Representation of research hypotheses

BACKGROUND: Hypotheses are now being automatically produced on an industrial scale by computers in biology, e.g. the annotation of a genome is essentially a large set of hypotheses generated by sequence similarity programs; and robot scientists enable the full automation of a scientific investigation, including generation and testing of research hypotheses. RESULTS: This paper proposes a logically defined way for recording automatically generated hypotheses in machine amenable way. The proposed formalism allows the description of complete hypotheses sets as specified input and output for scientific investigations. The formalism supports the decomposition of research hypotheses into more specialised hypotheses if that is required by an application. Hypotheses are represented in an operational way – it is possible to design an experiment to test them. The explicit formal description of research hypotheses promotes the explicit formal description of the results and conclusions of an investigation. The paper also proposes a framework for automated hypotheses generation. We demonstrate how the key components of the proposed framework are implemented in the Robot Scientist “Adam”. CONCLUSIONS: A formal representation of automatically generated research hypotheses can help to improve the way humans produce, record, and validate research hypotheses. AVAILABILITY: http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/cs/research/cb/projects/robotscientist/results

Hypotheses, evidence and relationships: The HypER approach for representing scientific knowledge claims

Biological knowledge is increasingly represented as a collection of (entity-relationship-entity) triplets. These are queried, mined, appended to papers, and published. However, this representation ignores the argumentation contained within a paper and the relationships between hypotheses, claims and evidence put forth in the article. In this paper, we propose an alternate view of the research article as a network of 'hypotheses and evidence'. Our knowledge representation focuses on scientific discourse as a rhetorical activity, which leads to a different direction in the development of tools and processes for modeling this discourse. We propose to extract knowledge from the article to allow the construction of a system where a specific scientific claim is connected, through trails of meaningful relationships, to experimental evidence. We discuss some current efforts and future plans in this area

Adult attachment style across individuals and role-relationships: Avoidance is relationship-specific, but anxiety shows greater generalizability

A generalisability study examined the hypotheses that avoidant attachment, reflecting the representation of others, should be more relationship-specific (vary across relationships more than across individuals), while attachment anxiety, reflecting self-representation, should be more generalisable across a person’s relationships. College students responded to 6-item questionnaire measures of these variables for 5 relationships (mother, father, best same-gender friend, romantic partner or best opposite-gender friend, other close person), on 3 (N = 120) or 2 (N = 77) occasions separated by a few weeks. Results supported the hypotheses, with the person variance component being larger than the relationship-specific component for anxiety, and the opposite happening for avoidance. Anxiety therefore seems not to be as relationship-specific as previous research suggested. Possible reasons for discrepancies between the current and previous studies are discussed

Representation of probabilistic scientific knowledge

This article is available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. Copyright © 2013 Soldatova et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.The theory of probability is widely used in biomedical research for data analysis and modelling. In previous work the probabilities of the research hypotheses have been recorded as experimental metadata. The ontology HELO is designed to support probabilistic reasoning, and provides semantic descriptors for reporting on research that involves operations with probabilities. HELO explicitly links research statements such as hypotheses, models, laws, conclusions, etc. to the associated probabilities of these statements being true. HELO enables the explicit semantic representation and accurate recording of probabilities in hypotheses, as well as the inference methods used to generate and update those hypotheses. We demonstrate the utility of HELO on three worked examples: changes in the probability of the hypothesis that sirtuins regulate human life span; changes in the probability of hypotheses about gene functions in the S. cerevisiae aromatic amino acid pathway; and the use of active learning in drug design (quantitative structure activity relation learning), where a strategy for the selection of compounds with the highest probability of improving on the best known compound was used. HELO is open source and available at https://github.com/larisa-soldatova/HELO.This work was partially supported by grant BB/F008228/1 from the UK Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council, from the European Commission under the FP7 Collaborative Programme, UNICELLSYS, KU Leuven GOA/08/008 and ERC Starting Grant 240186

Social Democracy, Globalization and Governance: Why is there no European Left Program in the EU? CES Germany & Europe Working Papers, no.00.6, September

This paper addresses globalization and governance in the EU by attempting to generate some plausible hypotheses that might explain the policy choices of the 12 out of 15 European democratic left governments. With all of the discussion in recent years of a democratic deficit, and then need to maintain a "social Europe," why have these governments not produced more explicit left-wing policies? It suggests three possible hypotheses to account for this apparently mysterious outcome. Hypothesis #1: They want to but they can't. Hypothesis #2: They don't want to because they aren't really left anymore. Hypothesis #3: They could, but they all are suffering from a fundamental failure of imagination. The paper explores each of these hypotheses in two ways. First it examines the initial years of the Schröder government in Germany apparently, pursuing each of these three hypotheses and different times during this period. Then it looks more systematically and comparatively and each of the three hypotheses by including analysis both of Germany and several other EU member states. The larger goal of this work is to provoke discussion and research on what role left political movements can actually play. Is it even reasonable to expect such a group of nation states to develop innovative forms of cross-national governance? Or are new and/or revised forms of representation and governance beyond traditional nation-state models

