Recursive Partitioning in the Health Sciences (Statistics for Biology and Health)

Book Description

This book describes the recursive partitioning methodology and demonstrates its effectiveness as a response to the challenge of analyzing and interpreting multiple complex pathways to many illnesses, diseases, and ultimately death. For comparison purposes, standard regression methods are presented briefly and they are applied in the examples. We emphasize particularly the importance of scientific judgment and interpretation while guided by statistical output. This book is suitable for three broad groups of readers: 1) Biomedical researchers, clinicians, public health practitioners including epidemiologists, health service researchers, environmental policy advisers; 2) Consulting statisticians who can use the recursive partitioning technique as a guide in providing effective and insightful solutions to clients' problems; and 3) Statisticians interested in methodological and theoretical issues. The book provides an up-to-date summary of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of recursive partitioning. It also presents a host of unsolved problems whose solutions whould advance the rigorous underpinnings of statistics in general. Heping Zhang is Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Child Study at Yale University. In addition to the methodology and application of recursive partitioning, he is interested in developing statistical methods for analyzing correlated data, especially family and genetic studies, and brain imaging problems. Burton Singer, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is Professor of Demography and Public Affairs at Princeton University. His research interests include combinatorial formulation of randomness, infectious disease epidemiology, and bio-demography of aging.

Customer Reviews:

sequel to CART.......2001-04-28

Brieman, Olshen, Friedman and Stone introduced CART in their 1984 book. It is an effective methodology and software tool for constructin classification and regression trees. The procedure is also referred to as recursive partitioning. There has been a great deal of research over the past 16 on this topic and the authors cover the basics and the new material well. New ideas include survival trees and adaptive splines (including MARS). It provides interesting applications to health science problems. Th authors compare tree based methods to logistic regression. This is a notable successor to the CART text.

Recursive Partitioning in the Health Sciences.......2000-06-13

Zhang and Singer have done a splendid job of explaining recursive partitioning, a topic that should be of great interest to anyone who wants to make sense of data in which there are many potentially important variables contributing to some outcome or variable of interest. One should not be put off by the "... in the Health Sciences" part of the book's title; the potential audience of readers who can benefit from reading it is much greater than this implies (I'm an ecologist, for example). Why? First, because the topics covered have wide applicability in many fields; and second, because the writing is exceptionally clear and easy to follow. If you are able to use a typical introductory text on multiple regression, for example, you should have no difficulty getting a lot out of Zhang and Singer. If you are able to handle a mathematically rigorous approach to statistics but are new to the topics covered here, this book will provide an excellent starting place before you jump into the many references to the recent literature provided by the authors.

Recursive Partitioning.......2000-05-16

Recursive Partitioning in the Health Sciences is one of the few statistical texts specifically written with the epidemiologist as a target end user, similar in genre to Schlesselman's Case Control Studies. The subject matter is relatively new in the field of epidemiology and as such needs to be related contextually to more traditional statistical approaches. The authors accomplish this by incorporating introductory chapters on methods corresponding to those being addressed by the nonparametric methods of recursive partitioning and multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS). Additionally, they compare results between these tried and true statistical methods and recursive partitioning and MARS with many illustrative examples. This last is a strength of this book. Examples of each topic under discussion are carefully considered in a stepwise manner. The book is nicely balanced in terms of theoretic background and practical applications, with the writing generally intelligible to the non-statistician. The book has provided our group with background material to allow utilization of recursive partitioning in our research. As the technique of recursive partitioning becomes recognized and subsequently applied in the epidemiological field, this book may well become a classic.

Recursive Partitioning.......2000-05-16

Book Description

This book examines the chemistry of dye production. Raw materials and synthetic procedures used to make dyes for a variety of end uses are detailed, included developments in computer-aided dye synthesis.

Book Description

The purpose of this symposium is to bring together scientists working on continuum theories of discrete mechanical and thermodynamical systems in the realm of mathematics, theoretical and applied mechanics, physics, material science and engineering. It aims to join together the divergent languages, questions and methods developed in the respective disciplines and to stimulate broad interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and results. The main topics, discussed in the lectures, concern thermodynamics, transport theory, statistical mechanics; continuum mechanics of complex fluids and deformable solids with microstructure; continuum theory of living structures; defect dynamics, synergetics, solitons, coherent structures; dislocations and plasticity; fundamentals of fracture mechanics.

Book Description

Woolf continually used stories and sketches to experiment with narrative models and themes for her novels. This collection of nearly fifty pieces brings together the contents of two published volumes, A Haunted House and Mrs. Dalloway’s Party; a number of uncollected stories; and several previously unpublished pieces. Edited and with an Introduction by Susan Dick.

Customer Reviews:

A GENIUS. Period........2005-09-14

I'm not the kind of person that uses the concept/word "genius" that often, but Virginia Woolf's talent to create Orchestral Manouvers in the Mind and Heart, weaving beautiful webs of ideas, feelings, emotions, thoughts and perceptions turned her texts into something to behold in a mixture of awe and joy. Each of her short stories is like an exquisite scent for the mind to process and delight at but never be able to define. This lady's words make her texts more real than reality itself. This is TALENT at its highest. This lady was - is -, obviously, a genius.

