594,736 research outputs found
Peer-review in a world with rational scientists: Toward selection of the average
One of the virtues of peer review is that it provides a self-regulating
selection mechanism for scientific work, papers and projects. Peer review as a
selection mechanism is hard to evaluate in terms of its efficiency. Serious
efforts to understand its strengths and weaknesses have not yet lead to clear
answers. In theory peer review works if the involved parties (editors and
referees) conform to a set of requirements, such as love for high quality
science, objectiveness, and absence of biases, nepotism, friend and clique
networks, selfishness, etc. If these requirements are violated, what is the
effect on the selection of high quality work? We study this question with a
simple agent based model. In particular we are interested in the effects of
rational referees, who might not have any incentive to see high quality work
other than their own published or promoted. We find that a small fraction of
incorrect (selfish or rational) referees can drastically reduce the quality of
the published (accepted) scientific standard. We quantify the fraction for
which peer review will no longer select better than pure chance. Decline of
quality of accepted scientific work is shown as a function of the fraction of
rational and unqualified referees. We show how a simple quality-increasing
policy of e.g. a journal can lead to a loss in overall scientific quality, and
how mutual support-networks of authors and referees deteriorate the system.Comment: 5 pages 4 figure
Exponential Random Graph Modeling for Complex Brain Networks
Exponential random graph models (ERGMs), also known as p* models, have been
utilized extensively in the social science literature to study complex networks
and how their global structure depends on underlying structural components.
However, the literature on their use in biological networks (especially brain
networks) has remained sparse. Descriptive models based on a specific feature
of the graph (clustering coefficient, degree distribution, etc.) have dominated
connectivity research in neuroscience. Corresponding generative models have
been developed to reproduce one of these features. However, the complexity
inherent in whole-brain network data necessitates the development and use of
tools that allow the systematic exploration of several features simultaneously
and how they interact to form the global network architecture. ERGMs provide a
statistically principled approach to the assessment of how a set of interacting
local brain network features gives rise to the global structure. We illustrate
the utility of ERGMs for modeling, analyzing, and simulating complex
whole-brain networks with network data from normal subjects. We also provide a
foundation for the selection of important local features through the
implementation and assessment of three selection approaches: a traditional
p-value based backward selection approach, an information criterion approach
(AIC), and a graphical goodness of fit (GOF) approach. The graphical GOF
approach serves as the best method given the scientific interest in being able
to capture and reproduce the structure of fitted brain networks
Optimizing Lossy Compression Rate-Distortion from Automatic Online Selection between SZ and ZFP
With ever-increasing volumes of scientific data produced by HPC applications,
significantly reducing data size is critical because of limited capacity of
storage space and potential bottlenecks on I/O or networks in writing/reading
or transferring data. SZ and ZFP are the two leading lossy compressors
available to compress scientific data sets. However, their performance is not
consistent across different data sets and across different fields of some data
sets: for some fields SZ provides better compression performance, while other
fields are better compressed with ZFP. This situation raises the need for an
automatic online (during compression) selection between SZ and ZFP, with a
minimal overhead. In this paper, the automatic selection optimizes the
rate-distortion, an important statistical quality metric based on the
signal-to-noise ratio. To optimize for rate-distortion, we investigate the
principles of SZ and ZFP. We then propose an efficient online, low-overhead
selection algorithm that predicts the compression quality accurately for two
compressors in early processing stages and selects the best-fit compressor for
each data field. We implement the selection algorithm into an open-source
library, and we evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed solution against
plain SZ and ZFP in a parallel environment with 1,024 cores. Evaluation results
on three data sets representing about 100 fields show that our selection
algorithm improves the compression ratio up to 70% with the same level of data
distortion because of very accurate selection (around 99%) of the best-fit
compressor, with little overhead (less than 7% in the experiments).Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, first revisio
Neural Network and Bioinformatic Methods for Predicting HIV-1 Protease Inhibitor Resistance
This article presents a new method for predicting viral resistance to seven protease inhibitors from the HIV-1 genotype, and for identifying the positions in the protease gene at which the specific nature of the mutation affects resistance. The neural network Analog ARTMAP predicts protease inhibitor resistance from viral genotypes. A feature selection method detects genetic positions that contribute to resistance both alone and through interactions with other positions. This method has identified positions 35, 37, 62, and 77, where traditional feature selection methods have not detected a contribution to resistance.
At several positions in the protease gene, mutations confer differing degress of resistance, depending on the specific amino acid to which the sequence has mutated. To find these positions, an Amino Acid Space is introduced to represent genes in a vector space that captures the functional similarity between amino acid pairs. Feature selection identifies several new positions, including 36, 37, and 43, with amino acid-specific contributions to resistance. Analog ARTMAP networks applied to inputs that represent specific amino acids at these positions perform better than networks that use only mutation locations.Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F49620-01-1-0423); National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NMA 201-01-1-2016); National Science Foundation (SBE-0354378); Office of Naval Research (N00014-01-1-0624
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