Empirical evaluation of different feature representations for social circles detection

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19390-8_4Social circles detection is a special case of community detection in social network that is currently attracting a growing interest in the research community. We propose in this paper an empirical evaluation of the multi-assignment clustering method using different feature representation models. We define different vectorial representations from both structural egonet information and user profile features. We study and compare the performance on the available labelled Facebook data from the Kaggle competition on learning social circles in networks. We compare our results with several different baselines.This work was developed in the framework of the W911NF-14-1-0254 research project Social Copying Community Detection (SOCOCODE), fundedby the US Army Research Office (ARO).Alonso, J.; Paredes Palacios, R.; Rosso, P. (2015). Empirical evaluation of different feature representations for social circles detection. En Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis: 7th Iberian Conference, IbPRIA 2015, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, June 17-19, 2015, Proceedings. Springer International Publishing. 31-38. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19390-8_4S3138Buhmann, J., Kühnel, H.: Vector quantization with complexity costs. IEEE Trans. Inf. Theor. 39(4), 1133–1145 (1993)Dey, K., Bandyopadhyay, S.: An empirical investigation of like-mindedness of topically related social communities on microblogging platforms. In: International Conference on Natural Languages (2013)Fortunato, S.: Community detection in graphs. Phys. Rep. 486(3), 75–174 (2010)Frank, M., Streich, A.P., Basin, D., Buhmann, J.M.: Multi-assignment clustering for boolean data. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 13(1), 459–489 (2012)Kaggle: Learning social circles in networks. http://www.kaggle.com/c/learning-social-circlesMcAuley, J., Leskovec, J.: Learning to discover social circles in ego networks. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 25, 539–547 (2012)McAuley, J., Leskovec, J.: Discovering social circles in ego networks. ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data (TKDD) 8(1), 4 (2014)Palla, G., Dernyi, I., Farkas, I., Vicsek, T.: Uncovering the overlapping community structure of complex networks in nature and society. Nature 435(7043), 814–818 (2005)Pathak, N., DeLong, C., Banerjee, A., Erickson, K.: Social topic models for community extraction. In: The 2nd SNA-KDD Workshop (2008)Porter, M.A., Onnela, J.P., Mucha, P.J.: Communities in networks. Not. Amer. Math. Soc. 56(9), 1082–1097 (2009)Rose, K., Gurewitz, E., Fox, G.C.: Vector quantization by deterministic annealing. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 38(4), 1249–1257 (1992)Sachan, M., Contractor, D., Faruquie, T.A., Subramaniam, L.V.: Using content and interactions for discovering communities in social networks. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 331–340 (2012)Streich, A.P., Frank, M., Basin, D., Buhmann, J.M.: Multi-assignment clustering for Boolean data. In: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 969–976 (2009)Vaidya, J., Atluri, V., Guo, Q.: The role mining problem: finding a minimal descriptive set of roles. In: Proceedings of the 12th ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies, pp. 175–184 (2007)Zhou, D., Councill, I., Zha, H., Giles, C.L.: Discovering temporal communities from social network documents. In: Seventh IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, PP. 745–750 (2007

If exercise is medicine, why don’t we know the dose? An overview of systematic reviews assessing reporting quality of exercise interventions in health and disease

Objective To determine how well exercise interventions are reported in trials in health and disease. Design Overview of systematic reviews. Data sources PubMed, EMBASE, CINAHL, SPORTDiscus and PsycINFO from inception until June 2021. Eligibility criteria Reviews of any health condition were included if they primarily assessed quality of exercise intervention reporting using the Consensus on Exercise Reporting Template (CERT) or the Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR). We assessed review quality using a modified version of A MeaSurement Tool to Assess systematic Reviews. Results We identified 7804 studies and included 28 systematic reviews. The median (IQR) percentage of CERT and TIDieR items appropriately reported was 24% (19%) and 49% (33%), respectively. TIDieR items 1, Brief name (median=100%, IQR 4) and 2, Why (median=98%, IQR 6), as well as CERT item 4, Supervision and delivery (median=68%, IQR 89), were the best reported. For replication of exercise interventions, TIDieR item 8, When and how much, was moderately well reported (median=62%, IQR 68) although CERT item 8, Description of each exercise to enable replication (median=23%, IQR 44) and item 13, Detailed description of the exercise intervention (median=24%, IQR 66) were poorly reported. Quality of systematic reviews ranged from moderate to critically low quality. Conclusion Exercise interventions are poorly reported across a range of health conditions. If exercise is medicine, then how it is prescribed and delivered is unclear, potentially limiting its translation from research to practice

