A clinical trial may have no subject (0%) or every subject (100%) developing the outcome of concern in either of the two comparison groups. This will cause a zero-cell in the four-cell (2x2) table of a trial using a binary outcome and make it impossible to estimate the odds ratio, a commonly used effect measure. A usual way to deal with this problem is to add 0.5 to each of the four cells in the 2x2 table. This is known as Haldane's approximation. In meta-analysis, Haldane's approximation can also be applied. Two approaches are possible: add 0.5 to only the trials with a zero cell or to all the trials in the meta-analysis. Little is known which approach is better when used in combination with different definitions of the odds ratio: the ordinary odds ratio, Peto's odds ratio and Mantel-Haenszel odds ratio. / A new formula is derived for converting Peto's odds ratio to the risk difference. The derived risk difference through the new method was then compared with the true risk difference and the risk difference derived by taking the Peto's odds ratio as the ordinary odds ratio. All simulations and analyses were conducted on the Statistical Analysis Software (SAS). / Conclusions. The estimated confidence interval of a meta-analysis would mostly exclude the truth if an inappropriate correction method is used to deal with zero cells. Counter-intuitively, the combined result of a meta-analysis will be worse as the number of studies included becomes larger. Mantel-Haenszel odds ratio without applying Haldane's approximation is recommended in general for dealing with sparse data in meta-analysis. The ordinary odds ratio with adding 0.5 to only the trials with a zero cell can be used when the trials are heterogeneous and the odds ratio is close to 1. Applying Haldane's approximation to all trials in a meta-analysis should always be avoided. Peto's odds ratio without Haldane's approximation can always be considered but the new formula should be used for converting Peto's odds ratio to the risk difference. / In addition, the odds ratio needs to be converted to a risk difference to aid decision making. Peto's odds ratio is preferable in some situations and the risk difference is derived by taking Peto's odds ratio as an ordinary odds ratio. It is unclear whether this is appropriate. / Methods. For studying the validity of Haldane's approximation, we defined 361 types of meta-analysis. Each type of meta-analysis is determined by a unique combination of the risk in the two compared groups and thus provides a unique true odds ratio. The number of trials in a meta-analysis is set at 5, 10 and 50 and the sample size of each trial in a meta-analysis varies at random but is made sufficiently small so that at least one trial in a meta-analysis will have a zero-cell. The number of outcome events in a comparison group of a trial is generated at random according to the pre-determined risk for that group. One thousand homogeneous meta-analyses and one thousand heterogeneous meta-analyses are simulated for each type of meta-analysis. Two Haldane's approximation approaches in addition to no approximation are evaluated for three definitions of the odds ratio. Thus, nine combined odds ratios are estimated for each type of meta-analysis and are all compared with the true odds ratio. The percentage of meta-analyses with the 95% confidence interval including the true odds ratio is estimated as the main index for validity of the correction methods. / Objectives. (1) We conducted a simulation study to examine the validity of Haldane's approximation as applied to meta-analysis, and (2) we derived and evaluated a new method to covert Peto's odds ratio to the risk difference, and compared it with the conventional conversion method. / Results. By using the true ordinary odds ratio, the percentage of meta-analyses with the confidence interval containing the truth was lowest (from 23.2% to 53.6%) when Haldane's approximation was applied to all the trials regardless the definition of the odds ratios used. The percentage was highest with Mantel-Haenszel odds ratio (95.0%) with no approximation applied. The validity of the corrections methods increases as the true odds ratio gets close to one, as the number of trials in a meta-analysis decreases, as the heterogeneity decreases and the trial size increases. / The proposed new formula performed better than the conventional method. The mean relative difference between the true risk difference and the risk difference obtained from the new formula is -0.006% while the mean relative difference between the true risk difference and the risk difference obtained from the conventional method is -10.9%. / The validity is relatively close (varying from 86.8% to 95.8%) when the true odds ratio is between 1/3 and 3 for all combinations of the correction methods and definitions of the odds ratio. However, Peto's odds ratio performed consistently best if the true Peto's odds ratio is used as the truth for comparison among the three definitions of the odds ratio regardless the correction method (varying from 88% to 98.7%). / Tam Wai-san Wilson. / "Jan 2006." / Adviser: J. L. Tang. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: B, page: 6488. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-157). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

