Philimon Nyamugure

A theoretical mathematical assessment of the effectiveness of coartemether in the treatment of Plasmodium falciparum malaria infection

This study analysed the dynamics of blood stage malaria with immune response and under administration of Coartem as a combination therapy. The techniques of mathematical modelling were used in coming up and analysing the deterministic model. Sensitivity analysis and statistical approaches were used to compare model simulated treatment results with the use of Coartem and other antimalarial drugs. We sought to theoretically assess if Coartem can bring improvement in the treatment of malaria as compared to the other drugs. Our analysis and numerical results suggest that Coartem compares well with other antimalarial drug that have been on the market. However, the shortfall of our model is that it could not give good comparative results between Coartem treatment and other combination treatment schemes with similar mode of action. Our study predicted effects of different drug treatment protocols in malaria using a theoretical mathematical model, which gives an insight into potential effective treatment schemes.

Investigating the effects of different grazing ratios and stocking rate of cattle and goats under mixed-species grazing on different plant species

The study focused on investigating the effects of different grazing ratios and stocking rate of cattle and goats under mixed species grazing on different species of plant. The experimental site was Matopos Research Station farm in Zimbabwe. This study was confined to the commonest grass species and forbs at the experimental site. Treatments spanned a period of eight years; from 1999 to 2007. Generally, heavy goats stocking rate resulted in low productivity of browse biomass while heavy cattle stocking rate resulted in low herbaceous biomass productivity. The present results do not support existence of a linear relationship between herbaceous biomass productivity and annual rainfall. Rather, a quadratic relationship existed, suggesting that there might be other factors in addition to rainfall that accounted for biomass productivity. Grazing ratios and stocking rate of cattle and goats, year and their interactions affected the productivity of plant species in the rangeland. Finally, farmers are encouraged to practice mixed-species grazing at an optimal grazing ratio of 4 cattle and 36 goats per 20 ha of rangeland.

Application of multinomial logistic regression to educational factors of the 2009 General Household Survey in South Africa

This paper combines factor analysis and multinomial logistic regression (MLR) in understanding the relationship between extracted factors of quality of life pertaining to education and variables of five key areas of the levels of development in the context of the South African 2009 General Household Survey. MLR was used to analyse the identified educational factors from factor analysis. It was also used to determine the extent to which these factors impact on educational level outcomes across South Africa. The overall classification accuracy rate displayed was 73.0% which is greater than the proportion by chance accuracy criteria of 57.0%. This means that the model improves on the proportion by chance accuracy rate of 25.0% or more so that the criterion for classification accuracy is satisfied and the model is adequate. Evidence is that being historically disadvantaged, absence of parental care, violence in schools and the perception that fees were too high generally have a negative influence on educational attainment. The results of this paper compare well with other household surveys conducted by other researchers.

A Minimum Spanning Tree Approximation to the Routing Problem through 'K' Specified Nodes

Abstract This paper presents a minimum spanning tree approach to determine a route through ‘k’ specified nodes. The path through ‘k’ specified nodes is a difficult problem for which no good solution procedure is known. The proposed method determines the route, which may be either an optimal or a near optimal path.

A transportation branch and bound algorithm for solving the generalized assignment problem

AbstractThis paper presents a transportation branch and bound algorithm for solving the generalized assignment problem. This is a branch and bound technique in which the sub-problems are solved by the available efficient transportation techniques rather than the usual simplex based approaches. A technique for selecting branching variables that minimize the number of sub-problems is also presented.