Privacy Preserving Adaptive Experiment Design

Adaptive experiment is widely adopted to estimate conditional average treatment effect (CATE) in clinical trials and many other scenarios. While the primary goal in experiment is to maximize estimation accuracy, due to the imperative of social welfare, it's also crucial to provide treatment with superior outcomes to patients, which is measured by regret in contextual bandit framework. These two objectives often lead to contrast optimal allocation mechanism. Furthermore, privacy concerns arise in clinical scenarios containing sensitive data like patients health records. Therefore, it's essential for the treatment allocation mechanism to incorporate robust privacy protection measures. In this paper, we investigate the tradeoff between loss of social welfare and statistical power in contextual bandit experiment. We propose a matched upper and lower bound for the multi-objective optimization problem, and then adopt the concept of Pareto optimality to mathematically characterize the optimality condition. Furthermore, we propose differentially private algorithms which still matches the lower bound, showing that privacy is "almost free". Additionally, we derive the asymptotic normality of the estimator, which is essential in statistical inference and hypothesis testing.Comment: Add a tabl

Error Analysis of Aerosol Extinction Cross Section Measurement due to Forward Scattering and Diffraction

Aerosol is a useful mean in electro-optical defence. The optical transmissivity is usually used to evaluate the performance of the aerosol. However in transmissivity measurement, forward-scattered or diffracted light might reach the detector and would be incorrectly recorded as unscattered and transmitted one, which results in the final optical density rise and experimental extinction cross-section becoming erroneously low. Based on forward scattering and diffraction analysis, the beam efficiency and effective extinction efficiency are introduced to examine the error. The results indicate that large particles and detector increase the error. To minimise the error, the distance between the aerosol and the detector must be large enough, and the detector of small area and small view angle is favourable.Defence Science Journal, 2009, 59(5), pp.545-548, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.59.155

Infrared Extinction Coefficients of Artificial Aerosol

The artificial aerosol is widely used in the modern battlefields to protect the potentialtargets and to conceal the movement of personnel and materials. In this paper, the double-bandinfrared extinction coefficients of the artificial aerosol have been calculated and compared withthe experimental data. The particulates were assumed to be small spheres and Mie's theory wasemployed with the grain size distribution function being lognormal. The numerical and theexperimental results show that the size distribution and the materials of the particles are decisiveof their infrared extinction capability

Calculation of Overall Effective Extinction Cross Section of Several Cold Smoke Infrared Ammunitions

The effective extinction cross section is an important parameter of the cold smoke infrared ammunition. This paper discusses the calculation of the maximal effective extinction cross section of the smoke produced by several smoke ammunitions and gives the optimal distance between the centres of the two adjacent smoke spheres. This study can provide theoretical basis for proper use of the smoke ammunition and the optimisation of the discharger

Measurement of Infrared Transmissivity of Smoke Using a Thermal Imager

The smoke is an effective camouflage method and is widely used in the modern battlefields.The smoke chamber test is used quantitatively to extinct the energies of the smoke material. Inthe smoke chamber test, a key problem is to accurately measure the transmissivity of the smoke.In this paper, the relationship between the temperatures measured and the radiation received bythe thermal imager has been disussed. The equation to accurately calculate the infraredtransmissivity of the smoke from the measured temperature is deduced. This equation is alsocompared with the simplified one

Fight Fire with Fire: Combating Adversarial Patch Attacks using Pattern-randomized Defensive Patches

Object detection has found extensive applications in various tasks, but it is also susceptible to adversarial patch attacks. Existing defense methods often necessitate modifications to the target model or result in unacceptable time overhead. In this paper, we adopt a counterattack approach, following the principle of "fight fire with fire," and propose a novel and general methodology for defending adversarial attacks. We utilize an active defense strategy by injecting two types of defensive patches, canary and woodpecker, into the input to proactively probe or weaken potential adversarial patches without altering the target model. Moreover, inspired by randomization techniques employed in software security, we employ randomized canary and woodpecker injection patterns to defend against defense-aware attacks. The effectiveness and practicality of the proposed method are demonstrated through comprehensive experiments. The results illustrate that canary and woodpecker achieve high performance, even when confronted with unknown attack methods, while incurring limited time overhead. Furthermore, our method also exhibits sufficient robustness against defense-aware attacks, as evidenced by adaptive attack experiments

