262,248 research outputs found
A Comprehensive Analysis of the Structure-Function Relationship in Proteins Based on Local Structure Similarity
BACKGROUND:Sequence similarity to characterized proteins provides testable functional hypotheses for less than 50% of the proteins identified by genome sequencing projects. With structural genomics it is believed that structural similarities may give functional hypotheses for many of the remaining proteins. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:We provide a systematic analysis of the structure-function relationship in proteins using the novel concept of local descriptors of protein structure. A local descriptor is a small substructure of a protein which includes both short- and long-range interactions. We employ a library of commonly reoccurring local descriptors general enough to assemble most existing protein structures. We then model the relationship between these local shapes and Gene Ontology using rule-based learning. Our IF-THEN rule model offers legible, high resolution descriptions that combine local substructures and is able to discriminate functions even for functionally versatile folds such as the frequently occurring TIM barrel and Rossmann fold. By evaluating the predictive performance of the model, we provide a comprehensive quantification of the structure-function relationship based only on local structure similarity. Our findings are, among others, that conserved structure is a stronger prerequisite for enzymatic activity than for binding specificity, and that structure-based predictions complement sequence-based predictions. The model is capable of generating correct hypotheses, as confirmed by a literature study, even when no significant sequence similarity to characterized proteins exists. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE:Our approach offers a new and complete description and quantification of the structure-function relationship in proteins. By demonstrating how our predictions offer higher sensitivity than using global structure, and complement the use of sequence, we show that the presented ideas could advance the development of meta-servers in function prediction
Incremental Entity Resolution from Linked Documents
In many government applications we often find that information about
entities, such as persons, are available in disparate data sources such as
passports, driving licences, bank accounts, and income tax records. Similar
scenarios are commonplace in large enterprises having multiple customer,
supplier, or partner databases. Each data source maintains different aspects of
an entity, and resolving entities based on these attributes is a well-studied
problem. However, in many cases documents in one source reference those in
others; e.g., a person may provide his driving-licence number while applying
for a passport, or vice-versa. These links define relationships between
documents of the same entity (as opposed to inter-entity relationships, which
are also often used for resolution). In this paper we describe an algorithm to
cluster documents that are highly likely to belong to the same entity by
exploiting inter-document references in addition to attribute similarity. Our
technique uses a combination of iterative graph-traversal, locality-sensitive
hashing, iterative match-merge, and graph-clustering to discover unique
entities based on a document corpus. A unique feature of our technique is that
new sets of documents can be added incrementally while having to re-resolve
only a small subset of a previously resolved entity-document collection. We
present performance and quality results on two data-sets: a real-world database
of companies and a large synthetically generated `population' database. We also
demonstrate benefit of using inter-document references for clustering in the
form of enhanced recall of documents for resolution.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, patented wor
MinoanER: Schema-Agnostic, Non-Iterative, Massively Parallel Resolution of Web Entities
Entity Resolution (ER) aims to identify different descriptions in various
Knowledge Bases (KBs) that refer to the same entity. ER is challenged by the
Variety, Volume and Veracity of entity descriptions published in the Web of
Data. To address them, we propose the MinoanER framework that simultaneously
fulfills full automation, support of highly heterogeneous entities, and massive
parallelization of the ER process. MinoanER leverages a token-based similarity
of entities to define a new metric that derives the similarity of neighboring
entities from the most important relations, as they are indicated only by
statistics. A composite blocking method is employed to capture different
sources of matching evidence from the content, neighbors, or names of entities.
The search space of candidate pairs for comparison is compactly abstracted by a
novel disjunctive blocking graph and processed by a non-iterative, massively
parallel matching algorithm that consists of four generic, schema-agnostic
matching rules that are quite robust with respect to their internal
configuration. We demonstrate that the effectiveness of MinoanER is comparable
to existing ER tools over real KBs exhibiting low Variety, but it outperforms
them significantly when matching KBs with high Variety.Comment: Presented at EDBT 2001
A Fuzzy Logic Programming Environment for Managing Similarity and Truth Degrees
FASILL (acronym of "Fuzzy Aggregators and Similarity Into a Logic Language")
is a fuzzy logic programming language with implicit/explicit truth degree
annotations, a great variety of connectives and unification by similarity.
