The adoption of whole-genome sequencing within the public health realm for molecular characterization of bacterial pathogens has been followed by an increased emphasis on real-time detection of emerging outbreaks (e.g., food-borne Salmonellosis). In turn, large databases of whole-genome sequence data are being populated. These databases currently contain tens of thousands of samples and are exp...

Clustering of web documents enables (semi-)automated categorization, and facilitates certain types of search. Any clustering method has to embed the documents in a suitable similarity space. While several clustering methods and the associated similarity measures have been proposed in the past, there is no systematic comparative study of the impact of similarity metrics on cluster quality, possi...

Given a matrix of dissimilarities, it has been debated whether researchers should perform multidimensional scaling on this original matrix or on a new one derived by comparing rows in the original matrix. Careful comparison studies (Drasgow & Jones, 1979; Van der Kloot & Van Herk, 1991) in the context of sorting data indicated that most of the initial enthusiasm for the derivative approach was ...

The correlation of the result lists provided by search engines is fundamental and it has deep and multidisciplinary ramifications. Here, we present automatic and unsupervised methods to assess whether or not search engines provide results that are comparable or correlated. We have two main contributions: First, we provide evidence that for more than 80% of the input queries —independently of th...

OBJECTIVE To develop methods for assessing the validity, consistency and currency of value sets for clinical quality measures, in order to support the developers of quality measures in which such value sets are used. METHODS We assessed the well-formedness of the codes (in a given code system), the existence and currency of the codes in the corresponding code system, using the UMLS and RxNorm...

In this study, we analyzed dominant molecular markers to estimate the genetic divergence of 26 popcorn genotypes and evaluate whether using various dissimilarity coefficients with these dominant markers influences the results of cluster analysis. Fifteen random amplification of polymorphic DNA primers produced 157 amplified fragments, of which 65 were monomorphic and 92 were polymorphic. To cal...

It is becoming increasingly clear among biometric research fraternity that Ear as a biometric articulation in human beings provides exclusive and unique advantages when compared with other kinds. In this paper, we present a person identification system which is based on clustering of ears. For the development of the system, a database of 605 ear images was considered. Shape based biometric feat...

The rep-PCR DNA fingerprint technique, which uses repetitive intergenic DNA sequences, was investigated as a way to differentiate between human and animal sources of fecal pollution. BOX and REP primers were used to generate DNA fingerprints from Escherichia coli strains isolated from human and animal sources (geese, ducks, cows, pigs, chickens, and sheep). Our initial studies revealed that the...

The main challenge of extractive-base text summarization is in selecting the top representative sentences from the input document. Several techniques were proposed to enhance the process of selection such as feature-base, cluster-base, and graph-base methods. Basically, this paper proposed to enhance a previous work, and provides some limitations in the similarity calculation of that previous w...

Stability in cluster analysis is strongly dependent on the data set, especially on how well separated and how homogeneous the clusters are. In the same clustering, some clusters may be very stable and others may be extremely unstable. The Jaccard coefficient, a similarity measure between sets, is used as a clusterwise measure of cluster stability, which is assessed by the bootstrap distribution...