BACKGROUND Two most important considerations in evaluation of survival prediction models are 1) predictability - ability to predict survival risks accurately and 2) reproducibility - ability to generalize to predict samples generated from different studies. We present approaches for assessment of reproducibility of survival risk score predictions across medical centers. METHODS Reproducibilit...

Retrotransposon-based molecular markers are powerful molecular tools. However, these markers are not readily available due to the difficulty in obtaining species-specific retrotransposon primers. Although recent techniques enabling the rapid isolation of retrotransposon sequences have facilitated primer development, this process nonetheless remains time-consuming and costly. Therefore, research...

The theory of Atoms-In-Molecules (AIM) is a partitioning of the real space of a molecule into disjoint atomic constituents as determined by the topology of the electron density, rho(r). This theory identifies an atom in a molecule with a quantum mechanical open system and, consequently, all of the atom's properties are unambiguously defined. AIM recovers the basic empirical cornerstone of chemi...

Physical inactivity is an increasing problem. Owing to limited financial resources, one method of getting information on the cost-effectiveness of different types of prevention programs is to examine existing programs and their results. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the transferability of cost-effectiveness results of physical activity programs for children and adolescents to ...

BACKGROUND Health technology assessments (HTA) generally, and economic evaluations (EE) more specifically, have become an integral part of health care decision making around the world. However, these assessments are time consuming and expensive to conduct. Evaluation resources are scarce and therefore priorities need to be set for these assessments and the ability to use information from one co...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study is to analyze the quality and transferability issues reported in published peer-reviewed English-language economic evaluations based in healthcare settings of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) and former Soviet countries. METHODS A systematic search of economic evaluations of healthcare interventions was performed for Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgari...

Land use regression (LUR) models have been used to assess air pollutant exposure, but limited evidence exists on whether location-specific LUR models are applicable to other locations (transferability) or general models are applicable to smaller areas (generalizability). We tested transferability and generalizability of spatial-temporal LUR models of hourly particle number concentration (PNC) f...

Quality-of-Service(QoS) is a set of service requirements to be met by the network while transporting a data flow in real-time communication systems. Many real-time sources generate traffic with variable rates. In this paper, we studied a class of soft real-time applications whose bandwidth requirements are random variables. We defined two models for soft real-time communications: the dropping m...

A primary assumption of environmental niche models (ENMs) is that models are both accurate and transferable across geography or time; however, recent work has shown that models may be accurate but not highly transferable. While some of this is due to modeling technique, individual species ecologies may also underlie this phenomenon. Life history traits certainly influence the accuracy of predic...