Survival ensembles by the sum of pairwise differences with application to lung cancer microarray studies

Lung cancer is among the most common cancers in the United States, in terms of incidence and mortality. In 2009, it is estimated that more than 150,000 deaths will result from lung cancer alone. Genetic information is an extremely valuable data source in characterizing the personal nature of cancer. Over the past several years, investigators have conducted numerous association studies where intensive genetic data is collected on relatively few patients compared to the numbers of gene predictors, with one scientific goal being to identify genetic features associated with cancer recurrence or survival. In this note, we propose high-dimensional survival analysis through a new application of boosting, a powerful tool in machine learning. Our approach is based on an accelerated lifetime model and minimizing the sum of pairwise differences in residuals. We apply our method to a recent microarray study of lung adenocarcinoma and find that our ensemble is composed of 19 genes, while a proportional hazards (PH) ensemble is composed of nine genes, a proper subset of the 19-gene panel. In one of our simulation scenarios, we demonstrate that PH boosting in a misspecified model tends to underfit and ignore moderately-sized covariate effects, on average. Diagnostic analyses suggest that the PH assumption is not satisfied in the microarray data and may explain, in part, the discrepancy in the sets of active coefficients. Our simulation studies and comparative data analyses demonstrate how statistical learning by PH models alone is insufficient.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS426 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Supply Chain Management in the Prime Lamb Industry Tender Plus: A Success Story

Traditionally fresh food industries have lagged behind other consumer goods in their approach to marketing and integration, and generally, are resigned to being commodity traders. Retailers' worldwide have increased their dominance within the fresh food industry. Clairs (2001) argued that within 10 years, 5-10 retail chains would dominate global food retailing. In Australia the three big supermarket chains and their subsidiaries had 40% of the retail grocery market in 1970 yet by 1998-99 their share had moved to 80% (AFFA and ABARE 2000). In the UK, four retailers account for two thirds of all grocery sales (Fearne & Hughes 1999). The Australian prime lamb industry is rapidly growing, especially in the export arena and has companies rising to the challenge of the domination of market place by retail chains. This paper looks in depth at one such company, Tender Plus. It profiles the relationships within the supply chain, and the success factors, which has provided Tender Plus with the impetus to increase sales to Japan by 15% a year. The key factor is a paradigm shift from a price orientated domain, to that of a relationship orientated one. This is achieved through the commercial factors of quality and consistency of supply, and the people factors of trust, honesty, loyalty and open communication. A combination of these factors, and continuous learning, is cementing the future of Tender Plus, in a marketplace where the power of multi-national conglomerates is increasing.Agribusiness, Industrial Organization,

The Earth Won’t Die

When given a particularly grim outlook on the future of the world without mankind, I wanted to make it clear how I feel about the resiliency of the earth itself. Mankind can succeed in killing itself and all other life on this planet, but nothing it could ever do will stop life from eventually finding its way back. I wanted to focus on the idea that this world has faced total annihilation before, and new life still managed to come after that, the Earth can kill us but we can’t kill The Earth.https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/hcom434_spring2021/1003/thumbnail.jp

They Still Matter

An image I created during one of our reading responses, noticing that images of protests during the civil rights movement and today are functionally the same pictures. I wanted to draw attention to this by simply replacing the signs of old with modern ones seen at more recent protests, and noting that it doesn’t change the meaning of said protests at all.https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/hcom434_spring2021/1002/thumbnail.jp

Beyond the Notation: Developing Tools to Guide Artistic Decisions of Performers in the Wind Ensemble

Music is a subjective art form that is enhanced by emotional connection and understanding of the relationship of line and phrasing to both the performer and the audience. Performers and conductors are charged with making artistic decisions about the expressive qualities of a phrase within moments of seeing the notation for the first time. In the development of wind ensembles, there is often a disconnect between the technique and accuracy of a musician’s performance and the emotional connection and understanding required to perform a lyrical melody or phrase within a piece of music. As musicians progress, often the attention is placed on the development of technical facilities required to play increasingly difficult music, causing the artistic qualities to fall second to those achieved through concrete evidence; correct notes and rhythms. It is the goal of this project to create a collection of common practices for conductors, teachers, and musicians to facilitate the development of artistry and lyrical playing in the performance of repertoire within the wind ensemble with a specific focus on contemporary music of diverse composers. This paper will also include a discussion of the implementation of the project with audio samples so the reader may see examples of how these techniques can inspire their own performance

“Normal”

Monologue on the futility of trying to define the sought after idea of a return to “normal”, inspired by our class readings and various online resources of writers questioning when “normal” can return as if that’s a set thing we know how to define.https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/hcom434_spring2021/1001/thumbnail.jp

An Introduction to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture

This article explores the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, one of the famous Millennium Prize Problems. In addition to providing the basic theoretic understanding necessary to understand the simplest form of the conjecture, some of the original numerical evidence used to formulate the conjecture is recreated. Recent results and current problems related to the conjecture are given at the end