Just as Enjoyable as her Novels.......2004-04-26

This book is great if you have read all of her novels or have yet to pick up one. It can introduce you to Woolf's style or if you already know what a wonderful writer she is, it will continue to entertain you. These short stories also let you see how she developed some of her novels as well as her style throughout her life. She was unbelievably dedicated to her writing, and this book makes her efforts clear.

What a wonderfull way to learn and read.......2000-05-11

Woolf use of words is just full and rich,english as english should be.

Lady in the Looking Glass.......2000-05-04

My favorite story in this collection is "The Lady in the Lookinglass." This story contains a powerful image: the yearning to completely comprehend another person. Such longing, as the narrator distinguishes, is not desire for "dinners and visits and polite conversations," nor "things she talked about at dinner," but something deeper, "her profounder state of being that one wanted to catch and turn to words."

On one hand, Isabella represents a synecdoche. If the narrator understands her deeply enough, he could "know everything there was to be known about Isabella," but also life, and perhaps all persons as well.

On the other hand, perhaps Isabella objectifies the inability of one person to scale walls of privacy and anonymity another erects to protect herself from intimacy.

Our sympathy straddles that wall, perhaps lying first with Isabella who veils herself, then with the narrator who longs to know her. We aren't shown why Isabella has become the trembling convolvulus. But no one's face should reflect "masklike indifference." The phrase is not congruous -- the need to mask is anything but indifferent. And can't we concede tragedy to anyone who, after 50-60 years, remains a person for whom another can claim, "The comparison showed how very little, after all these years, one knew about her; for it is impossible that any woman of flesh and blood of fifty-five or sixty should be really a wreath or a tendril"? This is a heartbreaking image.

Wonderful first steps to understanding Woolf.......1999-06-25

Woolf is not typically known as a writer of short stories -- "sketches" as she called them. However, the short fiction that she wrote provides a wonderful introduction to her narrative style. The early "Mark on the Wall," "Kew Gardens," and "An Unwritten Novel" give to the reader a sense of how Woolf's technique works within a smaller package than the usual assigned Woolf reading. Her feminist (apologies to VW since she considered the word dead once women were able to earn a living) leanings come through in "A Society" and "Moments of Being: 'Slater's Pins have no Points'." Woolf's early sketches are where she formed her interior monologue style, within which one thing leads to another as the work progresses. These short fiction works should be required reading for anyone delving into Woolf. Possibly those who read these sketches before they dive into the novels would understand a bit better of what Woolf's fiction is made. Excellent.

Complete Shorter Fiction (Everyman's Library (Cloth))

Average customer rating:

a treasure

Complete Shorter Fiction (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
Herman Melville
Manufacturer: Everyman's Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0375400680
Release Date: 1997-10-15

Book Description

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Herman Melville (1819-91) brought as much genius to the smaller-scale literary forms as he did to the full-blown novel: his poems and the short stories and novellas collected in this volume reveal a deftness and a delicacy of touch that is in some ways even more impressive than the massive, tectonic passions of Moby-Dick. In a story like "Bartleby, the Scrivener" -- one of the very few perfect representatives of the form in the English language -- he displayed an unflinching precision and insight and empathy in his depiction of the drastically alienated inner life of the title character. In "Benito Cereno," he addressed the great racial dilemmas of the nineteenth century with a profound, almost surreal imaginative clarity. And in Billy, Budd, Sailor, the masterpiece of his last years, he fused the knowledge and craft gained from a lifetime's magnificent work into a pure, stark, flawlessly composed tale of innocence betrayed and destroyed. Melville is justly honored for the epic sweep of his mind, but his lyricism, his skill in rendering the minute, the particular, the local, was equally sublime.

Customer Reviews:

a treasure.......1999-06-05

A wonderful collection of some fine stories by one of the greatest writers America will ever produce.

The Norton introduction to literature: Instructor's guide for the complete and shorter editions, The Norton introduction to fiction, and The Norton introduction to poetry

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The Norton introduction to literature: Instructor's guide for the complete and shorter editions, The Norton introduction to fiction, and The Norton introduction to poetry
Gayla McGlamery
Manufacturer: Norton
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Complete Shorter Fiction (Oxford World's Classics)

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A must have for any collection
A must for lovers of Oscar and great literature

Complete Shorter Fiction (Oxford World's Classics)
Oscar Wilde
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0192833766

Book Description

For the first time in one volume, this complete collection of all the short fiction Oscar Wilde published contains such social and literary parodies as "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" and "The Canterville Ghost;" such well-known fairy tales as "The Happy Prince," "The Young King," and "The
Fisherman and his Soul;" an imaginary portrait of the dedicatee of Shakespeare's Sonnets entitled "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.;" and the parables Wilde referred to as "Poems in Prose," including "The Artist," "The House of Judgment," and "The Teacher of Wisdom."

