BACKGROUND Community-level analysis of the human microbiota has culminated in the discovery of relationships between overall shifts in the microbiota and a wide range of diseases and conditions. However, existing work has primarily focused on analysis of relatively simple dichotomous or quantitative outcomes, for example, disease status or biomarker levels. Recently, there is also considerable ...

Search in and presentation of multimedia collections is an important and complex task. Often it involves various search strategies and the visualization of found object collections. Technically, search strategies can be formulated using distance measures between object pairs. In this paper we propose the use of a projection based method to dynamically arrange a set of objects (here images) give...

the wisdom of crowds, an innovative theory described in social science, claims that the aggregate decisions made by a group will often be better than those of its individual members if the four fundamental criteria of this theory are satisfied. this theory used for in clustering problems. previous researches showed that this theory can significantly increase the stability and performance of lea...

W investigate whether partners in a brand alliance should be similar or dissimilar in brand image to foster favorable perceptions of brand fit. Using a Bayesian nonlinear structural equation model and evaluations of 1,200 brand alliances, we find that the conceptual coherence in brand personality profiles predicts attitudes towards a brand alliance. More specifically, we find that similarity in...

Many practical applications in machine learning require pairwise distances among a set of objects. It is often desirable that these distance measurements satisfy the properties of a metric, especially the triangle inequality. Applications that could benefit from the metric property include data clustering and metric-based indexing of databases. In this paper, we present the metric nearness prob...

Traditional clustering algorithms usually rely on a pre-defined similarity measure between unlabelled data to attempt to identify natural classes of items. When compared to what a human expert would provide on the same data, the results obtained may be disappointing if the similarity measure employed by the system is too different from the one a human would use. To obtain clusters fitting user ...

Clustering is a powerful tool in revealing the intrinsic organization of data. A clustering of structural patterns consists of an unsupervised association of data based on the similarity of their structures and primitives. This chapter addresses the problem of structural clustering, and presents an overview of similarity measures used in this context. The distinction between string matching and...

To facilitate the intuitional analysis of protein sequences, a novel graphical representation of protein sequences called ADLD (Alignment Diagonal Line Diagram) is introduced in this paper first, and then a new ADLD based method is proposed and utilized to analyze the similarity/dissimilarity of protein sequences. Comparing with existing methods, our ADLD based method is proved to be effective ...