2024
Autores
Rodrigues, MG; Rodrigues, JD; Moreira, JA; Clemente, F; Dias, CC; Azevedo, LF; Rodrigues, PP; Areias, JC; Areias, ME;
Publicação
CHILD CARE HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT
Abstract
PurposeTo develop, implement and assess the results of psychoeducation to improve the QoL of parents with CHD newborns.MethodsParticipants were parents of inpatient newborns with the diagnosis of non-syndromic CHD. We conducted a parallel RCT with an allocation ratio of 1:1 (intervention vs. control), considering the newborns, using mixed methods research. The intervention group received psychoeducation (Parental Psychoeducation in CHD [PPeCHD]) and the usual routines, and the control group received just the regular practices. The allocation concealment was assured. PI was involved in enrolling participants, developing and implementing the intervention, data collection and data analysis. We followed the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) guidelines.ResultsParents of eight newborns were allocated to the intervention group (n = 15 parents) and eight to the control group (n = 13 parents). It was performed as an intention-to-treat (ITT) analysis. In M2 (4 weeks), the intervention group presented better QoL levels in the physical, psychological, and environmental domains of World Health Organization Quality of Life instrument (WHOQOL-Bref). In M3 (16 weeks), scores in physical and psychological domains maintained a statistically significant difference between the groups.ConclusionsThe PPeCHD, the psychoeducational intervention we developed, positively impacted parental QoL. These results support the initial hypothesis. This study is a fundamental milestone in this research field, adding new essential information to the literature.
2024
Autores
Leite, S; Mota, B; Silva, AR; Commons, ML; Miller, PM; Rodrigues, PP;
Publicação
PLOS ONE
Abstract
Several studies demonstrate that the structure of the brain increases in hierarchical complexity throughout development. We tested if the structure of artificial neural networks also increases in hierarchical complexity while learning a developing task, called the balance beam problem. Previous simulations of this developmental task do not reflect a necessary premise underlying development: a more complex structure can be built out of less complex ones, while ensuring that the more complex structure does not replace the less complex one. In order to address this necessity, we segregated the input set by subsets of increasing Orders of Hierarchical Complexity. This is a complexity measure that has been extensively shown to underlie the complexity behavior and hypothesized to underlie the complexity of the neural structure of the brain. After segregating the input set, minimal neural network models were trained separately for each input subset, and adjacent complexity models were analyzed sequentially to observe whether there was a structural progression. Results show that three different network structural progressions were found, performing with similar accuracy, pointing towards self-organization. Also, more complex structures could be built out of less complex ones without substituting them, successfully addressing catastrophic forgetting and leveraging performance of previous models in the literature. Furthermore, the model structures trained on the two highest complexity subsets performed better than simulations of the balance beam present in the literature. As a major contribution, this work was successful in addressing hierarchical complexity structural growth in neural networks, and is the first that segregates inputs by Order of Hierarchical Complexity. Since this measure can be applied to all domains of data, the present method can be applied to future simulations, systematizing the simulation of developmental and evolutionary structural growth in neural networks.
2024
Autores
Pereira, RC; Abreu, PH; Rodrigues, PP;
Publicação
JOURNAL OF COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE
Abstract
Missing data is an issue that can negatively impact any task performed with the available data and it is often found in real -world domains such as healthcare. One of the most common strategies to address this issue is to perform imputation, where the missing values are replaced by estimates. Several approaches based on statistics and machine learning techniques have been proposed for this purpose, including deep learning architectures such as generative adversarial networks and autoencoders. In this work, we propose a novel siamese neural network suitable for missing data imputation, which we call Siamese Autoencoder-based Approach for Imputation (SAEI). Besides having a deep autoencoder architecture, SAEI also has a custom loss function and triplet mining strategy that are tailored for the missing data issue. The proposed SAEI approach is compared to seven state-of-the-art imputation methods in an experimental setup that comprises 14 heterogeneous datasets of the healthcare domain injected with Missing Not At Random values at a rate between 10% and 60%. The results show that SAEI significantly outperforms all the remaining imputation methods for all experimented settings, achieving an average improvement of 35%. This work is an extension of the article Siamese Autoencoder-Based Approach for Missing Data Imputation [1] presented at the International Conference on Computational Science 2023. It includes new experiments focused on runtime, generalization capabilities, and the impact of the imputation in classification tasks, where the results show that SAEI is the imputation method that induces the best classification results, improving the F1 scores for 50% of the used datasets.
2024
Autores
Pereira, RC; Abreu, PH; Rodrigues, PP; Figueiredo, MAT;
Publicação
EXPERT SYSTEMS WITH APPLICATIONS
Abstract
Experimental assessment of different missing data imputation methods often compute error rates between the original values and the estimated ones. This experimental setup relies on complete datasets that are injected with missing values. The injection process is straightforward for the Missing Completely At Random and Missing At Random mechanisms; however, the Missing Not At Random mechanism poses a major challenge, since the available artificial generation strategies are limited. Furthermore, the studies focused on this latter mechanism tend to disregard a comprehensive baseline of state-of-the-art imputation methods. In this work, both challenges are addressed: four new Missing Not At Random generation strategies are introduced and a benchmark study is conducted to compare six imputation methods in an experimental setup that covers 10 datasets and five missingness levels (10% to 80%). The overall findings are that, for most missing rates and datasets, the best imputation method to deal with Missing Not At Random values is the Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations, whereas for higher missingness rates autoencoders show promising results.
2024
Autores
Silva, A; Mendes Moreira, J; Ferreira, C; Costa, N; Dias, D;
Publicação
COMPUTERS AND ELECTRONICS IN AGRICULTURE
Abstract
In this paper, a solution to monitor the location of humans during their activity in the agriculture sector with the aim to boost productivity and efficiency is provided. Our solution is based on map-matching methods, that are used to track the path spanned by a worker along a specific activity in an agriculture culture. Two different cultures are taken into consideration in this study olives and vines. We leverage the symmetry of the geometry of these cultures into our solution and divide the problem three-fold initially, we estimate a path of a worker along the fields, then we apply the map-matching to such path and finally, a post-processing method is applied to ensure local continuity of the sequence obtained from map-matching. The proposed methods are experimentally evaluated using synthetic and real data in the region of Mirandela, Portugal. Evaluation metrics show that results for synthetic data are robust under several sampling periods, while for real-world data, results for the vine culture are on par with synthetic, and for the olive culture performance is reduced.
2024
Autores
Mou, JJ; Brito, PQ;
Publicação
LEISURE SCIENCES
Abstract
While place attachment has been a hot research topic in tourism, place meanings generally have received less attention from researchers. By bridging environmental psychology to the context of tourism, this research employs schema theory to explore how the home environment influences place meanings perceived in foreign destinations by tourists belonging to the same cultural group, i.e., Chinese and Macau outbound tourists in Europe. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, and the findings show that there is much overlap in both groups' place meanings regarding Europe as they are culturally Chinese. Nonetheless, the Portuguese symbolic settings of their home environment are profoundly integrated in the Macau interviewees' autobiographical memories and self-identity, which turns them into "vicarious insiders" of Portugal prior to their actual visits, thus rendering Portugal a specifically meaningful destination. This study makes theoretical contributions to the tourism place literature and provides practical implications regarding meaning marketing for destination management organizations.
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