Pathological tremor is a common but highly complex movement disorder, affecting ~5% of population older than 65 years. Different methodologies have been proposed for its quantification. Nevertheless, the discrimination between Parkinson’s disease tremor and essential tremor remains a daunting clinical challenge, greatly impacting patient treatment and basic research. Here, we propose and compare several movement-based and electromyography-based tremor quantification metrics. For the latter, we identified individual motor unit discharge patterns from high-density surface electromyograms and characterized the neural drive to a (...) single muscle and how it relates to other affected muscles in 27 Parkinson’s disease and 27 essential tremor patients. We also computed several metrics from the literature. The most discriminative metrics were the symmetry of the neural drive to muscles, motor unit synchronization, and the mean log power of the tremor harmonics in movement recordings. Noteworthily, the first two most discriminative metrics were proposed in this study. We then used decision tree modelling to find the most discriminative combinations of individual metrics, which increased the accuracy of tremor type discrimination to 94%. In summary, the proposed neural drive-based metrics were the most accurate at discriminating and characterizing the two most common pathological tremor types. (shrink)

This paper attempts to define Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) more precisely than usual, and to produce the beginnings of a philosophy of this topical and somewhat novel branch of statistics. A data set is, roughly speaking, a collection of k-tuples for some k. In both descriptive statistics and in EDA, these k-tuples, or functions of them, are represented in a manner matched to human and computer abilities with a view to finding patterns that are not "kinkera". A kinkus is a (...) pattern that has a negligible probability of being even partly potentially explicable. A potentially explicable pattern is one for which there probably exists a hypothesis of adequate "explicativity", which is another technical probabilistic concept. A pattern can be judged to be probably potentially explicable even if we cannot find an explanation. The theory of probability understood here is one of partially ordered (interval-valued), subjective (personal) probabilities. Among other topics relevant to a philosophy of EDA are the "reduction" of data; Francis Bacon's philosophy of science; the automatic formulation of hypotheses; successive deepening of hypotheses; neurophysiology; and rationality of type II. (shrink)

The form of argument used by Popper and Miller to attack the concept of probabilistic induction is applied to the slightly different situation in which some evidence undermines a hypothesis. The result is seemingly absurd, thus bringing the form of argument under suspicion.

Everyone interested in Arabic and Persian literature, in Islam and in comparative religion, regrets the death of Arthur J. Arberry, Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge. Arberry combined rare human qualities and exceptional professional attainment, and this enabled him to make a unique contribution both to learning and to mutual understanding between East and West. He had a deep sense of vocation, which he brought to his unremitting labours as a skilled editor of texts, especially (...) in the field of Islamic mysticism, and as an imaginative translator of these texts of the Koran and of Arabic and Persian poetry, and as a sympathetic interpreter of Sūfism. (shrink)

It is shown by means of a simple example that a good explanation of an event is not necessarily corroborated by the occurrence of that event. It is also shown that this contention follows symbolically if an explanation having higher "explicativity" than another is regarded as better.

The use of a concept called "explicativity", for (provisionally) accepting a theory or Hypothesis H, has previously been discussed. That previous discussion took into account the prior probability of H, and hence implicitly its theoretical simplicity. We here suggest that a modification of explicativity is required to allow for what may be called the pragmatic simplicity of H, that is, the simplicity of using H in applications as distinct from the simplicity of the description of H.

Good expresses agreement that the controversy between Bayesian and non-Bayesian statistics is more fundamental than that between Carnap and Popper, and points out that his own position is a Bayes/non-Bayes compromise.

The causal propensity of an event F to cause another event E is explicated as the weight of evidence against F if E does not occur, given the state of the universe just before F occurred. This definition, first given in 1961, is sharpened, defended, and applied to several examples. In this definition the concept of weight of evidence in favor of a proposition, provided by another one, is to be understood in a technical sense that is intended to capture (...) its most customary informal meaning. (shrink)

Review of Mark Wynn's book, Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life.