Use of Noise to Augment Training Data: A Neural Network Method of Mineral-Potential Mapping in Regions of Limited Known Deposit Examples.

One of the main factors that affects the performance ofMLPneural networks trained using the backpropagation algorithm in mineral-potential mapping is the paucity of deposit relative to barren training patterns. To overcome this problem, random noise is added to the original training patterns in order to create additional synthetic deposit training data. Experiments on the effect of the number of deposits available for training in the Kalgoorlie Terrane orogenic gold province show that both the classification performance of a trained network and the quality of the resultant prospectivity map increase significantly with increased numbers of deposit patterns. Experiments are conducted to determine the optimum amount of noise using both uniform and normally distributed random noise. Through the addition of noise to the original deposit training data, the number of deposit training patterns is increased from approximately 50 to 1000. The percentage of correct classifications significantly improves for the independent test set as well as for deposit patterns in the test set. For example, using≥40% uniform random noise, the test-set classification performance increases from 67.9% and 68.0% to 72.8% and 77.1% (for test-set overall and test-set deposit patterns, respectively). Indices for the quality of the resultant prospectivity map, (i.e. D/A, D≥(D/A), where Dis the percentage of deposits and Ais the percentage of the total area for the highest prospectivity map-class, and area under an ROC curve) also increase from 8.2, 105, 0.79 to 17.9, 226, 0.87, respectively. Increasing the size of the training-stop data set results in a further increase in classification performance to 73.5%, 77.4%, 14.7, 296, 0.87 for test-set overall and test-set deposit patterns, D/A, D≥(D/A), and area under the ROC curve, respectively

Deficiency of the zinc finger protein ZFP106 causes motor and sensory neurodegeneration

Acknowledgements We are indebted to Jim Humphries, JennyCorrigan, LizDarley, Elizabeth Joynson, Natalie Walters, Sara Wells and the whole necropsy, histology, genotyping and MLC ward 6 teams at MRC Harwell for excellent technical assistance. We thank the staff of the WTSI Illumina Bespoke Team for the RNA-seq data, the Sanger Mouse Genetics Project for the initial mouse characterization and Dr David Adams for critical reading of the manuscript. We also thank KOMP for the mouse embryonic stem cells carrying the knockout first promoter-less allele (tm1a(KOMP)Wtsi) within Zfp016. Conflict of Interest statement. None declared. Funding This work was funded by the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) to A.A.-A. and a Motor Neurone Disease Association (MNDA) project grant to A.A.-A. and EMCF. D.L.H.B. is a Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Scientist Fellow and P.F. is a MRC/MNDA Lady Edith Wolfson Clinician Scientist Fellow. Funding to pay the Open Access publication charges for this article was provided by the MRC grant number: MC_UP_A390_1106.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Worry about crime in Europe: A model-based small area estimation from the European Social Survey

© The Author(s) 2019. Worry about crime is known to be higher in some European regions than others. However, cross-national surveys, which are the main source of information to map worry about crime across Europe, are designed to be representative of large areas (countries), and regions often suffer from small and unrepresentative sample sizes. This research produces reliable model-based small area estimates of worry about crime at regional level from European Social Survey data, in order to map the phenomenon and examine its macro-level predictors. Model-based small area estimation techniques borrow strength across areas to produce reliable estimates of parameters of interest. Estimates of worry about crime are higher in most South and East European regions, in contrast to Northern and Central Europe

Transparent and accurate reporting increases reliability, utility, and impact of your research: reporting guidelines and the EQUATOR Network

Although current electronic methods of scientific publishing offer increased opportunities for publishing all research studies and describing them in sufficient detail, health research literature still suffers from many shortcomings. These shortcomings seriously undermine the value and utility of the literature and waste scarce resources invested in the research. In recent years there have been several positive steps aimed at improving this situation, such as a strengthening of journals' policies on research publication and the wide requirement to register clinical trials

The Role of Individual Variables, Organizational Variables and Moral Intensity Dimensions in Libyan Management Accountants’ Ethical Decision Making

This study investigates the association of a broad set of variables with the ethical decision making of management accountants in Libya. Adopting a cross-sectional methodology, a questionnaire including four different ethical scenarios was used to gather data from 229 participants. For each scenario, ethical decision making was examined in terms of the recognition, judgment and intention stages of Rest’s model. A significant relationship was found between ethical recognition and ethical judgment and also between ethical judgment and ethical intention, but ethical recognition did not significantly predict ethical intention—thus providing support for Rest’s model. Organizational variables, age and educational level yielded few significant results. The lack of significance for codes of ethics might reflect their relative lack of development in Libya, in which case Libyan companies should pay attention to their content and how they are supported, especially in the light of the under-development of the accounting profession in Libya. Few significant results were also found for gender, but where they were found, males showed more ethical characteristics than females. This unusual result reinforces the dangers of gender stereotyping in business. Personal moral philosophy and moral intensity dimensions were generally found to be significant predictors of the three stages of ethical decision making studied. One implication of this is to give more attention to ethics in accounting education, making the connections between accounting practice and (in Libya) Islam. Overall, this study not only adds to the available empirical evidence on factors affecting ethical decision making, notably examining three stages of Rest’s model, but also offers rare insights into the ethical views of practising management accountants and provides a benchmark for future studies of ethical decision making in Muslim majority countries and other parts of the developing world

Genome-wide trans-ancestry meta-analysis provides insight into the genetic architecture of type 2 diabetes susceptibility.

To further understanding of the genetic basis of type 2 diabetes (T2D) susceptibility, we aggregated published meta-analyses of genome-wide association studies (GWAS), including 26,488 cases and 83,964 controls of European, east Asian, south Asian and Mexican and Mexican American ancestry. We observed a significant excess in the directional consistency of T2D risk alleles across ancestry groups, even at SNPs demonstrating only weak evidence of association. By following up the strongest signals of association from the trans-ethnic meta-analysis in an additional 21,491 cases and 55,647 controls of European ancestry, we identified seven new T2D susceptibility loci. Furthermore, we observed considerable improvements in the fine-mapping resolution of common variant association signals at several T2D susceptibility loci. These observations highlight the benefits of trans-ethnic GWAS for the discovery and characterization of complex trait loci and emphasize an exciting opportunity to extend insight into the genetic architecture and pathogenesis of human diseases across populations of diverse ancestry