A Bayesian Approach to Discovering Truth from Conflicting Sources for Data Integration

In practical data integration systems, it is common for the data sources being integrated to provide conflicting information about the same entity. Consequently, a major challenge for data integration is to derive the most complete and accurate integrated records from diverse and sometimes conflicting sources. We term this challenge the truth finding problem. We observe that some sources are generally more reliable than others, and therefore a good model of source quality is the key to solving the truth finding problem. In this work, we propose a probabilistic graphical model that can automatically infer true records and source quality without any supervision. In contrast to previous methods, our principled approach leverages a generative process of two types of errors (false positive and false negative) by modeling two different aspects of source quality. In so doing, ours is also the first approach designed to merge multi-valued attribute types. Our method is scalable, due to an efficient sampling-based inference algorithm that needs very few iterations in practice and enjoys linear time complexity, with an even faster incremental variant. Experiments on two real world datasets show that our new method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches to the truth finding problem.Comment: VLDB201

Will the Scottish Cancer Target for the year 2000 be met? The use of cancer registration and death records to predict future cancer incidence and mortality in Scotland.

Cancer mortality data reflect disease incidence and the effectiveness of treatment. Incidence data, however, reflect the burden of disease in the population and indicate the need for prevention measures, diagnostic services and cancer treatment facilities. Monitoring of targets mandates that both be considered. The Scottish Cancer Target, established in 1991, proposed that a reduction of 15% in mortality from cancer in the under-65s should be achieved between 1986 and 2000. Each year in Scotland approximately 8300 persons under 65 are diagnosed with cancer and 4500 die from the disease. The most common malignancies, in terms of both incident cases and deaths, in the under-65s, are lung and large bowel cancer in males, and breast, large bowel and lung cancer in females. A decrease of 6% in the number of cancer cases diagnosed in males under 65 is predicted between 1986 and 2000, whereas the number of cases in females in the year 2000 is expected to remain at the 1986 level. In contrast, substantial reductions in mortality are expected for both sexes: 17% and 25% in males and females respectively. Demographic changes will influence the numbers of cancer cases and deaths in the Scottish population in the year 2000. However, long-term trends in the major risk factors, such as smoking, are likely to be the most important determinants of the future cancer burden

Nonlinear interaction of charged particles with a free electron gas beyond the random-phase approximation

A nonlinear description of the interaction of charged particles penetrating a solid has become of basic importance in the interpretation of a variety of physical phenomena. Here we develop a many-body theoretical approach to the quadratic decay rate, energy loss, and wake potential of charged particles moving in an interacting free electron gas. Explicit expressions for these quantities are obtained either within the random-phase approximation (RPA) or with full inclusion of short-range exchange and correlation effects. The Z^3 correction to the energy loss of ions is evaluated beyond RPA, in the limit of low velocities.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures To appear in Phys. Rev.

COX-1 and COX-2 in Human Periodontal Disease States

Cyclooxygenase (COX) catalyses the conversion of arachidonic acid into prostanoids and related compounds which have been implicated in periodontal bone loss. Therefore, the aim of this study was to quantify COX-1 and COX-2 expression in gingival tissue derived from healthy/gingivitis and periodontitis sites

A miniaturized 4 K platform for superconducting infrared photon counting detectors

We report on a miniaturized platform for superconducting infrared photon counting detectors. We have implemented a fibre-coupled superconducting nanowire single photon detector in a Stirling/Joule–Thomson platform with a base temperature of 4.2 K. We have verified a cooling power of 4 mW at 4.7 K. We report 20% system detection efficiency at 1310 nm wavelength at a dark count rate of 1 kHz. We have carried out compelling application demonstrations in single photon depth metrology and singlet oxygen luminescence detection

The association of cold weather and all-cause and cause-specific mortality in the island of Ireland between 1984 and 2007

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background This study aimed to assess the relationship between cold temperature and daily mortality in the Republic of Ireland (ROI) and Northern Ireland (NI), and to explore any differences in the population responses between the two jurisdictions. Methods A time-stratified case-crossover approach was used to examine this relationship in two adult national populations, between 1984 and 2007. Daily mortality risk was examined in association with exposure to daily maximum temperatures on the same day and up to 6 weeks preceding death, during the winter (December-February) and cold period (October-March), using distributed lag models. Model stratification by age and gender assessed for modification of the cold weather-mortality relationship. Results In the ROI, the impact of cold weather in winter persisted up to 35 days, with a cumulative mortality increase for all-causes of 6.4% (95%CI=4.8%-7.9%) in relation to every 1oC drop in daily maximum temperature, similar increases for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and stroke, and twice as much for respiratory causes. In NI, these associations were less pronounced for CVD causes, and overall extended up to 28 days. Effects of cold weather on mortality increased with age in both jurisdictions, and some suggestive gender differences were observed. Conclusions The study findings indicated strong cold weather-mortality associations in the island of Ireland; these effects were less persistent, and for CVD mortality, smaller in NI than in the ROI. Together with suggestive differences in associations by age and gender between the two Irish jurisdictions, the findings suggest potential contribution of underlying societal differences, and require further exploration. The evidence provided here will hope to contribute to the current efforts to modify fuel policy and reduce winter mortality in Ireland

Semantic contextualisation of social tag-based profiles and item recommendations

Proceedigns of 12th International Conference, EC-Web 2011, Toulouse, France, August 30 - September 1, 2011.The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23014-1_9We present an approach that efficiently identifies the semantic meanings and contexts of social tags within a particular folksonomy, and exploits them to build contextualised tag-based user and item profiles. We apply our approach to a dataset obtained from Delicious social bookmarking system, and evaluate it through two experiments: a user study consisting of manual judgements of tag disambiguation and contextualisation cases, and an offline study measuring the performance of several tag-powered item recommendation algorithms by using contextualised profiles. The results obtained show that our approach is able to accurately determine the actual semantic meanings and contexts of tag annotations, and allow item recommenders to achieve better precision and recall on their predictions.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (TIN2008-06566-C04-02), and the Community of Madrid (CCG10- UAM/TIC-5877

Single hadron response measurement and calorimeter jet energy scale uncertainty with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

The uncertainty on the calorimeter energy response to jets of particles is derived for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). First, the calorimeter response to single isolated charged hadrons is measured and compared to the Monte Carlo simulation using proton-proton collisions at centre-of-mass energies of sqrt(s) = 900 GeV and 7 TeV collected during 2009 and 2010. Then, using the decay of K_s and Lambda particles, the calorimeter response to specific types of particles (positively and negatively charged pions, protons, and anti-protons) is measured and compared to the Monte Carlo predictions. Finally, the jet energy scale uncertainty is determined by propagating the response uncertainty for single charged and neutral particles to jets. The response uncertainty is 2-5% for central isolated hadrons and 1-3% for the final calorimeter jet energy scale.Comment: 24 pages plus author list (36 pages total), 23 figures, 1 table, submitted to European Physical Journal