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Validity and precision of the International Physical Activity Questionnaire for climacteric women using computational intelligence techniques.

Ronilson Ferreira FreitasJosiane Santos Brant RochaLaércio Ives SantosAndré Luiz de Carvalho Braule PintoMaria Helena Rodrigues MoreiraFernanda Piana Santos Lima de OliveiraMaria Suzana MarquesGeraldo Edson Souza Guerra JúniorKelma Dayana de Oliveira Silva GuerraAndreia Maria Araújo DrummondJoão Victor Villas Boas SpeltaCarolina Ananias Meira TrovãoDorothéa Schmidt FrançaLanuza Borges OliveiraAntônio Prates CaldeiraMarcos Flávio Silveira Vasconcelos D'Angelo
Published in: PloS one (2021)
This study aimed to evaluate the validity and precision of the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) for climacteric women using computational intelligence techniques. The instrument was applied to 873 women aged between 40 and 65 years. Considering the proposal to regroup the set of data related to the level of physical activity of climacteric women using the IPAQ, we used 2 algorithms: Kohonen and k-means, and, to evaluate the validity of these clusters, 3 indexes were used: Silhouette, PBM and Dunn. The questionnaire was tested for validity (factor analysis) and precision (Cronbach's alpha). The Random Forests technique was used to assess the importance of the variables that make up the IPAQ. To classify these variables, we used 3 algorithms: Suport Vector Machine, Artificial Neural Network and Decision Tree. The results of the tests to evaluate the clusters suggested that what is recommended for IPAQ, when applied to climacteric women, is to categorize the results into two groups. The factor analysis resulted in three factors, with factor 1 being composed of variables 3 to 6; factor 2 for variables 7 and 8; and factor 3 for variables 1 and 2. Regarding the reliability estimate, the results of the standardized Cronbach's alpha test showed values between 0.63 to 0.85, being considered acceptable for the construction of the construct. In the test of importance of the variables that make up the instrument, the results showed that variables 1 and 8 presented a lesser degree of importance and by the analysis of Accuracy, Recall, Precision and area under the ROC curve, there was no variation when the results were analyzed with all IPAQ variables but variables 1 and 8. Through this analysis, we concluded that the IPAQ, short version, has adequate measurement properties for the investigated population.
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