Predictive models for chronic renal disease using decision trees, naïve bayes and case-based methods

Data mining can be used in healthcare industry to “mine” clinical data to discover hidden information for intelligent and affective decision making. Discovery of hidden patterns and relationships often goes intact, yet advanced data mining techniques can be helpful as remedy to this scenario. This thesis mainly deals with Intelligent Prediction of Chronic Renal Disease (IPCRD). Data covers blood, urine test, and external symptoms applied to predict chronic renal disease. Data from the database is initially transformed to Weka (3.6) and Chi-Square method is used for features section. After normalizing data, three classifiers were applied and efficiency of output is evaluated. Mainly, three classifiers are analyzed: Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbour algorithm. Results show that each technique has its unique strength in realizing the objectives of the defined mining goals. Efficiency of Decision Tree and KNN was almost same but Naïve Bayes proved a comparative edge over others. Further sensitivity and specificity tests are used as statistical measures to examine the performance of a binary classification. Sensitivity (also called recall rate in some fields) measures the proportion of actual positives which are correctly identified while Specificity measures the proportion of negatives which are correctly identified. CRISP-DM methodology is applied to build the mining models. It consists of six major phases: business understanding, data understanding, data preparation, modeling, evaluation, and deployment.

Children’s Literature and English Teaching – Swedish Teachers’ Methods and Attitudes

This study investigates how primary school teachers of grades F-3 pupils in a number of sample schools in Sweden use children’s literature and other methods to enhance their teaching of English. The study explores the attitudes of these teachers’ to using English children’s literature as a teaching tool to promote language development in their pupils, focusing on vocabulary. An empirical questionnaire study was carried out including a total of twenty-three respondents from seven schools in a Stockholm suburb. The respondents are all working teachers with experience of teaching English to young learners, particularly in grades F-3. This study contributes with new knowledge about the often-recommended use of children’s literature as a method for teaching English to young learners, connecting international research with empirical data from the Swedish context. While the results suggest that the majority of the respondents are positive to using children’s literature in their teaching and regularly do so, many of them feel that it is somewhat difficult to find relevant materials to plan, implement and evaluate lessons within the allocated time-frame. Based on these results, further research about how to create more effective ways of using children’s literature as a method for English vocabulary teaching in Swedish schools is recommended.

English as a Second Language and Children’s literature : An empirical study on Swedish elementary school teachers’ methods and attitudes towards the use of children’s literature in the English classroom

Previous research has shown multiple benefits and challenges with the incorporation of children’s literature in the English as a Second language (ESL) classroom. In addition, the use of children’s literature in the lower elementary English classroom is recommended by the Swedish National Agency for Education. Consequently, the current study explores how teachers in Swedish elementary school teach ESL through children’s literature. This empirical study involves English teachers from seven schools in a small municipality in Sweden. The data has been collected through an Internet survey. The study also connects the results to previous international research, comparing Swedish and international research. The results suggest that even though there are many benefits of using children’s literature in the ESL classroom, the respondents seldom use these authentic texts, due to limited time and a narrow supply of literature, among other factors. However, despite these challenges, all of the teachers claim to use children’s literature by reading aloud in the classroom. Based on the results, further research exploring pupils’ thoughts in contrast to teachers would be beneficial. In addition, the majority of the participants expressed that they wanted more information on how to use children’s literature. Therefore, additional research relating to beneficial methods of teaching English through children’s literature, especially in Sweden, is recommended.

Semantic and Personalised Service Discovery

One of the most pervasive classes of services needed to support e-Science applications are those responsible for the discovery of resources. We have developed a solution to the problem of service discovery in a Semantic Web/Grid setting. We do this in the context of bioinformatics, which is the use of computational and mathematical techniques to store, manage, and analyse the data from molecular biology in order to answer questions about biological phenomena. Our specific application is myGrid (www.mygrid.org.uk) that is developing open source, service-based middleware upon which bioinformatics applications can be built. myGrid is specifically targeted at developing open source high-level service Grid middleware for bioinformatics.

Semantic and Personalised Service Discovery

One of the most pervasive classes of services needed to support e-Science applications are those responsible for the discovery of resources. We have developed a solution to the problem of service discovery in a Semantic Web/Grid setting. We do this in the context of bioinformatics, which is the use of computational and mathematical techniques to store, manage, and analyse the data from molecular biology in order to answer questions about biological phenomena. Our specific application is myGrid (http: //www.mygrid.org.uk) that is developing open source, service-based middleware upon which bioin- formatics applications can be built. myGrid is specif- ically targeted at developing open source high-level service Grid middleware for bioinformatics.

Personalised Grid Service Discovery

The authors take a broad view that ultimately Grid- or Web-services must be located via personalised, semantic-rich discovery processes. They argue that such processes must rely on the storage of arbitrary metadata about services that originates from both service providers and service users. Examples of such metadata are reliability metrics, quality of service data, or semantic service description markup. This paper presents UDDI-MT, an extension to the standard UDDI service directory approach that supports the storage of such metadata via a tunnelling technique that ties the metadata store to the original UDDI directory. They also discuss the use of a rich, graph-based RDF query language for syntactic queries on this data. Finally, they analyse the performance of each of these contributions in our implementation.

Personalised Grid Service Discovery

We take a broad view that ultimately Grid- or Web-services must be located via personalised, semantic-rich discovery processes. We argue that such processes must rely on the storage of arbitrary metadata about services that originates from both service providers and service users. Examples of such metadata are reliability metrics, quality of service data, or semantic service description markup. This paper presents UDDI-MT, an extension to the standard UDDI service directory approach that supports the storage of such metadata via a tunnelling technique that ties the metadata store to the original UDDI directory. We also discuss the use of a rich, graph-based RDF query language for syntactic queries on this data. Finally, we analyse the performance of each of these contributions in our implementation.

Towards a Protocol for the Attachment of Metadata to Service Descriptions and its Use in Semantic Discovery

Service discovery in large scale, open distributed systems is difficult because of the need to filter out services suitable to the task at hand from a potentially huge pool of possibilities. Semantic descriptions have been advocated as the key to expressive service discovery, but the most commonly used service descriptions and registry protocols do not support such descriptions in a general manner. In this paper, we present a protocol, its implementation and an API for registering semantic service descriptions and other task/user-specific metadata, and for discovering services according to these. Our approach is based on a mechanism for attaching structured and unstructured metadata, which we show to be applicable to multiple registry technologies. The result is an extremely flexible service registry that can be the basis of a sophisticated semantically-enhanced service discovery engine, an essential component of a Semantic Grid.

Agents and the Grid: Service Discovery

The Grid is a large-scale computer system that is capable of coordinating resources that are not subject to centralised control, whilst using standard, open, general-purpose protocols and interfaces, and delivering non-trivial qualities of service. In this chapter, we argue that Grid applications very strongly suggest the use of agent-based computing, and we review key uses of agent technologies in Grids: user agents, able to customize and personalise data; agent communication languages offering a generic and portable communication medium; and negotiation allowing multiple distributed entities to reach service level agreements. In the second part of the chapter, we focus on Grid service discovery, which we have identified as a prime candidate for use of agent technologies: we show that Grid-services need to be located via personalised, semantic-rich discovery processes, which must rely on the storage of arbitrary metadata about services that originates from both service providers and service users. We present UDDI-MT, an extension to the standard UDDI service directory approach that supports the storage of such metadata via a tunnelling technique that ties the metadata store to the original UDDI directory. The outcome is a flexible service registry which is compatible with existing standards and also provides metadata-enhanced service discovery.