12,421 research outputs found
Searching Data: A Review of Observational Data Retrieval Practices in Selected Disciplines
A cross-disciplinary examination of the user behaviours involved in seeking
and evaluating data is surprisingly absent from the research data discussion.
This review explores the data retrieval literature to identify commonalities in
how users search for and evaluate observational research data. Two analytical
frameworks rooted in information retrieval and science technology studies are
used to identify key similarities in practices as a first step toward
developing a model describing data retrieval
Principles for the post-GWAS functional characterisation of risk loci
Several challenges lie ahead in assigning functionality to susceptibility SNPs. For example, most effect sizes are small relative to effects seen in monogenic diseases, with per allele odds ratios usually ranging from 1.15 to 1.3. It is unclear whether current molecular biology methods have enough resolution to differentiate such small effects. Our objective here is therefore to provide a set of recommendations to optimize the allocation of effort and resources in order maximize the chances of elucidating the functional contribution of specific loci to the disease phenotype. It has been estimated that 88% of currently identified disease-associated SNP are intronic or intergenic. Thus, in this paper we will focus our attention on the analysis of non-coding variants and outline a hierarchical approach for post-GWAS functional studies
A Multiple Hypothesis Testing Approach to Low-Complexity Subspace Unmixing
Subspace-based signal processing traditionally focuses on problems involving
a few subspaces. Recently, a number of problems in different application areas
have emerged that involve a significantly larger number of subspaces relative
to the ambient dimension. It becomes imperative in such settings to first
identify a smaller set of active subspaces that contribute to the observation
before further processing can be carried out. This problem of identification of
a small set of active subspaces among a huge collection of subspaces from a
single (noisy) observation in the ambient space is termed subspace unmixing.
This paper formally poses the subspace unmixing problem under the parsimonious
subspace-sum (PS3) model, discusses connections of the PS3 model to problems in
wireless communications, hyperspectral imaging, high-dimensional statistics and
compressed sensing, and proposes a low-complexity algorithm, termed marginal
subspace detection (MSD), for subspace unmixing. The MSD algorithm turns the
subspace unmixing problem for the PS3 model into a multiple hypothesis testing
(MHT) problem and its analysis in the paper helps control the family-wise error
rate of this MHT problem at any level under two random
signal generation models. Some other highlights of the analysis of the MSD
algorithm include: (i) it is applicable to an arbitrary collection of subspaces
on the Grassmann manifold; (ii) it relies on properties of the collection of
subspaces that are computable in polynomial time; and () it allows for
linear scaling of the number of active subspaces as a function of the ambient
dimension. Finally, numerical results are presented in the paper to better
understand the performance of the MSD algorithm.Comment: Submitted for journal publication; 33 pages, 14 figure
1st INCF Workshop on Sustainability of Neuroscience Databases
The goal of the workshop was to discuss issues related to the sustainability of neuroscience databases, identify problems and propose solutions, and formulate recommendations to the INCF. The report summarizes the discussions of invited participants from the neuroinformatics community as well as from other disciplines where sustainability issues have already been approached. The recommendations for the INCF involve rating, ranking, and supporting database sustainability
Molecular Inverse Comorbidity between Alzheimer’s Disease and Lung Cancer: New Insights from Matrix Factorization
International audienceMatrix factorization (MF) is an established paradigm for large-scale biological data analysis with tremendous potential in computational biology. Here, we challenge MF in depicting the molecular bases of epidemiologically described disease-disease (DD) relationships. As a use case, we focus on the inverse comorbidity association between Alzheimer's disease (AD) and lung cancer (LC), described as a lower than expected probability of developing LC in AD patients. To this day, the molecular mechanisms underlying DD relationships remain poorly explained and their better characterization might offer unprecedented clinical opportunities. To this goal, we extend our previously designed MF-based framework for the molecular characterization of DD relationships. Considering AD-LC inverse comorbidity as a case study, we highlight multiple molecular mechanisms, among which we confirm the involvement of processes related to the immune system and mitochondrial metabolism. We then distinguish mechanisms specific to LC from those shared with other cancers through a pan-cancer analysis. Additionally, new candidate molecular players, such as estrogen receptor (ER), cadherin 1 (CDH1) and histone deacetylase (HDAC), are pinpointed as factors that might underlie the inverse relationship, opening the way to new investigations. Finally, some lung cancer subtype-specific factors are also detected, also suggesting the existence of heterogeneity across patients in the context of inverse comorbidity
High-Dimensional Joint Estimation of Multiple Directed Gaussian Graphical Models
We consider the problem of jointly estimating multiple related directed
acyclic graph (DAG) models based on high-dimensional data from each graph. This
problem is motivated by the task of learning gene regulatory networks based on
gene expression data from different tissues, developmental stages or disease
states. We prove that under certain regularity conditions, the proposed
-penalized maximum likelihood estimator converges in Frobenius norm to
the adjacency matrices consistent with the data-generating distributions and
has the correct sparsity. In particular, we show that this joint estimation
procedure leads to a faster convergence rate than estimating each DAG model
separately. As a corollary, we also obtain high-dimensional consistency results
for causal inference from a mix of observational and interventional data. For
practical purposes, we propose \emph{jointGES} consisting of Greedy Equivalence
Search (GES) to estimate the union of all DAG models followed by variable
selection using lasso to obtain the different DAGs, and we analyze its
consistency guarantees. The proposed method is illustrated through an analysis
of simulated data as well as epithelial ovarian cancer gene expression data
Many-Task Computing and Blue Waters
This report discusses many-task computing (MTC) generically and in the
context of the proposed Blue Waters systems, which is planned to be the largest
NSF-funded supercomputer when it begins production use in 2012. The aim of this
report is to inform the BW project about MTC, including understanding aspects
of MTC applications that can be used to characterize the domain and
understanding the implications of these aspects to middleware and policies.
Many MTC applications do not neatly fit the stereotypes of high-performance
computing (HPC) or high-throughput computing (HTC) applications. Like HTC
applications, by definition MTC applications are structured as graphs of
discrete tasks, with explicit input and output dependencies forming the graph
edges. However, MTC applications have significant features that distinguish
them from typical HTC applications. In particular, different engineering
constraints for hardware and software must be met in order to support these
applications. HTC applications have traditionally run on platforms such as
grids and clusters, through either workflow systems or parallel programming
systems. MTC applications, in contrast, will often demand a short time to
solution, may be communication intensive or data intensive, and may comprise
very short tasks. Therefore, hardware and software for MTC must be engineered
to support the additional communication and I/O and must minimize task dispatch
overheads. The hardware of large-scale HPC systems, with its high degree of
parallelism and support for intensive communication, is well suited for MTC
applications. However, HPC systems often lack a dynamic resource-provisioning
feature, are not ideal for task communication via the file system, and have an
I/O system that is not optimized for MTC-style applications. Hence, additional
software support is likely to be required to gain full benefit from the HPC
hardware
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