Academic Articles & Research Papers

Modeling antiretroviral therapy adherence among people living with HIV: a cross-sectional study at Pantang Hospital, Ghana

Abstract Background Poor adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) continues to undermine HIV treatment outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa, including Ghana. Objective This study aimed to quantify ART treatment adherence among people living with...

Robustness analysis of a Continuous-Time Markov Jump Process model for herd behaviour under stochastic shocks

Herd behaviour in socio-economic systems is characterised by asynchronous, stochastic decision-making that traditional models capture imperfectly. Discrete-time DTMCs impose fixed-tick synchrony and require binning, which distorts event tim...

Ranking of treatments in network meta-analysis: incorporating minimally important differences

Abstract Background In network meta-analysis (NMA), the magnitude of difference between treatment effects is typically ignored in the calculation of ranking metrics, such as probability best and surface under the cumulative ranking curve (S...

Seemingly unrelated time series model for forecasting the peak and short-term electricity demand: Evidence from the Kalman filtered Monte Carlo method

In this extant paper, a multivariate time series model using the seemingly unrelated times series equation (SUTSE) framework is proposed to forecast the peak and short-term electricity demand using time series data from February 2, 2014, to...

An artificial neural network-based model for predicting paratransit travel time

The nature of paratransit services makes for increased uncertainty in trip time, leading to reported unreliability and dissatisfaction by the users. While providing travel information has proved helpful in formal bus services and has been r...

The risk of colorectal cancer according to obesity status at four-year intervals: a nationwide population-based cohort study

Abstract Obesity is a risk factor for colorectal cancer. However, the effect of body weight change on colorectal cancer is uncertain. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between difference in body mass index and the risk of col...

Metabolomic sweet spot clock predicts mortality and age-related diseases in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging

Abstract Background Chronological age does not capture individual health or resilience. Advances in metabolomics have enabled development of molecular aging biomarkers that capture deviations between biological and chronological age, highli...

Increased prevalence of loneliness and associated risk factors during the COVID-19 pandemic: findings from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA)

Abstract Background Older adults have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 and related preventative measures undertaken during the pandemic. Given clear evidence of the relationship between loneliness and health outcomes, it is impe...

BUGSnet: an R package to facilitate the conduct and reporting of Bayesian network Meta-analyses

Abstract Background Several reviews have noted shortcomings regarding the quality and reporting of network meta-analyses (NMAs). We suspect that this issue may be partially attributable to limitations in current NMA software which do not re...

Longevity risk—Its financial impact on pensions

We study the financial impact of longevity risk on defined benefit (DB) pension plan liabilities using the 2010 Ghana population census, and the Lee-Carter model. We compare the usual Lee-Carter model to an extended version. While we observ...

The beneficial effects of menopausal hormone therapy on renal survival in postmenopausal Korean women from a nationwide health survey

Abstract Several studies have demonstrated the nephroprotective effects of estrogen on renal damage. In light of the inconsistent results of previous findings, this study aims to evaluate the in-depth role of menopausal hormone therapy (MHT...

Factors Affecting High Body Weight Variability

Background : High body weight variability (BWV) is associated with many metabolic and cardiovascular diseases in adults. The study was designed to explore the baseline characteristics associated with high BWV. Methods : Using a nationally r...

Elliptic problems with nonmonotone discontinuities at resonance (Erratum)

Clustering of Unhealthy Lifestyle and the Risk of Adverse Events in Patients With Atrial Fibrillation

BackgroundLittle is known regarding the risk of clinical outcomes depending on the clustering of lifestyle behaviors after atrial fibrillation (AF) diagnosis. This study evaluated the association between a cluster of healthy lifestyle behav...

Improved representation of laminar and turbulent sheet flow in subglacial drainage models

Subglacial hydrology models struggle to reproduce seasonal drainage patterns that are consistent with observed subglacial water pressures and surface velocities. We modify the standard sheet-flow parameterization within a coupled sheet–chan...

Entropy Measures for Plithogenic Sets and Applications in Multi-Attribute Decision Making

Plithogenic set is an extension of the crisp set, fuzzy set, intuitionistic fuzzy set, and neutrosophic sets, whose elements are characterized by one or more attributes, and each attribute can assume many values. Each attribute has a corres...

Fatty Liver & Diabetes Statistics in Korea: Nationwide Data 2009 to 2017

Background This study investigated the changes of fatty liver disease prevalence in general Korean population. Methods This study analyzed data from the Korean National Health Insurance Service from 2009 to 2017 that included individuals ag...

Evaluating Uses of Deep Learning Methods for Causal Inference

Logistic regression (LR) is a popular method that is used for estimating causal effects in observational studies using propensity scores. We examine the use of deep learning models such as the deep neural network (DNN), PropensityNet (PN), ...

Active querying approach to epidemic source detection on contact networks

Abstract The problem of identifying the source of an epidemic (also called patient zero) given a network of contacts and a set of infected individuals has attracted interest from a broad range of research communities. The successful and tim...

Cumulative Exposure to High γ-Glutamyl Transferase Level and Risk of Diabetes: A Nationwide Population-Based Study

Background Elevated γ-glutamyl transferase (γ-GTP) level is associated with metabolic syndrome, impaired glucose tolerance, and insulin resistance, which are risk factors for type 2 diabetes. We aimed to investigate the association of cumul...