The International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR)’s “Good Practices Task Force” reports are highly cited, multistakeholder perspective expert guidance reports that reflect ...international standards for health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) and their use in healthcare decision making. In this report, we discuss the criteria, development, and evaluation/consensus review and approval process for initiating a task force. The rationale for a task force must include a justification, including why this good practice guidance is important and its potential impact on the scientific community. The criteria include: (1) necessity (why is this task force required?); (2) a methodology-oriented focus (focus on research methods, approaches, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination); (3) relevance (to ISPOR’s mission and its members); (4) durability over time; (5) broad applicability; and 6) an evidence-based approach. In addition, the proposal must be a priority specifically for ISPOR.
These reports are valuable to researchers, academics, students, health technology assessors, medical technology developers and service providers, those working in other commercial entities, regulators, and payers. These stakeholder perspectives are represented in task force membership to ensure the report’s overall usefulness and relevance to the global ISPOR membership. We hope that this discussion will bring transparency to the process of initiating, approving, and producing these task force reports and encourage participation from a diverse range of experts within and outside ISPOR.
Temporal Segment Networks for Action Recognition in Videos Wang, Limin; Xiong, Yuanjun; Wang, Zhe ...
IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence,
2019-Nov.-1, 2019-Nov, 2019-11-1, 20191101, Letnik:
41, Številka:
11
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We present a general and flexible video-level framework for learning action models in videos. This method, called temporal segment network (TSN), aims to model long-range temporal structure with a ...new segment-based sampling and aggregation scheme. This unique design enables the TSN framework to efficiently learn action models by using the whole video. The learned models could be easily deployed for action recognition in both trimmed and untrimmed videos with simple average pooling and multi-scale temporal window integration, respectively. We also study a series of good practices for the implementation of the TSN framework given limited training samples. Our approach obtains the state-the-of-art performance on five challenging action recognition benchmarks: HMDB51 (71.0 percent), UCF101 (94.9 percent), THUMOS14 (80.1 percent), ActivityNet v1.2 (89.6 percent), and Kinetics400 (75.7 percent). In addition, using the proposed RGB difference as a simple motion representation, our method can still achieve competitive accuracy on UCF101 (91.0 percent) while running at 340 FPS. Furthermore, based on the proposed TSN framework, we won the video classification track at the ActivityNet challenge 2016 among 24 teams.
In the last few years, the formulation of real-world optimization problems and their efficient solution via metaheuristic algorithms has been a catalyst for a myriad of research studies. In spite of ...decades of historical advancements on the design and use of metaheuristics, large difficulties still remain in regards to the understandability, algorithmic design uprightness, and performance verifiability of new technical achievements. A clear example stems from the scarce replicability of works dealing with metaheuristics used for optimization, which is often infeasible due to ambiguity and lack of detail in the presentation of the methods to be reproduced. Additionally, in many cases, there is a questionable statistical significance of their reported results. This work aims at providing the audience with a proposal of good practices which should be embraced when conducting studies about metaheuristics methods used for optimization in order to provide scientific rigor, value and transparency. To this end, we introduce a step by step methodology covering every research phase that should be followed when addressing this scientific field. Specifically, frequently overlooked yet crucial aspects and useful recommendations will be discussed in regards to the formulation of the problem, solution encoding, implementation of search operators, evaluation metrics, design of experiments, and considerations for real-world performance, among others. Finally, we will outline important considerations, challenges, and research directions for the success of newly developed optimization metaheuristics in their deployment and operation over real-world application environments.
Abstract Objective The aim of the article is to present two issues; the concept of sustainability and the style of organisational leadership. The authors‘ goal is to demonstrate that a participative ...management style supports the implementation of the concept of organisational sustainability. Methodology The research method used to achieve the objective is a critical analysis of the literature, an analysis of secondary research and a review of good practice. Findings As the presented examples of the implementation of the concept of sustainable development in specific companies show, the implementation of this type of idea is definitely conducive to the selection of a participative style of leadership. Value Added Active participation of subordinates in shaping the sustainable development strategy in the organisation and their awareness of the real influence on the vision is realised, to a very large extent determines the success of achieving the goals set by the leader (and worked out together with subordinates). Recommendations It is recommended to create a vision, according to which the company operates in the spirit of sustainable development, and to enable subordinates to actively participate in the implementation of the strategy and the systematic evaluation of its results.
Conceptualizing a Model Roberts, Mark; Russell, Louise B.; Paltiel, A. David ...
Medical decision making,
09/2012, Letnik:
32, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The appropriate development of a model begins with understanding the problem that is being represented. The aim of this article is to provide a series of consensus-based best practices regarding the ...process of model conceptualization. For the purpose of this series of papers, the authors consider the development of models whose purpose is to inform medical decisions and health-related resource allocation questions. They specifically divide the conceptualization process into two distinct components: the conceptualization of the problem, which converts knowledge of the health care process or decision into a representation of the problem, followed by the conceptualization of the model itself, which matches the attributes and characteristics of a particular modeling type to the needs of the problem being represented. Recommendations are made regarding the structure of the modeling team, agreement on the statement of the problem, the structure, perspective and target population of the model, and the interventions and outcomes represented. Best practices relating to the specific characteristics of model structure, and which characteristics of the problem might be most easily represented in a specific modeling method, are presented. Each section contains a number of recommendations that were iterated among the authors, as well as the wider modeling taskforce, jointly set up by the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research and the Society for Medical Decision Making.
