Secular changes refer to short-term biological changes ostensibly due to environmental factors. Two well-documented secular trends in many populations are earlier age of menarche and increasing stature. This study synthesizes data on maximum clavicle length and fusion of the medial epiphysis in 1840-1980 American birth cohorts to provide a comprehensive assessment of developmental and morpholog...

In this study, the aim was to compare experimental and empirical methods used for estimation soil water retention under different conditions. Soil samples were chosen represent examples of heavy, medium light structures. Water curves obtained in laboratory using standard method. The van Genuchten (1980) (vG), Brooks Corey (1964) (BC) empirically. Model parameters determined by artificial neural...

A calibration transfer method for near-infrared (NIR) spectra based on spectral regression is proposed. Spectral regression method can reveal low dimensional manifold structure in high dimensional spectroscopic data and is suitable to transfer the NIR spectra of different instruments. A comparative study of the proposed method and piecewise direct standardization (PDS) for standardization on tw...

This paper is concerned with the construction and analysis of a universal estimator for the regression problem in supervised learning. Universal means that the estimator does not depend on any a priori assumptions about the regression function to be estimated. The universal estimator studied in this paper consists of a least-square fitting procedure using piecewise constant functions on a parti...

Trend forecasting and proper understanding of the future changes is necessary for planning in health-care area.One of the problems of analytic methods is determination of the number and location of the breakpoints, especially for fluctuation data. In this area, few researches are published when number and location of the nodes are not specified.In this paper, a clustering-based method is develo...

We introduce a new approach to image estimation based on a flexible constraint framework that encapsulates meaningful structural image assumptions. Piecewise image models (PIMs) and local image models (LIMs) are defined and utilized to estimate noise-corrupted images, PIMs and LIMs are defined by image sets obeying certain piecewise or local image properties, such as piecewise linearity, or loc...

Methods We surveyed the plant species of 44 small islands over a 5-year period from 1998 to 2002. Hurricanes Lili and Michelle occurred in 1996 and 2001, respectively; both storms affected small islands on the more exposed south-west side of Great Exuma to a greater degree than small islands on the more protected north-east side. A set of 27 islands was surveyed in 1998 and 2002 to evaluate spe...