Combined Multimorbidity and Polypharmacy Patterns in the Elderly: A Cross-Sectional Study in Primary Health Care

(1) Background: The acquisition of multiple chronic diseases, known as multimorbidity, is common in the elderly population, and it is often treated with the simultaneous consumption of several prescription drugs, known as polypharmacy. These two concepts are inherently related and cause an undue burden on the individual. The aim of this study was to identify combined multimorbidity and polypharmacy patterns for the elderly population in Catalonia. (2) Methods: A cross-sectional study using electronic health records from 2012 was conducted. A mapping process was performed linking chronic disease categories to the drug categories indicated for their treatment. A soft clustering technique was then carried out on the final mapped categories. (3) Results: 916,619 individuals were included, with 93.1% meeting the authors’ criteria for multimorbidity and 49.9% for polypharmacy. A seven-cluster solution was identified: one non-specific (Cluster 1) and six specific, corresponding to diabetes (Cluster 2), neurological and musculoskeletal, female dominant (Clusters 3 and 4) and cardiovascular, cerebrovascular and renal diseases (Clusters 5 and 6), and multi-system diseases (Cluster 7). (4) Conclusions: This study utilized a mapping process combined with a soft clustering technique to determine combined patterns of multimorbidity and polypharmacy in the elderly population, identifying overrepresentation in six of the seven clusters with chronic disease and chronic disease-drug categories. These results could be applied to clinical practice guidelines in order to better attend to patient needs. This study can serve as the foundation for future longitudinal regarding relationships between multimorbidity and polypharmacy.

Sentiment Analysis based on Soft Clustering through Dimensionality Reduction Technique

Clustering based sentiment analysis confers new directions to analyze real-world opinions without human participation and pre-tagged training data overhead. Clustering based techniques do not rely on linguistic information and more convenient as compared to other traditional machine learning techniques. Combining the dimensionality reduction techniques with clustering algorithms highly influence the computational cost and improve the performance of sentiment analysis. In this research, we applied Principal Component Analysis technique to reduce the size of features set. This reduced feature set improves binary K-means clustering results of sentiments analysis. In our experiments, we demonstrate the performance of the clustering system with a reduced feature set to provide high-quality sentiment analysis. However, K-mean clustering has its own limitations such as hard assignment and instability of results. To overcome the limitation of traditional K-means algorithm we applied soft clustering (Expectation maximization algorithm) approach which stabilizes clustering accuracy. This approach allows a soft assignment to cluster documents. Consequently, our experimental accuracy is 95% with standard deviation rate of 0.1% which is sufficient to apply the clustering technique in real-world applications.

SOFT CLUSTERING DENGAN ALGORITMA FUZZY K-MEANS (STUDI KASUS : PENGELOMPOKAN DESA DI KOTA TIDORE KEPULAUAN)

Mengembangkan wilayah untuk mengurangi kesenjangan dan menjamin pemerataan merupakan salah satu dari tujuh agenda Pembangunana RPJMN IV Tahun 2020-2024. Setiap wilayah tentunya memiliki potensi yang berbeda, baik potensi fisik maupun non-fisik. Perbedaan inilah yang menjadi dasar dalam pengelompokan desa sehingga pembangunan desa menjadi lebih terarah. Secara umum metode klaster dapat dibedakan menjadi dua kelompok yaitu hard clustering dan soft clustering. Pada hard clustering setiap objek dipetakan terhadap setiap kelompok. Metode yang populer pada kelompok hard clustering adalah Cluster K-Means. Sedangkan pada soft clustering objek tidak hanya dipetakan kedalam satu kelompok. Fuzzy K Means (FCM) merupakan salah satu metode dalam soft clustering, dimana Fuzzy K Means merupakan pengembangan dari Cluster K-Means. Cara kerja FCM adalah objek diberi probabilitas yang pada dasarnya menggambarkan kepemilikan objek ke dalam Cluster.

A learning-from-data approach with soft clustering and path relinking to the history-matching problem

History matching is an important reservoir engineering process whereby the values of uncertain attributes of a reservoir model are changed to find models that have a better chance of reproducing the performance of an actual reservoir. As a typical inverse and ill-posed problem, different combinations of reservoir uncertain attributes lead to equally well-matched models and the success of a history-matching approach is usually measured in terms of its ability to efficiently find multiple history-matched models inside the search space defined by the parameterization of the problem (multiple-matched models have a higher chance of better representing the reservoir performance forecast). While studies on history-matching approaches have produced remarkable progress over the last two decades, given the uniqueness of each reservoir’s history-matching problem, no strategy is proven effective for all cases, and finding alternative, efficient, and effective history-matching methodologies is still a research challenge. In this work, we introduce a learning-from-data approach with path relinking and soft clustering to the history-matching problem. The proposed algorithm is designed to learn the patterns of input attributes that are associated with good matching quality from the set of available solutions, and has two stages that handle different types of reservoir uncertain attributes. In each stage, the algorithm evaluates the data of all-available solutions continuously and, based on the acquired information, dynamically decides what needs to be changed, where the changes shall take place, and how such changes will occur in order to generate new (and hopefully better) solutions. We validate our approach using the UNISIM-I-H benchmark, a complex synthetic case constructed with real data from the Namorado Field, Campos Basin, Brazil. Experimental results indicate the potential of the proposed approach in finding models with significantly better history-matching quality. Considering a global misfit quality metric, the final best solutions found by our approach are up to 77% better than the corresponding initial best solutions in the datasets used in the experiments. Moreover, compared with previous work for the same benchmark, the proposed learning-from-data approach is competitive regarding the quality of solutions found and, above all, it offers a significant reduction (up to 30 × less) in the number of simulations.

Correction to: JOINT for large-scale single-cell RNAsequencing analysis via soft-clustering and parallel computing

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.