To the Editor: We read with interest the report from Drs. Abdulmassih-Gonçalves and Gonçalves.1 The authors should be commended for publishing a case of ectasia after LASIK, which was detected and addressed by collagen cross-linking. We also appreciate their willingness in sharing the preoperative raw data from rotatingScheimpflug tomography, which generated interesting information that we addr...

A multivariate quantitative data is often summarized into a general index as a weighted sum when each variate has a prescribed order. Although the sum of standardized scores is a sensible choice of index, it may have negative correlation with some of the variates. In this paper, a general index that has positive correlation with all the variates is constructed. The index is applied to study the...

For classification problems, feature extraction is a crucial process which aims to find a suitable data representation that increases the performance of the machine learning algorithm. According to the curse of dimensionality [4] theorem, the number of samples needed for a classification task increases exponentially as the number of dimensions (variables, features) increases. On the other hand,...

Chemical probes are essential tools for understanding biological systems and for target validation, yet selecting probes for biomedical research is rarely based on objective assessment of all potential compounds. Here, we describe the Probe Miner: Chemical Probes Objective Assessment resource, capitalizing on the plethora of public medicinal chemistry data to empower quantitative, objective, da...

Big Data Optimization is the term used to refer to optimization problems which have to manage very large amounts of data. In this paper, we focus on the parallelization of metaheuristics with the Apache Spark cluster computing system for solving multi-objective Big Data Optimization problems. Our purpose is to study the influence of accessing data stored in the Hadoop File System (HDFS) in each...

In this study we analyze the utility of an assessment center for selecting sales representatives of an German insurance company. Unlike most other utility studies an objective indicator of job performance yearly sales figures is used. The sales figures allow a simple and valid computation of the standard deviation of performance, the Achilles’ heel of utility analysis. Our results which are mai...

An objective method was developed to analyze longwave and shortwave trough lines in wind field data using different methods, given that these trough lines were researched in different ways. Longwave trough lines were analyzed by locating the cyclonic center and filtering candidate trough points simultaneously; the candidate longwave trough points were then traced based on distance and angle con...

In this paper, a numerical expert system using probabilistic reasoning with influence structure generated from the observed data is demonstrated. Instead of using an expert to encode the influence diagram, the system has the capability to construct it from the objective data. In cases where data are correlated, instead of compromising the performance by wrestling with different influence struct...

The microarray technology allows to monitor the expression level of thousands of genes simultaneously. A typical experiment will for example compare gene expression between multiple biological samples such as tumor biopsies, or a single sample in response to a treatment over time. It is assumed that genes with similar function or sharing regulatory elements will display a common expression prof...