FASILL integrates and extends features coming from MALP (Multi-Adjoint Logic
Programming, a fuzzy logic language with explicitly annotated rules) and
Bousi~Prolog (which uses a weak unification algorithm and is well suited for
flexible query answering). Hence, it properly manages similarity and truth
degrees in a single framework combining the expressive benefits of both
languages. This paper presents the main features and implementations details of
FASILL. Along the paper we describe its syntax and operational semantics and we
give clues of the implementation of the lattice module and the similarity
module, two of the main building blocks of the new programming environment
which enriches the FLOPER system developed in our research group.Comment: In Proceedings PROLE 2014, arXiv:1501.0169
ERBlox: Combining Matching Dependencies with Machine Learning for Entity Resolution
Entity resolution (ER), an important and common data cleaning problem, is
about detecting data duplicate representations for the same external entities,
and merging them into single representations. Relatively recently, declarative
rules called "matching dependencies" (MDs) have been proposed for specifying
similarity conditions under which attribute values in database records are
merged. In this work we show the process and the benefits of integrating four
components of ER: (a) Building a classifier for duplicate/non-duplicate record
pairs built using machine learning (ML) techniques; (b) Use of MDs for
supporting the blocking phase of ML; (c) Record merging on the basis of the
classifier results; and (d) The use of the declarative language "LogiQL" -an
extended form of Datalog supported by the "LogicBlox" platform- for all
activities related to data processing, and the specification and enforcement of
MDs.Comment: Final journal version, with some minor technical corrections.
Extended version of arXiv:1508.0601
Neural Nearest Neighbors Networks
Non-local methods exploiting the self-similarity of natural signals have been
well studied, for example in image analysis and restoration. Existing
approaches, however, rely on k-nearest neighbors (KNN) matching in a fixed
feature space. The main hurdle in optimizing this feature space w.r.t.
application performance is the non-differentiability of the KNN selection rule.
To overcome this, we propose a continuous deterministic relaxation of KNN
selection that maintains differentiability w.r.t. pairwise distances, but
retains the original KNN as the limit of a temperature parameter approaching
zero. To exploit our relaxation, we propose the neural nearest neighbors block
(N3 block), a novel non-local processing layer that leverages the principle of
self-similarity and can be used as building block in modern neural network
architectures. We show its effectiveness for the set reasoning task of
correspondence classification as well as for image restoration, including image
denoising and single image super-resolution, where we outperform strong
convolutional neural network (CNN) baselines and recent non-local models that
rely on KNN selection in hand-chosen features spaces.Comment: to appear at NIPS*2018, code available at
https://github.com/visinf/n3net
Qualitative Effects of Knowledge Rules in Probabilistic Data Integration
One of the problems in data integration is data overlap: the fact that different data sources have data on the same real world entities. Much development time in data integration projects is devoted to entity resolution. Often advanced similarity measurement techniques are used to remove semantic duplicates from the integration result or solve other semantic conflicts, but it proofs impossible to get rid of all semantic problems in data integration. An often-used rule of thumb states that about 90% of the development effort is devoted to solving the remaining 10% hard cases. In an attempt to significantly decrease human effort at data integration time, we have proposed an approach that stores any remaining semantic uncertainty and conflicts in a probabilistic database enabling it to already be meaningfully used. The main development effort in our approach is devoted to defining and tuning knowledge rules and thresholds. Rules and thresholds directly impact the size and quality of the integration result. We measure integration quality indirectly by measuring the quality of answers to queries on the integrated data set in an information retrieval-like way. The main contribution of this report is an experimental investigation of the effects and sensitivity of rule definition and threshold tuning on the integration quality. This proves that our approach indeed reduces development effort — and not merely shifts the effort to rule definition and threshold tuning — by showing that setting rough safe thresholds and defining only a few rules suffices to produce a ‘good enough’ integration that can be meaningfully used
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