13,452 research outputs found
How a well-adapting immune system remembers
An adaptive agent predicting the future state of an environment must weigh
trust in new observations against prior experiences. In this light, we propose
a view of the adaptive immune system as a dynamic Bayesian machinery that
updates its memory repertoire by balancing evidence from new pathogen
encounters against past experience of infection to predict and prepare for
future threats. This framework links the observed initial rapid increase of the
memory pool early in life followed by a mid-life plateau to the ease of
learning salient features of sparse environments. We also derive a modulated
memory pool update rule in agreement with current vaccine response experiments.
Our results suggest that pathogenic environments are sparse and that memory
repertoires significantly decrease infection costs even with moderate sampling.
The predicted optimal update scheme maps onto commonly considered competitive
dynamics for antigen receptors
Community detection for networks with unipartite and bipartite structure
Finding community structures in networks is important in network science,
technology, and applications. To date, most algorithms that aim to find
community structures only focus either on unipartite or bipartite networks. A
unipartite network consists of one set of nodes and a bipartite network
consists of two nonoverlapping sets of nodes with only links joining the nodes
in different sets. However, a third type of network exists, defined here as the
mixture network. Just like a bipartite network, a mixture network also consists
of two sets of nodes, but some nodes may simultaneously belong to two sets,
which breaks the nonoverlapping restriction of a bipartite network. The mixture
network can be considered as a general case, with unipartite and bipartite
networks viewed as its limiting cases. A mixture network can represent not only
all the unipartite and bipartite networks, but also a wide range of real-world
networks that cannot be properly represented as either unipartite or bipartite
networks in fields such as biology and social science. Based on this
observation, we first propose a probabilistic model that can find modules in
unipartite, bipartite, and mixture networks in a unified framework based on the
link community model for a unipartite undirected network [B Ball et al (2011
Phys. Rev. E 84 036103)]. We test our algorithm on synthetic networks (both
overlapping and nonoverlapping communities) and apply it to two real-world
networks: a southern women bipartite network and a human transcriptional
regulatory mixture network. The results suggest that our model performs well
for all three types of networks, is competitive with other algorithms for
unipartite or bipartite networks, and is applicable to real-world networks.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures.
(http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/16/9/093001
AI Solutions for MDS: Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Misuse Detection and Localisation in Telecommunication Environments
This report considers the application of Articial Intelligence (AI) techniques to
the problem of misuse detection and misuse localisation within telecommunications
environments. A broad survey of techniques is provided, that covers inter alia
rule based systems, model-based systems, case based reasoning, pattern matching,
clustering and feature extraction, articial neural networks, genetic algorithms, arti
cial immune systems, agent based systems, data mining and a variety of hybrid
approaches. The report then considers the central issue of event correlation, that
is at the heart of many misuse detection and localisation systems. The notion of
being able to infer misuse by the correlation of individual temporally distributed
events within a multiple data stream environment is explored, and a range of techniques,
covering model based approaches, `programmed' AI and machine learning
paradigms. It is found that, in general, correlation is best achieved via rule based approaches,
but that these suffer from a number of drawbacks, such as the difculty of
developing and maintaining an appropriate knowledge base, and the lack of ability
to generalise from known misuses to new unseen misuses. Two distinct approaches
are evident. One attempts to encode knowledge of known misuses, typically within
rules, and use this to screen events. This approach cannot generally detect misuses
for which it has not been programmed, i.e. it is prone to issuing false negatives.
