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Statistical dependence is one of the significant design issues in various radar systems for inference tasks including detecting an activity of interest or estimating states or parameters for situational awareness. Modeling dependence has been discussed in many articles on radar and the research has shown that taking dependence into account improves performance of inference tasks. In this paper, we introduce copulas as flexible tools for modeling of nonlinear/linear dependence. Copulas allow one to model the dependence structures among random variables with arbitrary marginal distributions. We explore the potential use of copula theory in radar systems while discussing the dependence modeling problem. Then we present an application for binary hypothesis testing to show the benefit of using copula theory.

We address the problem of characterizing uncertainty for multisensor data fusion in a classification problem. To achieve this goal, we model the joint density of given multivariate data using copula functions while allowing the ability to incorporate any desired marginal distributions, i.e., any desired modalities. The proposed model is data driven in that the corresponding copula functions and their parameters are learned from the data. Our results show that the proposed framework can capture the uncertainties more accurately than current state of the practice, and lead to robust and improved classification performance compared to traditional classifiers.

Background: It has been proven that an individuals health behavior is determined through a series of processes. This study aimed to assess the stages of adoption of breast cancer screening, and to identify the factors relating to progress through these stages. Materials and Methods: There were 202 female participants aged 2059 years who were living in Chungbuk, South Korea. They were informed of the study purpose and agreed to participate. Data were collected from October 2010 to January 2011 by assessing the breast cancer screening stage, health beliefs, socio-demographic factors, and other facilitating factors. The participant current stage of adoption of breast cancer screening was classified using the Precaution Adoption Process Model (PAPM), and the various PAPM stages were compared with each other to identify factors likely to determine progress between stages. The data were analyzed using the χ2-test, ANOVA, Duncan test, and multiple logistic regression. Results: Approximately half of all participants were not on-schedule for breast self-examination and mammography (unaware, 9.4% and 11.4%, unengaged, 8.4% and 5.0%, undecided, 20.3% and 17.8%, decided not to act, 1.5% and 1.0%, decided to act, 13.4% and 15.3%, respectively). The factors likely to determine the progress from one stage to another were age, marital status, exposure to media information about breast cancer, self-efficacy, and perceived severity. Conclusions: These results suggest that it is necessary to develop a tailored message for breast cancer screening behavior.

We report on Korean monolingual, Chinese-Korean English-as-pivot bilingual, and Chinese-English bilingual CLIR experiments using MT software augmented with Web-based entity-oriented translation as resources in the NTCIR-4 environment. Simple stemming is helpful in improving bigram indexing for Korean retrieval. For word indexing, keeping nouns only is preferable. Web-based translation reduces untranslated terms left over after MT and substantially improves CLIR results. Translation concatenation is found to consistently improve CLIR effectiveness, while combining a retrieval list from bigram and word indexing is also helpful. A method to disambiguate multiple MT outputs using a log likelihood ratio threshold was tested. Depending on the nature of the title or description queries, bigram only or a retrieval combination, or relaxed or rigid evaluations, direct bilingual CLIR returned an average precision of 71--79% (English-Korean) and 76--84% (Chinese-English) of the corresponding Korean-Korean and English-English monolingual results. Using English as a pivot in Chinese-Korean CLIR provides about 55--65% the effectiveness that Korean alone does. Entity/terminology translation at the pivot language stage accounts for a large portion of this deficiency. A topic with comparatively worse Chinese-English bilingual result does not necessarily mean that it will continue to under-perform (after further transitive Korean translation) at the Korean retrieval level.

Heterogeneous solid sensors are regarded as promising next-generation sensor due to their excellent chemical stability, low contamination, and excellent recyclability, despite their low sensitivity and weak signal. The dispersity and signals specifically from the exterior of solid sensors are critical aspects which define the sensing sensitivity and selectivity. A novel strategy for the preparation of ideal heterogeneous sensors based upon luminescent lanthanide coordination polymers (LnCP) has been demonstrated. Ideal heterogeneous sensors are systematically achieved by producing the sensors in small, uniform, and thin core-shell particles (silica@LnCP, Ln = Eu, Tb). Eventually, we found that the extremely small amount of well-structured silica@LnCP microsphere, less than ca. 1/400 compared to the amount of several known coordination polymer-based sensors, was sufficient to achieve a reliable Cu(2+) sensing with even much greater sensitivity (ca. 550% improvement).

