Isometric Sliced Inverse Regression for Nonlinear Manifolds Learning

[[abstract]]Sliced inverse regression (SIR) was developed to find effective linear dimension-reduction directions for exploring the intrinsic structure of the high-dimensional data. In this study, we present isometric SIR for nonlinear dimension reduction, which is a hybrid of the SIR method using the geodesic distance approximation. First, the proposed method computes the isometric distance between data points; the resulting distance matrix is then sliced according to K-means clustering results, and the classical SIR algorithm is applied. We show that the isometric SIR (ISOSIR) can reveal the geometric structure of a nonlinear manifold dataset (e.g., the Swiss roll). We report and discuss this novel method in comparison to several existing dimension-reduction techniques for data visualization and classification problems. The results show that ISOSIR is a promising nonlinear feature extractor for classification applications.[[incitationindex]]SCI[[booktype]]紙本[[booktype]]電子

A multi-center study on the attitudes of Malaysian emergency health care staff towards allowing family presence during resuscitation of adult patients

BACKGROUND The practice of allowing family members to witness on-going active resuscitation has been gaining ground in many developed countries since it was first introduced in the early 1990s. In many Asian countries, the acceptability of this practice has not been well studied. AIM We conducted a multi-center questionnaire study to determine the attitudes of health care professionals in Malaysia towards family presence to witness ongoing medical procedures during resuscitation. METHODS Using a bilingual questionnaire (in Malay and English language), we asked our respondents about their attitudes towards allowing family presence (FP) as well as their actual experience of requests from families to be allowed to witness resuscitations. Multiple logistic regression was used to analyze the association between the many variables and a positive attitude towards FP. RESULTS Out of 300 health care professionals who received forms, 270 responded (a 90% response rate). Generally only 15.8% of our respondents agreed to allow relatives to witness resuscitations, although more than twice the number (38.5%) agreed that relatives do have a right to be around during resuscitation. Health care providers are significantly more likely to allow FP if the procedures are perceived as likely to be successful (e.g., intravenous cannulation and blood taking as compared to chest tube insertion). Doctors were more than twice as likely as paramedics to agree to FP (p-value = 0.002). This is probably due to the Malaysian work culture in our health care systems in which paramedics usually adopt a 'follow-the-leader' attitude in their daily practice. CONCLUSION The concept of allowing FP is not well accepted among our Malaysian health care providers

Integrated manufacturing/distribution planning decisions with multiple imprecise goals in an uncertain environment

Manufacturing/distribution planning decisions, Possibilistic linear programming, Supply chains, Fuzzy set, Multi-objective linear programming,