Basic Concepts of Research Methodology

It is an investigation of finding solutions to scientific and social problems through objective and systematic analysis. It is a search for knowledge, that is, a discovery of hidden truths. Here knowledge means information about matters. The information might be collected from different sources like experience, human beings, books, journals, nature, etc. A research can lead to new contributions to the existing knowledge. Only through research is it possible to make progress in a field. Research is indeed civilization and determines the economic, social and political development of a nation. The results of scientific research very often force a change in the philosophical view of problems which extend far beyond the restricted domain of science itself. Research is not confined to science and technology only. There are vast areas of research in other disciplines such as languages, literature, history and sociology. Whatever might be the subject, research has to be an active, diligent and systematic process of inquiry in order to discover, interpret or revise facts, events, behaviours and theories. Applying the outcome of research for the refinement of knowledge in other subjects, or in enhancing the quality of human life also becomes a kind of research and development. Research is done with the help of study, experiment, observation, analysis, comparison and reasoning. Research Methods and Research Methodology Research methods are the various procedures, schemes and algorithms used in research. All the methods used by a researcher during a research study are termed as research methods. They are essentially planned, scientific and value-neutral. They include theoretical procedures, experimental studies, numerical schemes, statistical approaches, etc. Research methods help us collect samples, data and find a solution to a problem. Particularly, scientific research methods call for explanations based on collected facts, measurements and observations and not on reasoning alone. They accept only those explanations which can be verified by experiments. Research methodology is a systematic way to solve a problem. Foundations of research are built and conducted over a structure called methodology (Remenyi et al. 1998) and a valid study will always adapt encouraging research methodology (Buckley et al. 1975). It is a science of studying how research is to be carried out. Essentially, the procedures by which researchers go about their work of describing, explaining and predicting phenomena are called research methodology. It is also defined as the study of methods by which knowledge is gained. Its aim is to give the work plan of research. It consists a logical sequence of steps or actions that are necessary to effectively solve a research problem.

Research in common parlance refers to a search for knowledge. Once can also define research as a scientific and systematic search for pertinent information on a specific topic. In fact, research is an art of scientific investigation. The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English lays down the meaning of research as "a careful investigation or inquiry specially through search for new facts in any branch of knowledge." 1 Redman and Mory define research as a "systematized effort to gain new knowledge." 2 Some people consider research as a movement, a movement from the known to the unknown. It is actually a voyage of discovery. We all possess the vital instinct of inquisitiveness for, when the unknown confronts us, we wonder and our inquisitiveness makes us probe and attain full and fuller understanding of the unknown. This inquisitiveness is the mother of all knowledge and the method, which man employs for obtaining the knowledge of whatever the unknown, can be termed as research.

Journal of The American Medical Informatics Association, 2010

Objective: We present Lancet, a supervised machine-learning system that automatically extracts medication events consisting of medication names and information pertaining to their prescribed use (dosage, mode, frequency, duration and reason) from lists or narrative text in medical discharge summaries. Design: The Lancet system incorporates three supervised machine-learning models: a conditional random fields (CRF) model for tagging individual medication names and associated fields, an AdaBoost model with decision stump algorithm for determining which medication names and fields belong to a single medication event, and a support vector machines (SVM) disambiguation model for identifying the context style (narrative or list). Measurements: We participated in the third i2b2 shared-task for challenges in natural language processing for clinical data: medication extraction challenge. With the performance metrics provided by the i2b2 Challenge, we report the micro F1 (precision/recall) scores on both the horizontal and vertical level. Results: Among the top ten teams, the Lancet system achieved the highest precision at 90.4% with an overall F1 score of 76.4% (horizontal system level with exact match), a gain of 11.2% and 12%, respectively, compared to the rule-based baseline system jMerki. By combining the two systems, the hybrid system further increased the F1 score by 3.4% from 76.4% to 79.0%. Conclusions: We conclude that supervised machine-learning systems with minimal external knowledge resources can achieve a high precision with a competitive overall F1 score. The light weight learning framework makes the system more scalable and adaptable on other tasks even in other domains. The system is available online at http://code.google.com/p/lancet/.

Over the years, truck-shovel operation is established as the primary hauling method used in open pit mines. Since the haulage cost can be as high as 50 percent of the total operating cost in a particular mine, numerous studies addressed optimization of truck-shovel operations. Different fleet management systems have also been used at many open pit mines to increase the productivity and hence reduce the overall cost. Although these management systems help optimizing the truck assignments, the impact of the truck operator behavior on the overall machine availability has always been difficult to quantify. With the introduction of autonomous trucks into the mining industry in last decade, the effect of truck operator on machine availability has been a very critical information to compare manned vs autonomous trucks. The misuse of brakes during hauling will cause the trucks to be late for their assignments. It will cause extra time loss and fuel loss, which are very critical cost items for any mine. Using brakes unnecessarily will also cause more maintenance time and this will reduce the truck availability. Bad road designs, such as unnecessary stop signs at the intersections, can be another factor of unnecessary time loses. This paper presents a data mining methodology to model the cost of full-stops as opposed to deliberate gradual slow-downs, which is feasible with autonomous trucks. The model uses real machine health and fleet management data to determine the effect of truck stoppings versus slow-downs at intersections or among the haul road.