One goal for Mykrobe predictor was to avoid the combination of detecting mecA from mecA-containing-CoNS while failing to detect the CoNS species itself thus causing a miscall of MRSA.
In order to reduce the dimensionality in the set of predictors, and to avoid sparseness of data, the four variables dealing with use of communication technology (mobile phone calls, mobile phone SMS, internet, email) were collapsed into a single score representing the number of communication tools they declared to have used in the week prior to hospital admission.
So it is very important to identify a chemotherapeutic predictor in order to avoid unnecessary treatment.
Findings indicate that housing availability was the primary predictor of subsequent ability to avoid homelessness, while enhanced services reduced the risk of homelessness if housing was also available.
If a direct match was not possible, we replaced the original predictor with a proxy variable to avoid having to drop the model from our validation study.
Perceived self-efficacy is a strong predictor of behavior; people tend to avoid activities that they believe they cannot carry out, and engage in activities they judge themselves capable of handling [ 34, 35].
This approach aimed to reduce the number of predictors within each global model to avoid issues of overparameterization or overfitting of data and bias in regression coefficients; a rule of ≥5 observations to one predictor was adopted [ 62], which for n = 39 populations meant using 4 7 predictors.
To avoid "overlap" in predictors and issues with co-linearity, variables derived from predictors already included in the model (total scores for the PANSS and QLS scales, remission status, and baseline category) were not used in the multiple regression model.
33 We multiplied the predictor coefficients with uniform "shrinkage factors" to avoid exaggerated model coefficients (see supplementary appendix C for details).
Where similar clinical features were described by more than one significant predictor, the predictor with the higher level of significance in univariate analyses was entered into multivariate analyses, in order to avoid co-aggregation of predictors; e.g. baseline CIND rather than the baseline CAMCOG score as both these tests assess cognition.
