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For centuries, the study of traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been centred on historical observation and analyses of personal, social, and environmental processes, which have been examined separately. Today, computation implementation and vast patient data repositories can enable a concurrent analysis of personal, social, and environmental processes, providing insight into changes in health status transitions over time. We applied computational and data visualization techniques to categorize decade-long health records of 235,003 patients with TBI in Canada, from preceding injury to the injury event itself. Our results highlighted that health status transition patterns in TBI emerged along with the projection of comorbidity where many disorders, social and environmental adversities preceding injury are reflected in external causes of injury and injury severity. The strongest associations between health status preceding TBI and health status at the injury event were between multiple body system pathology and advanced age-related brain pathology networks. The interwoven aspects of health status on a time continuum can influence post-injury trajectories and should be considered in TBI risk analysis to improve prevention, diagnosis, and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present a weighted mixture distribution component counts (MDCC) approach for estimating total number of species. The proposed method combines conditional estimates of component counts from several candidate mixture distributions and uses bootstrap for confidence interval estimation. The distribution specification is flexible and can be adjusted to suit a variety of datasets. Smoothing techniques can also be incorporated to improve modeling of sparse data. The method is tested by a simulation study and applied to two microbiome datasets for illustration. Simulation results indicate improved bias, mean squared error and confidence interval coverage relative to comparison methods, as well as robustness to underlying data structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]