by Tung Mui Yin. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-125). / Questionnaire also in Chinese. / Acknowledgements --- p.i / Abstract --- p.ii-iii / Chapter Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 2. --- Literature Review / Trends in breastfeeding --- p.4 / Benefits of breastfeeding --- p.5 / Factors associated with the decision to breastfeed --- p.12 / Timing of decision to breastfeed --- p.20 / Factors influencing the maintenance of breastfeeding --- p.21 / Studies on evaluation of the effect of breastfeeding education program --- p.36 / Chapter Chapter 3. --- Methodology / Hypotheses --- p.43 / Operational definitions --- p.44 / Research design --- p.45 / Ethical approval --- p.45 / Sample --- p.45 / Randomization of the subjects --- p.47 / Data collection --- p.48 / Instruments --- p.49 / Intervention --- p.53 / Method of data analysis --- p.57 / Chapter Chapter 4. --- Results / Sample characteristics --- p.59 / Effect of intervention on the attitude towards and knowledge of breastfeeding --- p.63 / "Effect of intervention on the rate of intention, initiation and maintenance of breastfeeding" --- p.68 / Factors influencing the intention to breastfeed --- p.71 / Factors influencing the initiation and maintenance of breastfeeding --- p.75 / Hospital policy on breastfeeding and the reasons for early cessation of breastfeeding --- p.80 / Chapter Chapter 5. --- Discussion and Conclusions / Introduction --- p.84 / Limitations of the study --- p.84 / Effect of the antenatal breastfeeding education program on attitude towards and knowledge of breastfeeding --- p.90 / Effect of the antenatal breastfeeding education program on the intention and initiation of breastfeeding --- p.91 / Factors contributing to the success of the antenatal breastfeeding education program --- p.92 / Factors influencing the intention of breastfeeding --- p.94 / Effect of the antenatal breastfeeding education program on the maintenance of breastfeeding --- p.96 / Conclusion and implications for future breastfeeding promotion programs --- p.104 / References --- p.109 / Appendices / Chapter 1. --- Letter of ethical approval / Chapter 2. --- Letter of request for approval / Chapter 3. --- Consent form / Chapter 4. --- Questionnaire / Chapter 5. --- Teaching plan for the antenatal breastfeeding education program / Chapter 6. --- Summary of mean attitude scores for individual items / Chapter 7. --- Performance of women in knowledge towards breastfeeding scale

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This thesis investigates the syntax-discourse interface in adult, end state second language (L2) acquisition. Specifically, it examines topic constructions in Spanish and English, namely Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) and Contrastive Left Dislocation (CLD), which exhibit both syntactic and discourse level properties. In both cases, topics occur at the left periphery of clauses and reintroduce a subset of a known set previously mentioned in discourse. Sensitivity to specificity is available in Spanish but not in English. The interpretation of the topicalized element as either generic or specific depends on the presence or absence of the clitic. Data from a bidirectional study are reported in order to investigate the issue of L1 transfer as well as the question of whether acquiring a new property is easier than losing a property. / Three current theories of acquisition are examined, namely, the Full Transfer/Full Access model (FT/FA), Failed Functional Features Hypothesis/Representational Deficit Hypothesis (FFFH/RDH), and Optionality theory. The theories are considered with respect to their predictions about L2 ultimate attainment and the syntax-discourse interface. / Participants were 15 end state speakers of L2 Spanish/L1 English and 15 end state speakers of L2 English/L1 Spanish were tested. Three tasks were administered for each study (Sentence Completion Task, oral Sentence Selection Task, and oral Acceptability Task) targeting topic constructions and associated interpretive properties in the respective target languages. Results for the L2 Spanish study indicate that while the syntactic properties of CLLD were acquired, the interpretive properties of specificity were fossilized (i.e. clitic was overgeneralized). Results for the L2 English study also showed that the syntactic properties were acquired but the specificity distinction of the L1 was transferred into the L2. Results demonstrate that problems with specificity occur in both directions as predicted by the theory of Optionality. In both cases, the optionality found at the interpretive level was L1-based. Namely, non-target L1 forms co-existed with the L2 forms.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed on June 29, 2009). Includes bibliographical references.

Habschr. Bern, 1973.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-97).