Emotion regulation skills-focused interventions for chronic pain: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Objectives: To investigate the effect of emotion regulation skills-focused (ERSF) interventions to reduce pain intensity and improve psychological outcomes for people with chronic pain and to narratively report on safety and intervention compliance. Methods: Six databases and four registries were searched for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) up to 29 April 2022. Risk of bias was evaluated using the Cochrane RoB 2.0 tool, and certainty of evidence was assessed according to the Grading, Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE). Meta-analyses for eight studies (902 participants) assessed pain intensity (primary outcome), emotion regulation, affect, symptoms of depression and anxiety, and pain interference (secondary outcomes), at two time points when available, post-intervention (closest to intervention end) and follow-up (the first measurement after the post-intervention assessment). Results: Compared to TAU, pain intensity improved post-intervention (weighted mean difference [WMD] = −10.86; 95% confidence interval [CI] [−17.55, −2.56]) and at follow-up (WMD = −11.38; 95% CI [−13.55, −9.21]). Emotion regulation improved post-intervention (standard mean difference [SMD] = 0.57; 95% CI [0.14, 1.01]), and depressive symptoms improved at follow-up (SMD = −0.45; 95% CI [−0.66, −0.24]). Compared to active comparators, anxiety symptoms improved favouring the comparator post-intervention (SMD = 0.10; 95% CI [0.03, 0.18]), and compared to CBT, pain interference improved post-intervention (SMD = −0.37; 95% CI [−0.69, −0.04]). Certainty of evidence ranged from very low to moderate. Significance: The findings provide evidence that ERSF interventions reduce pain intensity for people with chronic pain compared to usual treatment. These interventions are at least as beneficial to reduce pain intensity as the current gold standard psychological intervention, CBT. However, the limited number of studies and certainty of evidence mean further high-quality RCTs are warranted. Additionally, further research is needed to identify whether ERSF interventions may be more beneficial for specific chronic pain conditions

Setting a Local Research Agenda for Women's Health: The National Centers of Excellence in Women's Health

Although women's health research expanded greatly in the past 10 years, significant gaps in knowledge remain. Prioritization and promotion of research will help assure continuing progress in closing such gaps and improving the health of women. Although a comprehensive agenda for the new millennium has been developed at the national level, the process for establishing a local research agenda is not well defined. The purpose of this study was to describe criteria for and barriers to establishing a local research agenda in women's health. A secondary aim was to describe mechanisms for identifying women's health researchers and for facilitating multidisciplinary research. Directors of Research at National Centers of Excellence in Women's Health (CoEs) (n = 18) were surveyed by mail for this information. The results indicate that the local research agenda should emphasize health issues that are prevalent in women, research that is likely to establish treatment, psychosocial/cultural factors, and quality of life issues. The process of setting a research agenda should include input from the communities served as well as from scientists. Critical evaluation of scientific strengths and weaknesses is an essential preliminary step in prioritizing research opportunities in order to implement and evaluate a research agenda in women's health.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/63225/1/152460901317193512.pd

The United Kingdom’s first unsanctioned overdose prevention site; a proof-of-concept evaluation

Background: The United Kingdom (UK) is currently experiencing a public health crisis of drug-related deaths. The government has rejected recommendations to open overdose prevention services, under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. We report on the operation and use of an unsanctioned overdose prevention service which operated in Glasgow city centre from September 2020 to May 2021. Methods: Description of the service, with analysis of data collected on its use. Results: The service operated for nine months without permission or funding from official sources. We report on the 894 injections supervised and recorded, and nine successful interventions with overdose events (seven opioid/two cocaine). Powder cocaine injection predominated either alone (60.6%) or with heroin (22.1%). Injection was mostly in the groin (68.0%) or arm (16.8%). More injections were recorded by males (70.1%). Around two-thirds (65%) of injection events featured an individual who was also on a buprenorphine/methadone prescription. Conclusion: It is feasible for an overdose prevention service to operate successfully in the UK without being shut down by the police or with negative consequences for the community. Future sites in the UK must tailor to the regional trends in substances used by their potential clients and there is a notable difference to some international trends (e.g. no fentanyl use). There is an urgent need and demand for these services in the UK to reduce harm, prevent and intervene during overdose, and provide vital psychosocial support for health and wellbeing in a highly marginalised population

