studies published between January 2008 and May 2017 that were subsequently evaluated, respecting the previously established inclusion and exclusion criteria. RESULTS: Three studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria, and the results show that in people with pleural effusion it is intended, with functional respiratory reeducation, to prevent the formation of pleural adhesions, to avoid the limitation of thoroco-pulmonary and diaphragmatic mobility; preventing or correcting defective analgesic positions and their consequences, preventing postural deformations such as compromised hemithorax retraction and limitation of the sputum-humeral joint; encourage lung expansion and promote the reabsorption of pleural effusion in order to improve pulmonary performance. Also the evidences found allowed us to elaborate a plan of intervention directed to the person with pelural effusion. Conclusion: The respiratory functional re-education program is an added value as an adjunct treatment, bringing significant benefits to patients in terms of pulmonary performance and decreased length of hospital stay. Keywords: Respiratory Rehabilitation, Respiratory Exercises; Respiratory Functional Reeducation, Pleural Effusion

A cluster based hybrid feature selection approach

Data collection and storage capacities have increased significantly in the past decades. In order to cope with the increasingly complexity of data, feature selection methods have become an omnipresent preprocessing step in data analysis. In this paper we present a hybrid (filter — wrapper) feature selection method tailored for data classification problems. Our hybrid approach is composed of two stages. In the first stage, a filter clusters features to identify and remove redundancy. In the second stage, a wrapper evaluates different feature subsets produced by the filter, determining the one that produces the best classification performance in terms of accuracy. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated through an empirical evaluation performed on real-world datasets coming from various sources.FAPESP (Grant #2011/04247-5 and #2013/18698-4)CNPq (Grant #304137/2013-8