This thesis analyzes the focus of the sentences in contemporary Spanish. The theoretical part presents definitions of key terms such as Czech and Spanish word order, Prague School Theory, Topic and comment etc. The second part of the thesis is practical and focuses on a detailed analysis of a few selected Spanish articles.

abstract: While discrete emotions like joy, anger, disgust etc. are quite popular, continuous emotion dimensions like arousal and valence are gaining popularity within the research community due to an increase in the availability of datasets annotated with these emotions. Unlike the discrete emotions, continuous emotions allow modeling of subtle and complex affect dimensions but are difficult to predict. Dimension reduction techniques form the core of emotion recognition systems and help create a new feature space that is more helpful in predicting emotions. But these techniques do not necessarily guarantee a better predictive capability as most of them are unsupervised, especially in regression learning. In emotion recognition literature, supervised dimension reduction techniques have not been explored much and in this work a solution is provided through probabilistic topic models. Topic models provide a strong probabilistic framework to embed new learning paradigms and modalities. In this thesis, the graphical structure of Latent Dirichlet Allocation has been explored and new models tuned to emotion recognition and change detection have been built. In this work, it has been shown that the double mixture structure of topic models helps 1) to visualize feature patterns, and 2) to project features onto a topic simplex that is more predictive of human emotions, when compared to popular techniques like PCA and KernelPCA. Traditionally, topic models have been used on quantized features but in this work, a continuous topic model called the Dirichlet Gaussian Mixture model has been proposed. Evaluation of DGMM has shown that while modeling videos, performance of LDA models can be replicated even without quantizing the features. Until now, topic models have not been explored in a supervised context of video analysis and thus a Regularized supervised topic model (RSLDA) that models video and audio features is introduced. RSLDA learning algorithm performs both dimension reduction and regularized linear regression simultaneously, and has outperformed supervised dimension reduction techniques like SPCA and Correlation based feature selection algorithms. In a first of its kind, two new topic models, Adaptive temporal topic model (ATTM) and SLDA for change detection (SLDACD) have been developed for predicting concept drift in time series data. These models do not assume independence of consecutive frames and outperform traditional topic models in detecting local and global changes respectively. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Computer Science 2015

A dissertação mapeia a formação da identidade internacional da União Europeia através da sua arquitetura de segurança internacional que tem como um dos seus nós a securitização da imigração, utilizando ferramentas metodológicas não-tradicionais para confirmar a nossa tese. A primeira parte do trabalho é um marco teórico: discutimos a virada linguística nas relações internacionais para entender a intersubjetividade entre pesquisador e objeto, de modo que nós escolhemos reflexividade como a nossa abordagem metodológica; em seguida, discutimos as escolas europeias em segurança internacional do pós-guerra fria, como a Escola de Copenhague, Escola Crítica de Gales e Escola de Paris, apresentando conceitos e objetos estudados por especialistas que nos são caros para entender nosso estudo e colocar nossa pesquisa dentro de sua comunidade epistêmica; finalmente, discutimos e incorporamos conceitos e abordagens da Teoria do Discurso (estudos de Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe e Escola de Essex) para fazer uma construção cronológica e geodiscursiva da região euromediterrânea. Na segunda parte, reconstruímos histórica e institucionalmente a arquitetura europeia de segurança internacional do pós-guerra a hoje vis-à-vis com suas políticas de migração notando suas correlações, também com foco na análise detalhada dos principais documentos oficiais de segurança. A parte quantitativa final (e nossa contribuição original) procura confirmar a causalidade do link segurança-imigração na arquitetura europeia; para isso, utilizamo-nos da linguística computacional para análise semântica semi-automatizada, mais especificamente Topic Model; analisamos cerca de 20.000 documentos oficiais de segurança da União Europeia para indicar estatísticas, agentes, instituições, agendas e discursos que confirmam nossa tese. / The dissertation maps the formation of the international identity of European Union through its international security architecture that has as one of its nodes the securitization of immigration, using non-traditional methodological tools to confirm our thesis. The first part of the work is a theoretical framework: we discuss the linguistic turn in international relations to understand the intersubjectivity between researcher and object so we choose Reflexivity as our methodological approach; then we discuss the European schools in international security from post-cold war such as the Copenhagen School, Wales Critical School and Paris School, presenting concepts and objects studied by experts who are dear to us to understand our study and place our research within its epistemic community; Finally, we discuss and incorporate concepts and approaches from Discourse Theory (studies from Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Essex School) to make a chronological geodiscursive construction of the euromediterranean region. In the second part, we reconstruct historically and institutionally the European international security architecture from post-war till today vis-à-vis with its migration policies and noting their correlations, also focusing on detailed analysis of the main official security documents. A final quantitative section (and our original contribution) seeks to confirm the causality of the security-immigration link in European architecture; for this we use computational linguistics for semi-automated semantic analysis, more specifically Topic Model; We analyze around 20,000 official security documents from European Union to indicate statistics, agents, institutions, agendas and speeches which confirm our thesis.