Efficacy, acceptability, and safety of muscle relaxants for adults with non-specific low back pain: Systematic review and meta-analysis

AbstractObjective To investigate the efficacy, acceptability, and safety of muscle relaxants for low back pain. Design Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. Data sources Medline, Embase, CINAHL, CENTRAL, ClinicalTrials.gov, clinicialtrialsregister.eu, and WHO ICTRP from inception to 23 February 2021. Eligibility criteria for study selection Randomised controlled trials of muscle relaxants compared with placebo, usual care, waiting list, or no treatment in adults (≥18 years) reporting non-specific low back pain. Data extraction and synthesis Two reviewers independently identified studies, extracted data, and assessed the risk of bias and certainty of the evidence using the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool and Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations, respectively. Random effects meta-analytical models through restricted maximum likelihood estimation were used to estimate pooled effects and corresponding 95% confidence intervals. Outcomes included pain intensity (measured on a 0-100 point scale), disability (0-100 point scale), acceptability (discontinuation of the drug for any reason during treatment), and safety (adverse events, serious adverse events, and number of participants who withdrew from the trial because of an adverse event). Results 49 trials were included in the review, of which 31, sampling 6505 participants, were quantitatively analysed. For acute low back pain, very low certainty evidence showed that at two weeks or less non-benzodiazepine antispasmodics were associated with a reduction in pain intensity compared with control (mean difference -7.7, 95% confidence interval-12.1 to-3.3) but not a reduction in disability (-3.3, -7.3 to 0.7). Low and very low certainty evidence showed that non-benzodiazepine antispasmodics might increase the risk of an adverse event (relative risk 1.6, 1.2 to 2.0) and might have little to no effect on acceptability (0.8, 0.6 to 1.1) compared with control for acute low back pain, respectively. The number of trials investigating other muscle relaxants and different durations of low back pain were small and the certainty of evidence was reduced because most trials were at high risk of bias. Conclusions Considerable uncertainty exists about the clinical efficacy and safety of muscle relaxants. Very low and low certainty evidence shows that non-benzodiazepine antispasmodics might provide small but not clinically important reductions in pain intensity at or before two weeks and might increase the risk of an adverse event in acute low back pain, respectively. Large, high quality, placebo controlled trials are urgently needed to resolve uncertainty. Systematic review registration PROSPERO CRD42019126820 and Open Science Framework https://osf.io/mu2f5/

Hydroxymethylglutaryl-CoA reductase inhibition with simvastatin in acute lung injury to reduce pulmonary dysfunction (HARP-2) trial : study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

Acute lung injury (ALI) is a common devastating clinical syndrome characterized by life-threatening respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation and multiple organ failure. There are in vitro, animal studies and pre-clinical data suggesting that statins may be beneficial in ALI. The Hydroxymethylglutaryl-CoA reductase inhibition with simvastatin in Acute lung injury to Reduce Pulmonary dysfunction (HARP-2) trial is a multicenter, prospective, randomized, allocation concealed, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial which aims to test the hypothesis that treatment with simvastatin will improve clinical outcomes in patients with ALI

The Role of the Mucus Barrier in Digestion

Mucus forms a protective layer across a variety of epithelial surfaces. In the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, the barrier has to permit the uptake of nutrients, while excluding potential hazards, such as pathogenic bacteria. In this short review article, we look at recent literature on the structure, location, and properties of the mammalian intestinal secreted mucins and the mucus layer they form over a wide range of length scales. In particular, we look at the structure of the gel-forming glycoprotein MUC2, the primary intestinal secreted mucin, and the influence this has on the properties of the mucus layer. We show that, even at the level of the protein backbone, MUC2 is highly heterogeneous and that this is reflected in the networks it forms. It is evident that a combination of charge and pore size determines what can diffuse through the layer to the underlying gut epithelium. This information is important for the targeted delivery of bioactive molecules, including nutrients and pharmaceuticals, and for understanding how GI health is maintained