The passing rate of the Medical Licensing Examination has been variable, which probably originated from the difference in the difficulty of items and/or difference in the ability level of examinees. We tried to explain the origin of the difference using the test equating method based on the item response theory. The number of items and examinees were 500, 3,647 in 2003 and 550, 3,879 in 2004. C...

Multipoint lod scores are typically calculated for a grid of locus positions, moving the putative disease locus across a fixed map of genetic markers. Changing the order of a set of markers and/or the distances between the markers can make a substantial difference in the resulting lod score curve and the location and height of its maximum. The typical approach of using the best maximum likeliho...

A novel strategy to optimize consensus classifiers for large classification problems is proposed, based on Linear Programming (LP) techniques and the recently introduced Maximum Feasibility (MaxF) heuristic for solving infeasible LP problems. For a set of classifiers and their normalized class dependent scores one postulates that the consensus score is a linear combination of individual scores....

BACKGROUND In medical research both propensity score methods and logistic regression analysis are used to estimate treatment effects in observational studies. From literature reviews it has been concluded that treatment effect estimates from both methods are quite similar. With this study we will show that there are systematic differences which can be substantial. METHODS We used a simulated ...

please cite this article as: ordobazari m, naqavi al-hosseini aa, zafarmand h. a novel approach for craniofacial symmetry evaluation: using the midsagittal reference line drawn from “crista gali” with nhp technique. novel biomed 2013;1(2):48-53. background and objective: the purpose of this study was the determination of midsagittal reference line (msl) for craniofacial asymmetry assessment by ...

Can a truth-bearer be true but not determinately so? On the enduringly popular standard supervaluational conception of indeterminacy, under which the principle of bivalence is invalid, the answer is a straightforward No. On such a conception, truth just is determinate truth—truth in all admissible interpretations. For that reason, a more interesting question is: can a truth-bearer be true but n...

In a structural error model the structural quasi score (SQS) estimator is based on the distribution of the latent regressor variable. If this distribution is misspecified the SQS estimator is (asymptotically) biased. Two types of misspecification are considered. Both assume that the statistician erroneously adopts a normal distribution as his model for the regressor distribution. In the first t...