Recent reviews of the rapidly growing scientific literature on neighbourhood green space and health show strong evidence for protective and restorative effects on mental wellbeing. However, multiple informants are common when reporting mental wellbeing in studies of children. Do different informants lead to different results? This study utilised nationally representative data on Goodman's 25-it...

We introduce the Locally Linear Latent Variable Model (LL-LVM), a probabilistic model for non-linear manifold discovery that describes a joint distribution over observations, their manifold coordinates and locally linear maps conditioned on a set of neighbourhood relationships. The model allows straightforward variational optimisation of the posterior distribution on coordinates and locally lin...

We introduce the Locally Linear Latent Variable Model (LL-LVM), a probabilistic model for non-linear manifold discovery that describes a joint distribution over observations, their manifold coordinates and locally linear maps conditioned on a set of neighbourhood relationships. The model allows straightforward variational optimisation of the posterior distribution on coordinates and locally lin...

This paper is concerned with the development of intelligent decision support methodologies for nurse rostering problems in large modern hospital environments. We present an approach which hybridises heuristic ordering with variable neighbourhood search. We show that the search can be extended and the solution quality can be significantly improved by the careful combination and repeated use of h...

Natural environments especially greenspace may play an important role in enhancing people’s mental health. However, the existing literature mainly assesses exposure residential neighbourhood ignoring dynamic nature of daily movements and histories. Also, most research from ‘over-head’ perspective whereas ‘eye-level’ better capture experiences greenspace, including its quality. We examine import...

Mappings that preserve neighbourhood relationships are relevant in bothpractical and biological contexts. It is important to be clear about precisely what preserving neighbourhoods could mean. We give a definition of a “perfectly neighbourhood preserving” map, which we call a topographic homeomorphism, and prove that this has certain desirable properties. When a topographic homeomorphism does n...

BACKGROUND Recent increases in violent crime may impact a variety of health outcomes in Mexico. We examined relationships between neighbourhood-level violence and smoking behaviours in a cohort of Mexican smokers from 2011 to 2012, and whether neighbourhood-level social cohesion modified these relationships. METHODS Data were analysed from adult smokers and recent ex-smokers who participated ...

Constructing examination timetable for higher educational institutions is a very complex work due to the complexity of timetabling problems. The objective of examination timetabling problem is to satisfy the hard constraints and minimize the violations of soft constraints. In this paper, a tabu-based memetic approach has been applied and evaluated against the latest methodologies in the literat...