OBJECTIVES To translate and culturally adapt the CMS and assess the validity of the Brazilian version (CMS-BR). METHODS The translation was carried out according to the back-translation method by four independent translators. The produced versions were synthesized through extensive analysis and by consensus of an expert committee, reaching a final version used for the cultural adaptation. A f...

OBJECTIVE To develop, standardize, and partly validate a developmental scale for toddlers (age, 1.6 to 3 years) attending anganwadis in India. METHODS After the development of the 12-item Developmental Assessment Tool for Anganwadis (DATA), its internal consistency, face validity, content validity and construct validity were studied in 100 toddlers in anganwadis and were found to be appropria...

In August 2009, the Federal Reserve Bank reports the volume of consumer credit-card debt in the United States to be in excess of $900 billion. According to the 2009 Nilson Report this number is projected to grow by 20% in 2010. Developing an optimal strategy for collecting such an enormous debt is a crucial operational problem that, to the best of our knowledge, has not been successfully studie...

In this paper, we focus on the problem of unsupervised clustering which allows automatic setting of optimal clusters number. We present a generalization of the competitive agglomeration clustering algorithm firstly introduced in [1]. This generalization is inspired by the regularization theory and suggests a new schema for using various cluster validity criteria continuously proposed in the lit...

Bayesian hierarchical clustering (BHC) is an agglomerative clustering method, where a probabilistic model is defined and its marginal likelihoods are evaluated to decide which clusters to merge. While BHC provides a few advantages over traditional distance-based agglomerative clustering algorithms, successive evaluation of marginal likelihoods and careful hyperparameter tuning are cumbersome an...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to determine how the medical performance of physicians during consultations is related to doctor-patient communication and satisfaction of patients, taking into account the actual length of the consultations. In addition, we studied the validity of the 'efficiency-per-time score' as a measure of competence. METHODS General practice trainees participated in...

Clustering attempts to discover significant groups present in a data set. It is an unsupervised process. It is difficult to define when a clustering result is acceptable. Thus, several clustering validity indices are developed to evaluate the quality of clustering algorithms results. In this paper, we propose to improve the quality of a clustering algorithm called ”CLUSTER” by using a validity ...

Clustering is a mostly unsupervised procedure and the majority of the clustering algorithms depend on certain assumptions in order to define the subgroups present in a data set. As a consequence, in most applications the resulting clustering scheme requires some sort of evaluation as regards its validity. In this paper we present a clustering validity procedure, which evaluates the results of c...

Due to the availability of a vast amount unstructured data in various forms (e.g., web, social networks, etc.), clustering text documents has become increasingly important. Traditional algorithms have not been able solve this problem because semantic relationships between words could accurately represent meaning documents. Thus, document extensively utilized enhance quality clustering. This met...