This paper presents a review on the analytical results obtained by laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS). In the first part, results on identification and classification of samples are ...presented including the risk of misclassification, and in the second part, results on concentration measurement based on calibration are accompanied with significant figures of merit including the concept of accuracy. Both univariate and multivariate approaches are discussed with special emphasis on the methodology, the way of presenting the results and the assessment of the methods. Finally, good practices are proposed for both classification and concentration measurement.
Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) in its different variants has become increasingly prominent over the last years in business and management research. While this notable trend is, in general, ...more than welcome, the applications in the field have to hold against some minimal standards of the QCA community. This study is based on an assessment of 61 published, peer-reviewed journal articles applying QCA within the field of business and management studies. It demonstrates several major and minor flaws and presents several suggestions on how to overcome these shortcomings or avoid them in the first place.
As it is the case for any spectroscopic technique, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is strongly influenced by the signal fluctuations, and the LIBS spectra need to be normalized to obtain ...enhanced analytical performance. Nowadays, normalization in LIBS remains an open question and, in the present review, the normalization methods commonly applied to LIBS are presented and discussed, in particular those based on background, total area, internal standard, and Standard Normal Variate. We emphasize that the figures of merit, namely the coefficient of determination, the root-mean square error of prediction and the limit of quantification used to assess the advantages of processing normalized instead of non-normalized LIBS spectra, in a context of quantification, must be calculated in a rigorous way to be able to draw conclusions. We thus propose advices and good practices to achieve a rigorous comparison between quantitative models involving various normalization approaches, the final choice of the best normalization being ultimately driven by the analytical context. In order to take the best advantage from normalization in LIBS and thus increase the analytical performance of this technique, we encourage the analyst to thoroughly compare different normalization methods.
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•LIBS often requires to normalize spectra to reduce fluctuations and increase the prediction ability of quantitative models.•Several normalization methods have been proposed during these last years, but no general rule has been established.•We give the state-of-the-art about normalization methods.•Figures of merit used to assess the performance of quantitative models are provided.•We give advices about the relevance of the figures of merit to robustly evaluate the quantitative model performances.•An example to find the best normalization method for a given analytical context by comparing different model outcomes is proposed.•No normalization method of LIBS spectra can be considered as the best one but different methods should be compared instead.
Accessibility to abundant sources of high‐quality water is integral to the production of safe and wholesome fresh produce. However, access to safe water is becoming increasingly difficult in many ...parts of the world, and this can lead to the production of fresh produce contaminated with pathogenic microorganisms, resulting in increased risk of human disease. Water, an important raw material in the fresh produce chain, is used in considerable amounts in many operations, including irrigation and application of pesticides and fertilizers, but also as a transport medium and for cooling and washing in postharvest practices. In several reported outbreaks related to uncooked fruit and vegetable products, water has been identified as a likely source of the outbreak. The present study, initiated by the ILSI Europe Emerging Microbiological Issues Task Force in collaboration with 8 other ILSI branches and support of WHO/FAO, was undertaken to review the status of, and provide suggestions for, consideration by different stakeholders on water and sanitation and its impact on food safety and public health. A limited number of guidelines and regulations on water quality for agricultural production are available, and many of them are still heavily based on microbial standards and (debated) parameters such as fecal coliforms. Data gaps have been identified with regard to baseline studies of microbial pathogens in water sources in many regions, the need for agreement on methods and microbial parameters to be used in assessing water quality, the fate of pathogens in water, and their transfer and persistence on irrigated/processed produce.
•Review of the EUR, WENRA, and IAEA definitions and requirements of the DEC-A analysis;•Review of the current level of knowledge and modeling capabilities for DEC-A relevant phenomena;•Review of good ...practices for DEC-A analysis in OECD/NEA member countries and partners.
Since 2012, many NEA member countries have implemented deterministic safety analyses for operating nuclear power plants under design extension conditions without significant fuel degradation or core melt (DEC-A). However, variations persist among these countries in defining DEC-A scenarios and acceptance criteria, validation and application of computer codes, development and application of deterministic safety analysis methods. Furthermore, there is a dearth of shared international experience and methodologies among various stakeholders, including regulatory authorities, technical safety or support organizations, utilities, engineering and consulting companies. To address these gaps, the OECD/NEA initiated a project in 2021, titled “Good Practices for Analyses of Design Extension Conditions without Significant Fuel Degradation for Operating Nuclear Power Plants” (or “DEC-A”), under the auspices of the Working Group on Accident Management and Analysis (WGAMA) and the Working Group on Fuel Safety (WGFS). The DEC-A project aims to review and summarize the current requirements, knowledge status, and best practices in NEA member countries. This paper outlines the objectives and scope of the OECD/NEA DEC-A project, and presents the findings from the review and discussions for each task.
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