Prognostic Value of Germline Copy Number Variants and Environmental Exposures in Non-small Cell Lung Cancer

Germline copy number variant (gCNV) has been studied as a genetic determinant for prognosis of several types of cancer, but little is known about how it affects non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) prognosis. We aimed to develop a prognostic nomogram for NSCLC based on gCNVs. Promising gCNVs that are associated with overall survival (OS) of NSCLC were sorted by analyzing the TCGA data and were validated in a small Chinese population. Then the successfully verified gCNVs were determined in a training cohort (n = 570) to develop a prognostic nomogram, and in a validation cohort (n = 465) to validate the nomogram. Thirty-five OS-related gCNVs were sorted and were reduced to 15 predictors by the Lasso regression analysis. Of them, only CNVR395.1 and CNVR2239.1 were confirmed to be associated with OS of NSCLC in the Chinese population. High polygenic risk score (PRS), which was calculated by the hazard effects of CNVR395.1 and CNVR2239.1, exerted a significantly higher death rate in the training cohort (HR = 1.41, 95%CI: 1.16–1.74) and validation cohort (HR = 1.42, 95%CI: 1.13–1.77) than low PRS. The nomogram incorporating PRS and surrounding factors, achieved admissible concordance indexes of 0.678 (95%CI: 0.664–0.693) and 0.686 (95%CI: 0.670–0.702) in predicting OS in the training and validation cohorts, respectively, and had well-fitted calibration curves. Moreover, an interaction between PRS and asbestos exposure was observed on affecting OS (Pinteraction = 0.042). Our analysis developed a nomogram that achieved an admissible prediction of NSCLC survival, which would be beneficial to the personalized intervention of NSCLC

Association between the NBS1 E185Q polymorphism and cancer risk: a meta-analysis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>NBS1 is a key DNA repair protein in the homologous recombination repair pathway and a signal modifier in the intra-S phase checkpoint that plays important roles in maintaining genomic stability. The <it>NBS1 </it>8360G>C (<it>Glu185Gln</it>) is one of the most commonly studied polymorphisms of the gene for their association with risk of cancers, but the results are conflicting.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We performed a meta-analysis using 16 eligible case-control studies (including 17 data sets) with a total of 9,734 patients and 10,325 controls to summarize the data on the association between the <it>NBS1 </it>8360G>C (E185Q) polymorphism and cancer risk.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Compared with the common 8360GG genotype, the carriers of variant genotypes (i.e., 8360 GC/CC) had a 1.06-fold elevated risk of cancer (95% CI = 1.00–1.12, <it>P </it>= 0.05) in a dominant genetic model as estimated in a fixed effect model. However, the association was not found in an additive genetic model (CC <it>vs </it>GG) (odds ratio, OR = 0.98, 95% CI = 0.85–1.13, <it>P </it>= 0.78) nor in a recessive genetic model (CC <it>vs </it>GC +GG) (OR = 0.94, 95% CI = 0.82–1.07, <it>P </it>= 0.36). The effect of the 8360G>C (E185Q) polymorphism was further evaluated in stratification analysis. It was demonstrated that the increased risk of cancer associated with 8360G>C variant genotypes was more pronounced in the Caucasians (OR = 1.07, 95% CI = 1.01–1.14, <it>P </it>= 0.03).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our meta-analysis suggests that the <it>NBS1 </it>E185Q variant genotypes (8360 <it>GC/CC</it>) might be associated with an increased risk of cancer, especially in Caucasians.</p

Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor Speed Control Based on Improved Active Disturbance Rejection Control

An improved active disturbance rejection control (I-ADRC) to improve the disturbance attenuation of a permanent magnet synchronous motor speed controller was proposed in this paper. A nonlinear function with improved smoothness was adopted to design the controller. The Lyapunov stability of the improved tracking differentiator, the improved extended state observer, and the controller were analysed. Moreover, simulations and experiments confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed controller. The results demonstrate that the proposed controller has a smaller steady-state error and a stronger disturbance attenuation ability than the proportional integral derivative (PID) controller