The other attempts to `learn' the features of event patterns that constitute normal
behaviour, and, by observing patterns that do not match expected behaviour, detect
when a misuse has occurred. This approach is prone to issuing false positives,
i.e. inferring misuse from innocent patterns of behaviour that the system was not
trained to recognise. Contemporary approaches are seen to favour hybridisation,
often combining detection or localisation mechanisms for both abnormal and normal
behaviour, the former to capture known cases of misuse, the latter to capture
unknown cases. In some systems, these mechanisms even work together to update
each other to increase detection rates and lower false positive rates. It is concluded
that hybridisation offers the most promising future direction, but that a rule or state
based component is likely to remain, being the most natural approach to the correlation
of complex events. The challenge, then, is to mitigate the weaknesses of
canonical programmed systems such that learning, generalisation and adaptation
are more readily facilitated
Hidden Markov Models for Gene Sequence Classification: Classifying the VSG genes in the Trypanosoma brucei Genome
The article presents an application of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for
pattern recognition on genome sequences. We apply HMM for identifying genes
encoding the Variant Surface Glycoprotein (VSG) in the genomes of Trypanosoma
brucei (T. brucei) and other African trypanosomes. These are parasitic protozoa
causative agents of sleeping sickness and several diseases in domestic and wild
animals. These parasites have a peculiar strategy to evade the host's immune
system that consists in periodically changing their predominant cellular
surface protein (VSG). The motivation for using patterns recognition methods to
identify these genes, instead of traditional homology based ones, is that the
levels of sequence identity (amino acid and DNA sequence) amongst these genes
is often below of what is considered reliable in these methods. Among pattern
recognition approaches, HMM are particularly suitable to tackle this problem
because they can handle more naturally the determination of gene edges. We
evaluate the performance of the model using different number of states in the
Markov model, as well as several performance metrics. The model is applied
using public genomic data. Our empirical results show that the VSG genes on T.
brucei can be safely identified (high sensitivity and low rate of false
positives) using HMM.Comment: Accepted article in July, 2015 in Pattern Analysis and Applications,
Springer. The article contains 23 pages, 4 figures, 8 tables and 51
reference
Immunotronics - novel finite-state-machine architectures with built-in self-test using self-nonself differentiation
A novel approach to hardware fault tolerance is demonstrated that takes inspiration from the human immune system as a method of fault detection. The human immune system is a remarkable system of interacting cells and organs that protect the body from invasion and maintains reliable operation even in the presence of invading bacteria or viruses. This paper seeks to address the field of electronic hardware fault tolerance from an immunological perspective with the aim of showing how novel methods based upon the operation of the immune system can both complement and create new approaches to the development of fault detection mechanisms for reliable hardware systems. In particular, it is shown that by use of partial matching, as prevalent in biological systems, high fault coverage can be achieved with the added advantage of reducing memory requirements. The development of a generic finite-state-machine immunization procedure is discussed that allows any system that can be represented in such a manner to be "immunized" against the occurrence of faulty operation. This is demonstrated by the creation of an immunized decade counter that can detect the presence of faults in real tim
Models of self-peptide sampling by developing T cells identify candidate mechanisms of thymic selection
Conventional and regulatory T cells develop in the thymus where they are exposed to samples of self-peptide MHC (pMHC) ligands. This probabilistic process selects for cells within a range of responsiveness that allows the detection of foreign antigen without excessive responses to self. Regulatory T cells are thought to lie at the higher end of the spectrum of acceptable self-reactivity and play a crucial role in the control of autoimmunity and tolerance to innocuous antigens. While many studies have elucidated key elements influencing lineage commitment, we still lack a full understanding of how thymocytes integrate signals obtained by sampling self-peptides to make fate decisions. To address this problem, we apply stochastic models of signal integration by T cells to data from a study quantifying the development of the two lineages using controllable levels of agonist peptide in the thymus. We find two models are able to explain the observations; one in which T cells continually re-assess fate decisions on the basis of multiple summed proximal signals from TCR-pMHC interactions; and another in which TCR sensitivity is modulated over time, such that contact with the same pMHC ligand may lead to divergent outcomes at different stages of development. Neither model requires that T and T are differentially susceptible to deletion or that the two lineages need qualitatively different signals for development, as have been proposed. We find additional support for the variable-sensitivity model, which is able to explain apparently paradoxical observations regarding the effect of partial and strong agonists on T and T development
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