Permanence and almost periodic solution of a multispecies Lotka-Volterra mutualism system with time varying delays on time scales

In this paper, we consider the almost periodic dynamics of a multispecies Lotka-Volterra mutualism system with time varying delays on time scales. By establishing some dynamic inequalities on time scales, a permanence result for the model is obtained. Furthermore, by means of the almost periodic functional hull theory on time scales and Lyapunov functional, some criteria are obtained for the existence, uniqueness and global attractivity of almost periodic solutions of the model. Our results complement and extend some scientific work in recent years. Finally, an example is given to illustrate the main results.Comment: 31page

A Local-Global LDA Model for Discovering Geographical Topics from Social Media

Micro-blogging services can track users' geo-locations when users check-in their places or use geo-tagging which implicitly reveals locations. This "geo tracking" can help to find topics triggered by some events in certain regions. However, discovering such topics is very challenging because of the large amount of noisy messages (e.g. daily conversations). This paper proposes a method to model geographical topics, which can filter out irrelevant words by different weights in the local and global contexts. Our method is based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model but each word is generated from either a local or a global topic distribution by its generation probabilities. We evaluated our model with data collected from Weibo, which is currently the most popular micro-blogging service for Chinese. The evaluation results demonstrate that our method outperforms other baseline methods in several metrics such as model perplexity, two kinds of entropies and KL-divergence of discovered topics

A Generalized Recurrent Neural Architecture for Text Classification with Multi-Task Learning

Multi-task learning leverages potential correlations among related tasks to extract common features and yield performance gains. However, most previous works only consider simple or weak interactions, thereby failing to model complex correlations among three or more tasks. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning architecture with four types of recurrent neural layers to fuse information across multiple related tasks. The architecture is structurally flexible and considers various interactions among tasks, which can be regarded as a generalized case of many previous works. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets for text classification show that our model can significantly improve performances of related tasks with additional information from others

Role of traditional Chinese medicine in the regulation of inflammatory mediators in paediatric asthma

Abstract Background: In many nations, there has been an increase in the prevalence of allergic diseases, many of which lack therapies for recovery. In addition, there are concerns regarding the use of conventional medicine, particularly corticosteroids, in children. Accordingly, in the case of asthma, many chronic allergic patients are looking at complementary and alternative drugs to treat their condition. Objective: The study intended to observe the impact of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) prescriptions children with asthma, with a specific focus on their impact on the molecular mechanism of asthma. Method: A total number of 167 children with symptom of asthma were included in the study and were randomly allocated to two groups – those who received traditional Chinese medicine (TCM, the TCM group, n = 90) and those who were given salbutamol plus montelukast (SM, the SM group, n = 77). Different TCM treatments were given to patients in the TCM group, while salbutamol and montelukast were given to the SM group. Theappropriate treatment was given to both groups for 12 weeks. The patient who are getting TCM treatment had 42 cases, and the SM group had 35 cases. Real-time quantitative fluorescent PCR detects interleukin 10 and interleukin 17 (IL-10 and IL17 respectively) and matrix metal-oproteinase 9 commonly known as MMP-9 expression levels including monocyte blood transforming growth factor 1 (MBTGF-β1). A diagnosis of IL-10 orIL-17 or, MMP-9 as well as MBTGF- β1 is monitored in peripheral blood which were treated before and after consecutively. Results: MBTGF-β1-RNA decreased among the SM group children after the treatment Whereas after treatment no major variances in MMP-9 among TCM and the SM children group were noted (0.05>0.05). The amount of IL-10 including IL-17 and MMP-9 expressively declined (p = 0.01, 0.04 and 0.03 respectively) in the TCM group. On the other hand, MMP-9 and MBTGF- β1 levels expressively declined in the SM group following therapy. The IL-10 as well as IL-17, and MBTGF-β1 and MMP-9 values in the two groups were not significantly different (> 0.05). The differences between IL-17 and c-ACT scores in the Chinese medicine group and SM group were adversely correlated. Conclusions: Traditional Chinese Medicine has controlling consequence on secretions of childhood asthma inflammatory mediators and help in asthma management immune mechanism. [Ethiop. J. Health Dev. 2020; 34(4):262-266] Key words: Paediatric asthma, traditional Chinese medicine, children, Chinese herbal medicin

Characteristics of traditional Chinese medicine users and prescription analysis for pediatric atopic dermatitis

Abstract Background: Traditional Chinese medicine is commonly used to treat children with atopic dermatitis. This research study reviewed patients with atopic dermatitis, recorded in Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Research Database, to investigate the characteristics and prescriptions of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) so as to propose the use of TCM for a broader societal application. Objective: The aim of this study is to determine the application mode of TCM in children with atopic dermatitis, specifically the combination of Chinese herbal medicines (CHMs) used. Methods: The database reported atopic dermatitis-diagnosed children aged 5 to 12. TCM users documented data relate to age, diagnostic code, residence area and the use of corticosteroids. An analysis of the medications used for atopic dermatitis was achieved through a review of examining the association of various factors. Results: A total of 13,646 children with atopic dermatitis, and treated using TCM, were sampled from different area of Taiwan. The use of TCM is associated with use by women (male: OR 0.83), adolescence (OR: 10.0, 95% CI: 8.88-11.15) and allergic rhinitis (OR: 2.44; 95 % CI: 2.10-2.85). Fewer TCM users than non-users receive corticosteroid therapy (35.8% of all users receive TCM). Still, the percentage of TCM users who use long-lastingcorticosteroid therapy is greater than TCM non-users (10.6% of TCM users and 2.0% of TCM non-users). In total, 36,398 CHM prescriptions were used by 93.7% of Chinese medicine users. There was a total of 5.62 types CHM types used. Relationships between the Chinese herbal medicine forms network, where Xiao fengsan is the primary treatment for atopic dermatitis. Conclusions: The article describes features of children with atopic dermatitis who are treated with Chinese medicine. Xiao fengsan is the most common CHM used to treat atopic dermatitis in children. Further research on the safety and efficiency of this treatment is still required. [Ethiop. J. Health Dev. 2020; 34(4):253-261] Key words: Traditional Chinese medicine, atopic dermatitis, paediatrics, Chinese herbal medicin

Receding Horizon Trajectory Optimization with Terminal Impact Specifications

The trajectory optimization problem subject to terminal impact time and angle specifications can be reformulated as a nonlinear programming problem using the Gauss pseudospectral method. The cost function of the trajectory optimization problem is modified to reduce the terminal control energy. A receding horizon optimization strategy is implemented to reject the errors caused by the motion of a surface target. Several simulations were performed to validate the proposed method via the C programming language. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and that the real-time requirement can be easily achieved if the C programming language is used to realize it