949 research outputs found
The Influence of Text Pre-processing on Plagiarism Detection
This paper explores the influence of text preprocessing techniques on plagiarism detection. We examine stop-word removal, lemmatization,number replacement, synonymy recognition, and word generalization. We also look into the influence of punctuation and word-order within N-grams. All these techniques are evaluated according to their impact on F1-measure and speed of execution. Our experiments were performed on a Czech corpus of plagiarized documents about politics. At the end of this paper, we propose what we consider to be the best combination of text pre-processing techniques
Prevention of cardiovascular disease in patients with familial hypercholesterolaemia: the role of PCSK9 inhibitors
Familial hypercholesterolaemia is an autosomal dominant inherited disorder characterised by elevated low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels and consequently an increased risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD). Familial hypercholesterolaemia is relatively common, but is often underdiagnosed and undertreated. Cardiologists are likely to encounter many individuals with familial hypercholesterolaemia; however, patients presenting with premature ASCVD are rarely screened for familial hypercholesterolaemia and fasting lipid levels are infrequently documented. Given that individuals with familial hypercholesterolaemia and ASCVD are at a particularly high risk of subsequent cardiac events, this is a missed opportunity for preventive therapy. Furthermore, because there is a 50% chance that first-degree relatives of individuals with familial hypercholesterolaemia will also be affected by the disorder, the underdiagnosis of familial hypercholesterolaemia among patients with ASCVD is a barrier to cascade screening and the prevention of ASCVD in affected relatives. Targeted screening of patients with ASCVD is an effective strategy to identify new familial hypercholesterolaemia index cases. Statins are the standard treatment for individuals with familial hypercholesterolaemia; however, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol targets are not achieved in a large proportion of patients despite treatment. Proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9) inhibitors have been shown to reduce low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels considerably in individuals with familial hypercholesterolaemia who are concurrently receiving the maximal tolerated statin dose. The clinical benefit of PCSK9 inhibitors must, however, also be considered in terms of their cost-effectiveness. Increased awareness of familial hypercholesterolaemia is required among healthcare professionals, particularly cardiologists and primary care physicians, in order to start early preventive measures and to reduce the mortality and morbidity associated with familial hypercholesterolaemia and ASCVD
Shepherding Hordes of Markov Chains
This paper considers large families of Markov chains (MCs) that are defined
over a set of parameters with finite discrete domains. Such families occur in
software product lines, planning under partial observability, and sketching of
probabilistic programs. Simple questions, like `does at least one family member
satisfy a property?', are NP-hard. We tackle two problems: distinguish family
members that satisfy a given quantitative property from those that do not, and
determine a family member that satisfies the property optimally, i.e., with the
highest probability or reward. We show that combining two well-known
techniques, MDP model checking and abstraction refinement, mitigates the
computational complexity. Experiments on a broad set of benchmarks show that in
many situations, our approach is able to handle families of millions of MCs,
providing superior scalability compared to existing solutions.Comment: Full version of TACAS'19 submissio
Deductive Controller Synthesis for Probabilistic Hyperproperties
Probabilistic hyperproperties specify quantitative relations between the
probabilities of reaching different target sets of states from different
initial sets of states. This class of behavioral properties is suitable for
capturing important security, privacy, and system-level requirements. We
propose a new approach to solve the controller synthesis problem for Markov
decision processes (MDPs) and probabilistic hyperproperties. Our specification
language builds on top of the logic HyperPCTL and enhances it with structural
constraints over the synthesized controllers. Our approach starts from a family
of controllers represented symbolically and defined over the same copy of an
MDP. We then introduce an abstraction refinement strategy that can relate
multiple computation trees and that we employ to prune the search space
deductively. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed
approach considerably outperforms HyperProb, a state-of-the-art SMT-based model
checking tool for HyperPCTL. Moreover, our approach is the first one that is
able to effectively combine probabilistic hyperproperties with additional
intra-controller constraints (e.g. partial observability) as well as
inter-controller constraints (e.g. agreements on a common action)
RODES: A Robust-Design Synthesis Tool for Probabilistic Systems
We introduce RODES – a tool for the synthesis of probabilis- tic systems that satisfy strict reliability and performance requirements, are Pareto-optimal with respect to a set of optimisation objectives, and are robust to variations in the system parameters. Given the design space of a system (modelled as a parametric continuous-time Markov chain), RODES generates system designs with low sensitivity to required tol- erance levels for the system parameters. As such, RODES can be used to identify and compare robust designs across a wide range of Pareto- optimal tradeoffs between the system optimisation objectives
Designing Robust Software Systems through Parametric Markov Chain Synthesis
We present a method for the synthesis of software system designs that satisfy strict quality requirements, are Pareto-optimal with respect to a set of quality optimisation criteria, and are robust to variations in the system parameters. To this end, we model the design space of the system under development as a parametric continuous-time Markov chain (pCTMC) with discrete and continuous parameters that correspond to alternative system architectures and to the ranges of possible values for configuration parameters, respectively. Given this pCTMC and required tolerance levels for the configuration parameters, our method produces a sensitivity-aware Pareto-optimal set of designs, which allows the modeller to inspect the ranges of quality attributes induced by these tolerances, thus enabling the effective selection of robust designs. Through application to two systems from different domains, we demonstrate the ability of our method to synthesise robust designs with a wide spectrum of useful tradeoffs between quality attributes and sensitivity
Engineering the Fab fragment of the anti-IgE omalizumab to prevent Fab crystallization and permit IgE-Fc complex crystallization
Immunoglobulin E (IgE) plays a central role in the allergic response, in which cross-linking of allergen by Fc[epsilon]RI-bound IgE triggers mast cell and basophil degranulation and the release of inflammatory mediators. The high-affinity interaction between IgE and Fc[epsilon]RI is a long-standing target for therapeutic intervention in allergic disease. Omalizumab is a clinically approved anti-IgE monoclonal antibody that binds to free IgE, also with high affinity, preventing its interaction with Fc[epsilon]RI. All attempts to crystallize the pre-formed complex between the omalizumab Fab and the Fc region of IgE (IgE-Fc), to understand the structural basis for its mechanism of action, surprisingly failed. Instead, the Fab alone selectively crystallized in different crystal forms, but their structures revealed intermolecular Fab/Fab interactions that were clearly strong enough to disrupt the Fab/IgE-Fc complexes. Some of these interactions were common to other Fab crystal structures. Mutations were therefore designed to disrupt two recurring packing interactions observed in the omalizumab Fab crystal structures without interfering with the ability of the omalizumab Fab to recognize IgE-Fc; this led to the successful crystallization and subsequent structure determination of the Fab/IgE-Fc complex. The mutagenesis strategy adopted to achieve this result is applicable to other intractable Fab/antigen complexes or systems in which Fabs are used as crystallization chaperones
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