Noisy Independent Factor Analysis Model for Density Estimation and Classification

We consider the problem of multivariate density estimation when the unknown density is assumed to follow a particular form of dimensionality reduction, a noisy independent factor analysis (IFA) model. In this model the data are generated by a number of latent independent components having unknown distributions and are observed in Gaussian noise. We do not assume that either the number of components or the matrix mixing the components are known. We show that the densities of this form can be estimated with a fast rate. Using the mirror averaging aggregation algorithm, we construct a density estimator which achieves a nearly parametric rate (log1/4 n)/√n, independent of the dimensionality of the data, as the sample size n tends to infinity. This estimator is adaptive to the number of components, their distributions and the mixing matrix. We then apply this density estimator to construct nonparametric plug-in classifiers and show that they achieve the best obtainable rate of the excess Bayes risk, to within a logarithmic factor independent of the dimension of the data. Applications of this classifier to simulated data sets and to real data from a remote sensing experiment show promising results.Financial support from the IAP research network of the Belgian government (Belgian Federal Science Policy) is gratefully acknowledged. Research of A. Samarov was partially supported by NSF grant DMS- 0505561 and by a grant from Singapore-MIT Alliance (CSB). Research of A.B. Tsybakov was partially supported by the grant ANR-06-BLAN-0194 and by the PASCAL Network of Excellence

Liquid-liquid equilibrium in quarternary systems ethanol – ethylpropanoate – choline chloride –glycerol, propanol – propylpropanoate – choline chloride –glycerol, butanol – butylpropanoate – choline chloride – glycerol

This study was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project № 16-33-60128 mol_a_dk). The experimental work was facilitated by the equipment of Magnetic Resonance Research Centre at St. Petersburg State University

Easily Vaporizable Ionic Liquids - No Contradiction!

Copyright © 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim. It was a big surprise to see crystals of an ionic liquid (IL) forming by sublimation at room temperature. ILs are generally accepted to have negligible vapour pressures at elevated temperatures, making their sublimation or distillation very difficult. ILs that sublime easily contain silylimidazolium-based cations. In order to establish the details of the unusual behaviour of this subclass of ILs, a combined spectroscopic, X-ray crystallographic, physicochemical and theoretical characterization was performed. The results are compared with those of other easily vaporizable compounds, like ammonium chloride and naphthalene. The single-crystal X-ray structure analysis of one of these compounds, N-methyl-N′-dimethyl(phenyl)silylimidazolium chloride (monoclinic, C2/c), clearly shows the existence of isolated ions, demonstrating that the compound is an ionic liquid. Ionic liquids (ILs) are commonly known as compounds with negligible vapour pressure, which makes them difficult to boil/distil or sublime. Surprisingly, ILs with imidazolium-based cations with the specialty of N-bonded silylorganic groups sublime very easily. The process of sublimation has been investigated thoroughly with physicochemical methods and theoretical calculations

Comprehensive Thermodynamic Study of Alkyl-Cyclohexanes as Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers Motifs

Alkyl-cyclohexanes can be considered as suitable model compounds to understand the thermochemistry of aromatic compounds and their hydrogenated counterparts discussed as Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carrier systems. Thermochemical measurements on these hydrogen-rich compounds are thwarted by complications due to the 99.9 % purity limitation and sample size specific to these methods. However, the data on vaporisation and formation enthalpies are necessary to optimize the hydrogenation/dehydrogenation processes. In this work, various empirical and theoretical methods are described to reliably assess the gas phase enthalpies of formation and vaporization enthalpies of alkyl-substituted cyclohexanes. The empirical and quantum-chemical methods have been validated against reliable literature data and provide reasonable estimates with an accuracy comparable to that of the experimental data. The liquid phase enthalpies of formation of differently shaped alkyl-cyclohexanes were derived and used to estimate the energetics of their dehydrogenation reactions. The influence of alkyl substituents on the reaction enthalpy is discussed. The vapour pressures of typical hydrogen-rich compounds at technically relevant temperatures were calculated and compared to vapour pressures of biodiesel fuels measured in this work using the static method

Microbiome Responses to an Uncontrolled Short-Term Diet Intervention in the Frame of the Citizen Science Project

Personalized nutrition is of increasing interest to individuals actively monitoring their health. The relations between the duration of diet intervention and the effects on gut microbiota have yet to be elucidated. Here we examined the associations of short-term dietary changes, long-term dietary habits and lifestyle with gut microbiota. Stool samples from 248 citizen-science volunteers were collected before and after a self-reported 2-week personalized diet intervention, then analyzed using 16S rRNA sequencing. Considerable correlations between long-term dietary habits and gut community structure were detected. A higher intake of vegetables and fruits was associated with increased levels of butyrate-producing Clostridiales and higher community richness. A paired comparison of the metagenomes before and after the 2-week intervention showed that even a brief, uncontrolled intervention produced profound changes in community structure: resulting in decreased levels of Bacteroidaceae, Porphyromonadaceae and Rikenellaceae families and decreased alpha-diversity coupled with an increase of Methanobrevibacter, Bifidobacterium, Clostridium and butyrate-producing Lachnospiraceae- as well as the prevalence of a permatype (a bootstrapping-based variation of enterotype) associated with a higher diversity of diet. The response of microbiota to the intervention was dependent on the initial microbiota state. These findings pave the way for the development of an individualized diet.</p