BACKGROUND Observational studies have consistently demonstrated the survival benefits of a greater dialysis dose in maintenance hemodialysis (MHD) patients, whereas randomized controlled trials have shown conflicting results. The possible causal impact of dialysis dose on mortality needs to be investigated using rich cohort data analyzed with novel statistical methods such as marginal structura...

Recognizing the structural similarity without significant sequence identity (called fold recognition) is the key for bridging the gap between the number of known protein sequences and the number of structures solved. Previously, we developed a fold-recognition method called SP(3) which combines sequence-derived sequence profiles, secondary-structure profiles and residue-depth dependent, structu...

In this article, we show the general relation between standardization methods and marginal structural models. Standardization has been recognized as a method to control confounding and to estimate causal parameters of interest. Because standardization requires stratification by confounders, the sparse-data problem will occur when stratified by many confounders and one then might have an unstabl...

an important problem in performance evaluations of irrigation systems is the difficulty of the determining share of structural and operational elements and determining improvement solutions. in most studies, the combined impact of structural and operational elements on the performance of irrigation systems is assessed. some researchers try to separate the effects of structural and operational e...

As a service organization, for an academic institution, knowledge sharing is a critical process that needed to be done and developed always in order to achieve sustainable advantage, emphasizing its role as center of excellence. The research objection was to explore the relationship between the three constructs: Knowledge Sharing, Absorptive Capacity and Channel Richness. The conceptual and str...

This paper considers experimental information on the atomic arrangements in non-crystalline single element films of transition and coinage metals prepared by vapour quenching and compares this information with results from recently reported structural models. The method of structural analysis using transmission electron diffraction is outlined and several recent experimental investigations are ...

In a previous paper, Russo et al. (2006), causality is considered in the framework of structural models, i.e. statistical models characterized by parameters that are stable over a large class of interventions or of environmental changes and that take into account background and contextual knowledge. From this statistical viewpoint, causality is defined in terms of exogeneity in a structural mod...

Abstract: Knowledge-based protein folding potentials have proven successful in the recent years. Based on statistics of observed interatomic distances, they generally encode pairwise contact information. In this study we present a method that derives multi-body contact potentials from measurements of surface areas using coarse-grained protein models. The measurements are made using a newly impl...

A method is presented for scoring the model quality of experimental and theoretical protein structures. The structural model to be evaluated is dissected into small fragments via a sliding window, where each fragment is represented by a vector of multiple – angles. The sliding window ranges in size from a length of 1–10 – pairs (3–12 residues). In this method, the conformation of each fragment ...