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Multistage sequential decision-making scenarios are commonly seen in the healthcare diagnosis process. In this paper, an active learning-based method is developed to actively collect only the necessary patient data in a sequential manner. There are two novelties in the proposed method. First, unlike the existing ordinal logistic regression model which only models a single stage, we estimate the parameters for all stages together. Second, it is assumed that the coefficients for common features in different stages are kept consistent. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated in both a simulation study and a real case study. Compared with the baseline method where the data is modeled individually and independently, the proposed method improves the estimation efficiency by 62\%-1838\%. For both simulation and testing cohorts, the proposed method is more effective, stable, interpretable, and computationally efficient on parameter estimation. The proposed method can be easily extended to a variety of scenarios where decision-making can be done sequentially with only necessary information.

Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) is a versatile technique for characterizing the chemical composition of the various uncertainties, including baseline shift and multiplicative error. This study aims at analyzing the effect of certain treatment on the FTIR responses subject to these uncertainties. A two-step method is proposed to quantify the treatment effect on the FTIR signals. First, an optimization problem is solved to calculate the template signal by aligning the pre-treatment FTIR signals. Second, the effect of treatment is decomposed as the pattern of modification $\mathbf{g}$ that describes the overall treatment effect on the spectra and a vector of effect $\boldsymbol{\delta}$ that describes the degree of modification. $\mathbf g$ and $\boldsymbol{\delta}$ are solved by another optimization problem. They have explicit engineering interpretations and provide useful information on how the treatment effect change the surface chemical components. The effectiveness of the proposed method is first validated in a simulation. In a real case study, it's used to investigate how the plasma exposure applied at various heights affects the FTIR signal which indicates the change of the chemical composition on the composite material. The vector of effects indicates the range of effective plasma height, and the pattern of modification matches existing engineering knowledge well., Comment: \{copyright} 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works