Tumor cell contamination (TCC) of peripheral blood stem cells (PBSCs) is a major risk in the autologous PBSC transplant setting. However, the effect of different mobilization regimens (cytokines only versus cytokines + chemotherapy) on TCC of PBSCs and its impact on treatment outcomes have not been systematically reviewed. In the present meta-analysis, we aimed to investigate this effect in breast cancer patients since multiple studies have been conducted in this setting. We systematically searched MEDLINE and Cochrane Library up to May 2012. Seventeen studies (1,819 patients) were assessed. There was no significant difference in the incidence of TCC of PBSCs between the two mobilization regimens. When the analysis was restricted to granulocyte colony-stimulating factor as a cytokine, this difference was again not significant. We also found that TCC of PBSCs was associated with a higher annual recurrence rate in these patients. This suggests that there may be a significant risk for reinfusion of tumor cell-positive PBSCs, and whether it can increase the risk of disease recurrence needs to be determined. This study also raises important questions regarding the causes of TCC of PBSCs. These issues should be investigated systematically in PBSC transplant patients.

Purpose: The purposes of this study were to develop and test a prediction model for caregiving experiences including caregiving satisfaction and burden in dementia family caregivers. Methods: The stress process model and a two factor model were used as the conceptual frameworks. Secondary data analysis was done with 320 family caregivers who were selected from the Seoul Dementia Management Survey (2014) data set. In the hypothesis model, the exogenous variable was patient symptomatology which included cognitive impairment, behavioral problems, dependency in activity of daily living and in instrumental activity of daily living. Endogenous variables were caregiver’s perception of dementia patient’s unmet needs, caregiving satisfaction and caregiving burden. Data were analysed using SPSS/WINdows and AMOS program. Results: Caregiving burden was explained by patient symptomatology and caregiving satisfaction indicating significant direct effects and significant indirect effect from unmet needs. The proposed model explained 37.8% of the variance. Caregiving satisfaction was explained by patient symptomatology and unmet needs. Mediating effect of unmet needs was significant in the relationship between patient symptomatology and caregiving satisfaction. Conclusion: Results indicate that interventions focusing on relieving caregiving burden and enhancing caregiver satisfaction should be provided to caregivers with high levels of dementia patients’ unmet needs and low level of caregiving satisfaction.

Background The aim of this study was to investigate the association between obesity and prehypertension (preHT) after adjustment for socioeconomic position and health behavior factors. Methods The study sample included 1973 Korean men and women, 45–64 years of age. Subjects were classified into three groups based on their baseline blood pressure: prehypertensive, hypertensive and normotensive. Men with a waist circumference 90 cm or women 80 cm were considered abdominally obese. Body mass index (BMI) obesity was defined as having a BMI 25. The prevalence of abdominal obesity and BMI obesity was calculated with age adjustment using a direct method. Multinomial logistic regression analysis was applied. Results The prevalence of preHT in our study was 52.8%. We found that subjects with abdominal obesity were 2.06 times as likely to be prehypertensive as those without it and people with BMI obesity were 1.89 times as likely to be prehypertensive as those without it. Interestingly, men with BMI obesity had a higher preHT risk, while women with abdominal obesity had a higher preHT risk. Conclusions Statistical analyses of a community-based random sample of the Korean population indicate that obesity is associated with

