Recommender systems have been used in e-commerce and online social networks. Among various challenges to construct such systems, how to parameterize them and their evaluations are two vaguely explored issues. Generally, each recommendation strategy has parameters and factors that can be varied. In this article, we propose to evaluate the impact of key parameters of two state-of-the-art function...

Drug discovery is dependent on finding a very small number of biologically active or potent compounds among millions of compounds stored in chemical collections. Quantitative structure-activity relationships suggest that potency of a compound is highly related to that compound's chemical makeup or structure. To improve the efficiency of cell-based analysis methods for high throughput screening,...

The quality of video transmitted by mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can be influenced by several factors, including protocol layers; parameter settings of each protocol. In this paper, we are concerned with understanding the functional relationship between these influential factors and objective video quality in MANETs. We illustrate a systematic statistical design of experiments (DOE) strategy...

Soybean lecithin containing a mixture of phospholipids (PLs) is an important co product obtained during soybean oil refining. Saturated rich PLs find several applications in food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical areas. The present study reports a simple, rapid, efficient and continuous hydrogenation process using 10% Pd/C catalyst at various temperatures and pressures. Degree of hydrogenation was m...

In order to improve biosurfactant production by Yarrowia lipolytica IMUFRJ 50682, a factorial design was carried out. A 2(4) full factorial design was used to investigate the effects of nitrogen sources (urea, ammonium sulfate, yeast extract, and peptone) on maximum variation of surface tension (Delta ST) and emulsification index (EI). The best results (67.7% of EI and 20.9 mN m(-1) of Delta ST...

The present study was aimed at investigating the effect of hydrotrope and surfactant on poor solubility of atorvastatin calcium. Excipients screening followed by factorial design was performed to study effect of excipients and manufacturing methods on solubility of drug. Three independent factors (carrier, surfactant and manufacturing method) were evaluated at two levels using solubility as a d...

A Two-Level Fractional Factorial design was employed to develop and optimize the combination of demographic characteristics that has the greatest effect on the spread of HIV in the South African population. HIV prevalence (dependent variable) was found to be highly sensitive to changes in the mother’s age (15-55years) and level of education (Grades 0-13) (independent variables), using the 2006 ...

For treating colonic diseases, conventional oral drug delivery systems are not effective, as they fail to reach the appropriate site of action. Thus, there is a need to develop effective and safe therapy for the treatment of colonic disorders. The aim of the present study was to design a colon-specific delivery system for an anti-inflammatory drug, mesalamine, with minimal degradation and optim...

Regular two-level fractional factorial designs are often used in industrial experiments as screening experiments. When some factors have levels which are hard or expensive to change, restrictions are often placed on the order in which runs can be performed, resulting in a split-plot factorial design. In these cases, the hard or expensive to change factors are applied to whole plots, whereas the...

This paper presents a mixed-level factorial design for scalability analysis of the Zereal Massively Multiplayer Game Simulator. The selected factors are number of killers, monsters and CPUs in addition to the killer and monster vision radius. The analysis show that the factors explain approximately 85% of the model (measured in square of errors), which is surprisingly good since the simulation ...