Abstract
With rising healthcare costs, using health personnel and resources efficiently and effectively is critical. International cross-country and simple worker-to-population ratio comparisons are frequently used for improving the efficiency of health systems, planning of health human resources and guiding policy changes. These comparisons are made between countries typically of the same continental region. However, if used imprudently, inconsistencies arising from frail comparisons of health systems may outweigh the positive benefits brought by new policy insights. In this work, we propose a different approach to international health system comparisons. We present a methodology to group similar countries in terms of mortality, morbidity, utilisation levels, and human and physical resources, which are all factors that influence health gains. Instead of constructing an absolute rank or comparing against the average, the method finds countries that share similar ground, upon which more reliable comparisons can then be conducted, including performance analysis. We apply this methodology using data from the World Health Organization's Health for All database, and we present some interesting empirical relationships between indicators that may provide new insights into how such information can be used to promote better healthcare planning and policy guidance.

Abstract
The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the most studied optimization problems. Various meta heuristics (MHs) have been proposed and investigated on many instances of this problem. It is widely accepted that the best MH varies for different instances. Ideally, one should be able to recommend the best MHs for a new TSP instance without having to execute them. However, this is a very difficult task. We address this task by using a meta-learning approach based on label ranking algorithms. These algorithms build a mapping that relates the characteristics of those instances (i.e., the meta-features) with the relative performance (i.e., the ranking) of MHs, based on (meta-)data extracted from TSP instances that have been already solved by those MHs. The success of this approach depends on the quality of the meta-features that describe the instances. In this work, we investigate four different sets of meta-features based on different measurements of the properties of TSP instances: edge and vertex measures, complex network measures, properties from the MHs, and subsampling landmarkers properties. The models are investigated in four different TSP scenarios presenting symmetry and connection strength variations. The experimental results indicate that meta-learning models can accurately predict rankings of MHs for different TSP scenarios. Good solutions for the investigated TSP instances can be obtained from the prediction of rankings of MHs, regardless of the learning algorithm used at the meta level. The experimental results also show that the definition of the set of meta-features has an important impact on the quality of the solutions obtained.

Abstract
We present a dynamic web tool that allows interactive search and visualization of large news archives using an entity-centric approach. Users are able to search entities using keyword phrases expressing news stories or events and the system retrieves the most relevant entities to the user query based on automatically extracted and indexed entity profiles. From the computational journalism perspective, TimeMachine allows users to explore media content through time using automatic identification of entity names, jobs, quotations and relations between entities from co-occurrences networks extracted from the news articles. TimeMachine demo is available at http://maquinadotempo.sapo.pt/. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.

Abstract
The selection of metafeatures for metalearning (MtL) is often an ad hoc process. The lack of a proper motivation for the choice of a metafeature rather than others is questionable and may originate a loss of valuable information for a given problem (e.g., use of class entropy and not attribute entropy). We present a framework to systematically generate metafeatures in the context of MtL. This framework decomposes a metafeature into three components: meta-function, object and post-processing. The automatic generation of metafeatures is triggered by the selection of a meta-function used to systematically generate metafeatures from all possible combinations of object and post-processing alternatives. We executed experiments by addressing the problem of algorithm selection in classification datasets. Results show that the sets of systematic metafeatures generated from our framework are more informative than the non-systematic ones and the set regarded as state-of-the-art.

Abstract
Dynamic selection or combination (DSC) methods allow to select one or more classifiers from an ensemble according to the characteristics of a given test instance x. Most methods proposed for this purpose are based on the nearest neighbours algorithm: it is assumed that if a classifier performed well on a set of instances similar to x, it will also perform well on x. We address the problem of dynamically combining a pool of classifiers by combining two approaches: metalearning and multi-label classification. Taking into account that diversity is a fundamental concept in ensemble learning and the interdependencies between the classifiers cannot be ignored, we solve the multi-label classification problem by using a widely known technique: Classifier Chains (CC). Additionally, we extend a typical metalearning approach by combining metafeatures characterizing the interdependencies between the classifiers with the base-level features.We executed experiments on 42 classification datasets and compared our method with several state-of-the-art DSC techniques, including another metalearning approach. Results show that our method allows an improvement over the other metalearning approach and is very competitive with the other four DSC methods. © Springer International Publishing AG 2016.

Abstract
Social media is strongly present in people's everyday life and Twitter is one example that stands out. The data within these types of services can be analyzed in order to discover useful knowledge. One interesting approach is to use data mining techniques to perceive hidden behaviours and patterns. The primary focus of this paper is the identification of patterns of retweets and to understand how information spreads over time in Twitter. The aim of this work lies in the adaptation of the GetMove tool, that is capable of extracting spatio-temporal pattern trajectories, and TweeProfiles, that identifies tweet profiles regarding several dimensions: spatial, temporal, social and content. We hope that the more flexible clustering strategy from TweeProfiles will enhance the results extracted by GetMove. We study the application of said mechanism to one case study and developed a visualization tool to interpret the results.