The Impact of Information About Client in Moderated the Effect of the Involvement of Public Accounting Firm Head and the Effect of Problem Representations on Audit Planning

This research examined the effect of executive involvement and problem representation toward audit planning using client’s information as moderating variable. The populations are managing partners, partners, and managers on the public accountant firm that located in DKI Jakarta. Purposive sampling used to take the samples. The sample was taken about 34 respondents which collected by using questionnaires. The analysis methods were consist of test quality data, descriptive statistic, classical assumption test, and hypotheses analysis used test of absolute difference value. The result of hypotheses analysis show that client information have not significantly impact on the influence of executive involvement and problem representation on audit plannin

Examining the Link Between Diversity and Firm Performance: The Effects of Diversity Reputation and Leader Racial Diversity

Given the scarcity of empirical research on the impact of diversity on organizational performance, we used longitudinal data for 100 firms to test hypotheses related to the effects of diversity reputation and leader racial diversity on firm financial outcomes. The results showed a positive relationship between diversity reputation and book-to-market equity, and a curvilinear U-shaped relationship between leader diversity and revenues, net income and book-to-market equity. Our analyses suggest that economic benefits generated from diversity reputation may primarily derive from capital rather than product markets. Further, firm performance declines with increases in the representation of racial minorities in leadership up to a point, beyond which further increases in diversity are associated with increases in performance

Visualization of the decision criteria in testing statistical hypotheses on programming in R (Rstudio)

Purpose: The case study addresses a development and justification of approaches to visualization of decision criteria in the problems of testing statistical hypotheses for a given distribution law (specifically, checking the distribution normality). Design/Methodology/Approach: The study describes a construction of graphical model that visualizes an application of criteria when testing statistical hypotheses for compliance with a given distribution law. This problem is solved in the language of statistical analysis R in the RStudio environment. Using the standard approach and focusing only on the P-value in relation to the chosen level of significance, the researcher cannot take into account the error of the second kind. However, analyzing the graphical representation of the behavior of the sample under study, one can conclude whether the value of the obtained P-value corresponds to the real assumption that the sample corresponds to a given distribution law. Findings: The research case proposes a new approach to testing statistical hypotheses on the compliance of a sample with a given distribution law, using visualization tools and allowing a researcher having even a little experience with the R language to solve applied problems. Practical implications: The approach does not require an in-depth knowledge of mathematics and programming which can be used by experts in various fields of knowledge to successfully solve applied problems. The text of the article contains working scripts in the language R and graphical illustrations obtained with their help. Originality/Value: The main contribution of this study is to expand the variety of methods for testing statistical hypotheses. The proposed method extends the set of statistical problems successfully solved by means of R.peer-reviewe

Forensic accountants, auditors and fraud capability and competence requirements in the Nigerian public sector

The foundation of this study is to examine the task performance fraud risk assessment (TPFRA) among forensic accountants and auditors in the Nigerian public sector. Most importantly, the study explored the role of fraud related problem representation (FRPR) as a mediator on the relationship between knowledge, skills and mindset (forensic accountant and auditor) and task performance fraud risk assessment. Importantly, this research employed the second generation statistical analysis tools of PLS-SEM and IBM SPSS. The ten out of fifteen hypotheses were tested through the use of PLS-SEM algorithm and bootstrap techniques on the hypothesized relationships while the remaining five hypotheses of differences among groups were tested using the Mann-Whitney U Test. The results provided verifiable support for the hypothesized relationships of the study. Specifically, knowledge, skills and mindset (forensic accountant and auditor), and fraud related problem representation are significant and positively related to task performance fraud risk assessment. In addition, knowledge, skills and mindset (forensic accountant and auditor) are significantly and positively related to fraud related problem representation. Most gratifying is the significant positive influences of knowledge, skills and mindset and fraud related problem representation indicate that the variables are essential requirements in enhancing task performance fraud risk assessment. The research findings provided support for the differences between groups (forensic accountants and auditors) hypotheses in the area of fraud detection, prevention and response. Importantly, forensic accountants have higher levels of knowledge (KR), skills (SR), mindset (MR), fraud related problem representation (FRPR), and task performance fraud risk assessment (TPFRA) than auditors. Therefore, accountants and auditors in the Nigerian public sector should be encouraged to acquire forensic accounting knowledge, skills, mindset, fraud related problem representation (i.e. capability requirement) to enhance task performance fraud risk assessment (i.e. competences requirement) in the workplace