Customer Reviews:

A must have for any collection.......2006-05-02

I only came to this page to mark that I loved this book using the star system. Seeing that there is only one other review for this book I feel an obligation to write something more in its support. Maybe just telling you, the potential reader, this fact will tell at how much I like this book.

First off, if you've never read anything by Oscar Wilde before, this is a great place to start. He is a man who wrote in two extremes, though with many dimensions of those two: the very high and the very low. This book covers both of those poles in a complete way, giving the reader a feel of what the author can do with words.

Take the low pole, for example. The story 'The Nightingale and the Rose' will move you to tears if you're not careful to read it from a 'happy place'. It is a sad tale that observes love in a seemingly juvenile way (being that it is written as a fairy tale, something most modern audiences are not used to reading as adult literature and find themselves approaching with all their defenses down) but that handles it in such a way as to tilt our ready emotions into an abyss we are probably not ready to handle. Fairy tales are supposed to be about princesses, horses, and godmothers, right? "So what is this..?" We find ourselves asking at the end. It is genius.

To go to the other extreme of his work, try out 'Lord Arthur Saville's Crime' a story that begins with the title character finding himself caught up with a chiromancer (palm reader) who tells him that he is going to murder someone. The poor fellow, feeling that he cannot go forward with his engagement to a woman until this task is taken care of, goes about attempting to murder several unsuspecting characters. He does this knowing that it is his obligation, that he cannot possibly be happy until he has done what he must. I challenge you to read this and not laugh until you are red in the face.

Either extreme makes you think. The first story will have you questioning what love really is made of, looking inside of yourself to see to which extreme you gravitate. The latter story will have you wondering at fate versus destiny; which played its role in this story? I will not give away the ending but will tell you that you should spend some time pondering its conclusion.

Yet even in touching on these two stories I have but skimmed ever so lightly across what delights this book holds. Try the sinister implications found in the repetitions of 'The Fisherman and His Soul'. Laugh at the idiotic characterizations of Americans (I'm an American, for the record on this- yet it was still funny) in 'The Canterville Ghost'. Ponder on the parallels in the 'Poems Written in Prose' at the back of the book, each of which is like a short, succinct question to the reader.

Bottom line: I cannot recommend this book enough. I cannot recommend Oscar Wilde and his works enough.

-LP

A must for lovers of Oscar and great literature.......2001-07-20

Oscar Wilde is my favorite author and in my opinion one of the greatest writers to have ever lived.His magnificent stories can make you laugh out loud but they can also move you to tears.No library is complete without the writings of Oscar Wilde.And I highly recommend this book and anything else by Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Wilde complete shorter fiction contains all of Oscar Wildes fairy tales.And it also contains his short stories and some poems.

The fairy tales collected in this volume are "The Nightingale and The Rose" and "The Selfish Giant" and "The Happy Prince".The aforementioned tales happen to be my absolute favorites.The are among the most beautiful stories I have ever read and they will truly touch your heart.Other fairy tales in this book are "The Devoted Friend" and "The Remarkable Rocket".

The short stories in this collection include" Lord Arthur Savile`s Crime "and "The Sphinx Without a Secret".And also "The Canterville Ghost" and "The Model Millionaire"."The Canterville Ghost" is absolutely hilarious and yet at the same time very touching.

Other stories contained in this book are "The Young King" "The Birthday Of Infanta" and "The Fisherman and his Soul "and also "The Star Child"."The Birthday Of Infanta" will truly break your heart and "The Fisherman and his Soul" is also a very touching story.

The poems in this book include The Artist, The Doer of Good,The Disciple, "The Master" and "The House Of Judgement" and "The Teacher of Wisdom".

I highly recommend this book and if you haven`t read any of these stories treat yourself to this book you won`t be sorry.

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4 Book Set By Virginia Woolf; Mrs. Dalloway; Flush; to the Lighthouse; the Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000WO2TL2

Product Description

4 Book Set By Virginia Woolf; Mrs. Dalloway; Flush; to the Lighthouse; the Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf

Anthony Trollope: The Complete Shorter Fiction

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Anthony Trollope: The Complete Shorter Fiction
Anthony Trollope
Manufacturer: Carroll & Graf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0881848549

The Complete Shorter Fiction Of Oscar Wilde

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The Complete Shorter Fiction Of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Product Description

271 Pages of Text

The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction Instructor's Handbook for the Complete and Shorter Editions

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The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction Instructor's Handbook for the Complete and Shorter Editions
R.V. Cassill
Manufacturer: W.W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000S7W4BS

The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction: Instructor's Handbook for the Complete and Shorter Editions (5th Edition)

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The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction: Instructor's Handbook for the Complete and Shorter Editions (5th Edition)
R.V. Cassill
Manufacturer: W.W. Norton
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
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The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction

ASIN: 0393967034

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The Norton anthology of short fiction;: Instructor's handbook, for the complete and shorter editions

Manufacturer: Norton
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: B0006DCLEO

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