The conjugation of Eu(3+)-doped coordination polymers constructed from Gd(3+) and isophthalic acid (H(2)IPA) with silica particles is investigated for the production of luminescent microspheres. A series of doping ratio-controlled silica@coordination polymer core-shell spheres is easily synthesized by altering the amounts of metal nodes used in the reactions, where the ratios of Gd(3+) and Eu(3+) are 10:0 (1a), 9:1 (1b), 8:2 (1c), 7:3 (1d), 5:5 (1e), and 0:10 (1f). The formation of monodisperse uniform core-shell structures is achieved throughout the entirety of a series. Investigations of the photoluminescence property of the resulting series of silica@coordination polymer core-shell spheres reveal that 20% Eu(3+)-doped product (1c) has the strongest emission intensity. The subsequent calcination process on the silica@coordination polymer core-shell structures (1a-f) results in the formation of a series of doping ratio-controlled silica@Gd(2)O(3):Eu core-shell microspheres (2a-f) with uniform shell thickness. During the calcination step, the coordination polymers within silica@coordination polymer core-shells are transformed into metal oxides, resulting in silica@Gd(2)O(3):Eu core-shell structures. The final etching process on the silica@Gd(2)O(3):Eu core-shell microspheres (2a-f) produces a series of hollow Gd(2)O(3):Eu microspheres (3a-f) as a result of the elimination of silica cores. The luminescence intensities of silica@Gd(2)O(3):Eu core-shell (2a-f) and hollow Gd(2) O(3):Eu microspheres (3a-f) also vary depending upon the doping ratio of Eu(3+) ions.

Development of the novel homotopy, or particle-flow, nonlinear filters1-10 has recently been quite rapid. There is actually a whole family of such methods, so we will refer to these collectively in this paper as "DH" filters, after their developers, the third and fourth authors of this manuscript. Unlike a particle filter, a DH filter does not resample; instead, the particles are moved in a smooth way, from a space that reflects prior (predicted) knowledge to one that is updated according to the measurements. Working versions of several DH filters now exist, and the purpose of this paper is to attempt to provide some perspective on them. We stress that this paper discusses the efforts of the first two authors to learn about and to explain in their own terms these these filters that others might benefit from that. The latter pair of authors - these are the developers of the DH filter family - have been instrumental in this effort. But it must be noted that they continue to develop their algorithms, and that this paper represents a snapshot of a rapidly changing landscape.

We present a target tracking system for a specific sort of passive radar, that using a Digital Audio/Video Broadcast (DAB/DVB) network for illuminators of opportunity. The system can measure bi-static range and range-rate. Angular information is assumed here unavailable. The DAB/DVB network operates in a single frequency mode; this means the same data stream is broadcast from multiple senders in the same frequency band. This supplies multiple measurements of each target using just one receiver, but introduces an additional ambiguity, as the signals from each sender are indistinguishable. This leads to a significant data association problem: as well as the usual target/measurement uncertainty there is additional "list" of illuminators that must be contended with. Our intention is to provide tracks directly in the geographic space, as opposed to a two-step procedure of formation of tracks in (bi-static) range and range-rate space to fuse these onto a map. We offer two solutions: one employing joint probabilistic data association (JPDA) based on an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), and the other a particle filter. For the former, we explain a "super-target" approach to bring what might otherwise be a three-dimensional assignment list down to the two dimensions the JPDAF needs. The latter approach would seem prohibitive in computation even with these; as such, we discuss the use of a PMHT-like measurement model that greatly reduces the numerical load.

Well-dispersed hollow porous carbon (HPC) spheres are prepared by the pyrolysis of polystyrene@ZIF-8 core-shell microspheres. The resulting HPC spheres have high surface areas and show tremendous methylene blue adsorption ability due to the lack of agglomeration, excellent dispersion, and high surface-to-volume ratio.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to develop a prediction model for the characteristics of older adults with depression using the decision tree method. Methods: A large dataset from the 2008 Korean Elderly Survey was used and data of 14,970 elderly people were analyzed. Target variable was depression and 53 input variables were general characteristics, family & social relationship, economic status, health status, health behavior, functional status, leisure & social activity, quality of life, and living environment. Data were analyzed by decision tree analysis, a data mining technique using SPSS Window 19.0 and Clementine 12.0 programs. Results: The decision trees were classified into five different rules to define the characteristics of older adults with depression. Classification & Regression Tree (C&RT) showed the best prediction with an accuracy of 80.81% among data mining models. Factors in the rules were life satisfaction, nutritional status, daily activity difficulty due to pain, functional limitation for basic or instrumental daily activities, number of chronic diseases and daily activity difficulty due to disease. Conclusion: The different rules classified by the decision tree model in this study should contribute as baseline data for discovering informative knowledge and developing interventions tailored to these individual characteristics.