Vitamin D Deficiency and Related Factors in Patients at a Hospice (일개 호스피스 병동에서 비타민 D 결핍 현황 및 관련인자)
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- Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care
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- v.17 no.1
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- pp.27-33
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- 2014
Purpose: Although vitamin D deficiency is more commonly found in cancer patient than in non-cancer patients, there have been little data regarding the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in cancer patients at the very end of life. We examined vitamin D deficiency in terminally ill cancer patients and related factors. Methods: This study was based on a retrospective chart review of 133 patients in a hospice ward. We collected data regarding age, sex, serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D level, cancer type, physical performance, current medications and various laboratory findings. We investigated factors related to serum vitamin D levels after multivariate adjustment for potential confounders. Serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D<20 ng/mL was considered deficient and <10 ng/mL severely deficient. Results: Ninety-five percent of the patients were serum vitamin D deficient. Severe vitamin D deficiency was more common in male patients, non-lung cancer patients,
Fama asserted that in an efficient market, we can't make a trading rule that consistently outperforms the average stock market returns. This study aims to suggest a machine learning algorithm to improve the trading performance of an intraday short volatility strategy applying asymmetric volatility spillover effect, and analyze its trading performance improvement. Generally stock market volatility has a negative relation with stock market return and the Korean stock market volatility is influenced by the US stock market volatility. This volatility spillover effect is asymmetric. The asymmetric volatility spillover effect refers to the phenomenon that the US stock market volatility up and down differently influence the next day's volatility of the Korean stock market. We collected the S&P 500 index, VIX, KOSPI 200 index, and V-KOSPI 200 from 2008 to 2018. We found the negative relation between the S&P 500 and VIX, and the KOSPI 200 and V-KOSPI 200. We also documented the strong volatility spillover effect from the VIX to the V-KOSPI 200. Interestingly, the asymmetric volatility spillover was also found. Whereas the VIX up is fully reflected in the opening volatility of the V-KOSPI 200, the VIX down influences partially in the opening volatility and its influence lasts to the Korean market close. If the stock market is efficient, there is no reason why there exists the asymmetric volatility spillover effect. It is a counter example of the efficient market hypothesis. To utilize this type of anomalous volatility spillover pattern, we analyzed the intraday volatility selling strategy. This strategy sells short the Korean volatility market in the morning after the US stock market volatility closes down and takes no position in the volatility market after the VIX closes up. It produced profit every year between 2008 and 2018 and the percent profitable is 68%. The trading performance showed the higher average annual return of 129% relative to the benchmark average annual return of 33%. The maximum draw down, MDD, is -41%, which is lower than that of benchmark -101%. The Sharpe ratio 0.32 of SVS strategy is much greater than the Sharpe ratio 0.08 of the Benchmark strategy. The Sharpe ratio simultaneously considers return and risk and is calculated as return divided by risk. Therefore, high Sharpe ratio means high performance when comparing different strategies with different risk and return structure. Real world trading gives rise to the trading costs including brokerage cost and slippage cost. When the trading cost is considered, the performance difference between 76% and -10% average annual returns becomes clear. To improve the performance of the suggested volatility trading strategy, we used the well-known SVM algorithm. Input variables include the VIX close to close return at day t-1, the VIX open to close return at day t-1, the VK open return at day t, and output is the up and down classification of the VK open to close return at day t. The training period is from 2008 to 2014 and the testing period is from 2015 to 2018. The kernel functions are linear function, radial basis function, and polynomial function. We suggested the modified-short volatility strategy that sells the VK in the morning when the SVM output is Down and takes no position when the SVM output is Up. The trading performance was remarkably improved. The 5-year testing period trading results of the m-SVS strategy showed very high profit and low risk relative to the benchmark SVS strategy. The annual return of the m-SVS strategy is 123% and it is higher than that of SVS strategy. The risk factor, MDD, was also significantly improved from -41% to -29%.
Recommender system has become one of the most important technologies in e-commerce in these days. The ultimate reason to shop online, for many consumers, is to reduce the efforts for information search and purchase. Recommender system is a key technology to serve these needs. Many of the past studies about recommender systems have been devoted to developing and improving recommendation algorithms and collaborative filtering (CF) is known to be the most successful one. Despite its success, however, CF has several shortcomings such as cold-start, sparsity, gray sheep problems. In order to be able to generate recommendations, ordinary CF algorithms require evaluations or preference information directly from users. For new users who do not have any evaluations or preference information, therefore, CF cannot come up with recommendations (Cold-star problem). As the numbers of products and customers increase, the scale of the data increases exponentially and most of the data cells are empty. This sparse dataset makes computation for recommendation extremely hard (Sparsity problem). Since CF is based on the assumption that there are groups of users sharing common preferences or tastes, CF becomes inaccurate if there are many users with rare and unique tastes (Gray sheep problem). This study proposes a new algorithm that utilizes Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques to resolve the gray sheep problem. We utilize 'degree centrality' in SNA to identify users with unique preferences (gray sheep). Degree centrality in SNA refers to the number of direct links to and from a node. In a network of users who are connected through common preferences or tastes, those with unique tastes have fewer links to other users (nodes) and they are isolated from other users. Therefore, gray sheep can be identified by calculating degree centrality of each node. We divide the dataset into two, gray sheep and others, based on the degree centrality of the users. Then, different similarity measures and recommendation methods are applied to these two datasets. More detail algorithm is as follows: Step 1: Convert the initial data which is a two-mode network (user to item) into an one-mode network (user to user). Step 2: Calculate degree centrality of each node and separate those nodes having degree centrality values lower than the pre-set threshold. The threshold value is determined by simulations such that the accuracy of CF for the remaining dataset is maximized. Step 3: Ordinary CF algorithm is applied to the remaining dataset. Step 4: Since the separated dataset consist of users with unique tastes, an ordinary CF algorithm cannot generate recommendations for them. A 'popular item' method is used to generate recommendations for these users. The F measures of the two datasets are weighted by the numbers of nodes and summed to be used as the final performance metric. In order to test performance improvement by this new algorithm, an empirical study was conducted using a publically available dataset - the MovieLens data by GroupLens research team. We used 100,000 evaluations by 943 users on 1,682 movies. The proposed algorithm was compared with an ordinary CF algorithm utilizing 'Best-N-neighbors' and 'Cosine' similarity method. The empirical results show that F measure was improved about 11% on average when the proposed algorithm was used