20,298 research outputs found
Interactions between species introduce spurious associations in microbiome studies
Microbiota contribute to many dimensions of host phenotype, including
disease. To link specific microbes to specific phenotypes, microbiome-wide
association studies compare microbial abundances between two groups of samples.
Abundance differences, however, reflect not only direct associations with the
phenotype, but also indirect effects due to microbial interactions. We found
that microbial interactions could easily generate a large number of spurious
associations that provide no mechanistic insight. Using techniques from
statistical physics, we developed a method to remove indirect associations and
applied it to the largest dataset on pediatric inflammatory bowel disease. Our
method corrected the inflation of p-values in standard association tests and
showed that only a small subset of associations is directly linked to the
disease. Direct associations had a much higher accuracy in separating cases
from controls and pointed to immunomodulation, butyrate production, and the
brain-gut axis as important factors in the inflammatory bowel disease.Comment: 4 main text figures, 15 supplementary figures (i.e appendix) and 6
supplementary tables. Overall 49 pages including reference
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Towards Informed Exploration for Deep Reinforcement Learning
In this thesis, we discuss various techniques for improving exploration for deep reinforcement learning. We begin with a brief review of reinforcement learning (RL) and the fundamental v.s. exploitation trade-off. Then we review how deep RL has improved upon classical and summarize six categories of the latest exploration methods for deep RL, in the order increasing usage of prior information. We then explore representative works in three categories discuss their strengths and weaknesses. The first category, represented by Soft Q-learning, uses regularization to encourage exploration. The second category, represented by count-based via hashing, maps states to hash codes for counting and assigns higher exploration to less-encountered states. The third category utilizes hierarchy and is represented by modular architecture for RL agents to play StarCraft II. Finally, we conclude that exploration by prior knowledge is a promising research direction and suggest topics of potentially impact
Periodic behaviour of coronal mass ejections, eruptive events, and solar activity proxies during solar cycles 23 and 24
We report on the parallel analysis of the periodic behaviour of coronal mass
ejections (CMEs) based on 21 years [1996 -- 2016] of observations with the
SOHO/LASCO--C2 coronagraph, solar flares, prominences, and several proxies of
solar activity. We consider values of the rates globally and whenever possible,
distinguish solar hemispheres and solar cycles 23 and 24. Periodicities are
investigated using both frequency (periodogram) and time-frequency (wavelet)
analysis. We find that these different processes, in addition to following the
11-year Solar Cycle, exhibit diverse statistically significant
oscillations with properties common to all solar, coronal, and heliospheric
processes: variable periodicity, intermittence, asymmetric development in the
northern and southern solar hemispheres, and largest amplitudes during the
maximum phase of solar cycles, being more pronounced during solar cycle 23 than
the weaker cycle 24. However, our analysis reveals an extremely complex and
diverse situation. For instance, there exists very limited commonality for
periods of less than one year. The few exceptions are the periods of 3.1--3.2
months found in the global occurrence rates of CMEs and in the sunspot area
(SSA) and those of 5.9--6.1 months found in the northern hemisphere. Mid-range
periods of 1 and 2 years are more wide spread among the
studied processes, but exhibit a very distinct behaviour with the first one
being present only in the northern hemisphere and the second one only in the
southern hemisphere. These periodic behaviours likely results from the
complexity of the underlying physical processes, prominently the emergence of
magnetic flux.Comment: 33 pages, 15 figures, 2 table
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