2,631 research outputs found
Recently published papers: An ancient debate, novel monitors and post ICU outcome in the elderly
Tracheostomies have been around for close to 3000 years, so one would hope that the controversies might have been thrashed out by now, but apparently not. Judging by some recent publications it would appear that we still do not know when or how to insert them. Monitoring is fundamental to critical care; two papers describe novel/modified techniques for assessing traumatic brain injury and cardiac output. The intensive care unit imposes a heavy treatment burden, particularly on the elderly. What impact does this have on the lives of the survivors
Improved variable selection with Forward-Lasso adaptive shrinkage
Recently, considerable interest has focused on variable selection methods in
regression situations where the number of predictors, , is large relative to
the number of observations, . Two commonly applied variable selection
approaches are the Lasso, which computes highly shrunk regression coefficients,
and Forward Selection, which uses no shrinkage. We propose a new approach,
"Forward-Lasso Adaptive SHrinkage" (FLASH), which includes the Lasso and
Forward Selection as special cases, and can be used in both the linear
regression and the Generalized Linear Model domains. As with the Lasso and
Forward Selection, FLASH iteratively adds one variable to the model in a
hierarchical fashion but, unlike these methods, at each step adjusts the level
of shrinkage so as to optimize the selection of the next variable. We first
present FLASH in the linear regression setting and show that it can be fitted
using a variant of the computationally efficient LARS algorithm. Then, we
extend FLASH to the GLM domain and demonstrate, through numerous simulations
and real world data sets, as well as some theoretical analysis, that FLASH
generally outperforms many competing approaches.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS375 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Can the whole life cost of railway track be reduced through the effective management of tangential wheel-rail loading?
Imperial Users onl
Functional linear regression that's interpretable
Regression models to relate a scalar to a functional predictor are
becoming increasingly common. Work in this area has concentrated on estimating
a coefficient function, , with related to through
. Regions where correspond to places where
there is a relationship between and . Alternatively, points where
indicate no relationship. Hence, for interpretation purposes, it
is desirable for a regression procedure to be capable of producing estimates of
that are exactly zero over regions with no apparent relationship and
have simple structures over the remaining regions. Unfortunately, most fitting
procedures result in an estimate for that is rarely exactly zero and
has unnatural wiggles making the curve hard to interpret. In this article we
introduce a new approach which uses variable selection ideas, applied to
various derivatives of , to produce estimates that are both
interpretable, flexible and accurate. We call our method "Functional Linear
Regression That's Interpretable" (FLiRTI) and demonstrate it on simulated and
real-world data sets. In addition, non-asymptotic theoretical bounds on the
estimation error are presented. The bounds provide strong theoretical
motivation for our approach.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-AOS641 the Annals of
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Recommended from our members
MAZI Deliverable Report D2.5: â Design, progress and evaluation of the Deptford CreekNet pilot (version 2)
In this deliverable, the second in a series of three, we report on progress in the Creeknet pilot. We describe progress towards tasks identified in the Description of Work (DoW) for Task 2.2, focusing on activities in Year 2 (2017: months 13-24) and look forward to Year 3. The Creeknet pilot consists of four phases. This year, our focus has been on consolidating initial contacts made in Year 1 (Phase 1), and continuing community engagement activities alongside carrying out an initial deployment of the MAZI toolkit with a number of engaged community groups and individuals (Phase 2). In the second half of the year, as the toolkit was developed and an integrated set of tool established these groups and others were invited to engage in further trials, and feedback was gathered to further inform onward development (Phase 3). We have continued with our efforts to build upon existing relationships in Deptford Creek and further afield to help us explore the different ways in which DIY networking in the broadest sense and the use of the MAZI toolkit in particular might help address local challenges. We have reassessed some of our foci through seeking out new opportunities for engagement and trialling the MAZI toolkit. A major activity was planning and running the two day MAZI London Cross-fertilisation symposium. This created the opportunity for Creeknet participants to share their experiences and engage with the other MAZI pilots, bringing together existing community contacts in Deptford Creek, and MAZI partners, and attracted new contributors. Through our activities, working with the emerging MAZI toolkit that evolved through several iterations during the year, we have better understood local circumstances and the complexity involved in the conceptualisation of âDIY networkingâ - it cannot be assumed to be a single notion. We have identified that both social and technological concerns can restrict its uptake, and consider routes to overcoming these challenges. We provide analysis of work carried out so far, and look towards the future activities
Sparse regulatory networks
In many organisms the expression levels of each gene are controlled by the
activation levels of known "Transcription Factors" (TF). A problem of
considerable interest is that of estimating the "Transcription Regulation
Networks" (TRN) relating the TFs and genes. While the expression levels of
genes can be observed, the activation levels of the corresponding TFs are
usually unknown, greatly increasing the difficulty of the problem. Based on
previous experimental work, it is often the case that partial information about
the TRN is available. For example, certain TFs may be known to regulate a given
gene or in other cases a connection may be predicted with a certain
probability. In general, the biology of the problem indicates there will be
very few connections between TFs and genes. Several methods have been proposed
for estimating TRNs. However, they all suffer from problems such as unrealistic
assumptions about prior knowledge of the network structure or computational
limitations. We propose a new approach that can directly utilize prior
information about the network structure in conjunction with observed gene
expression data to estimate the TRN. Our approach uses penalties on the
network to ensure a sparse structure. This has the advantage of being
computationally efficient as well as making many fewer assumptions about the
network structure. We use our methodology to construct the TRN for E. coli and
show that the estimate is biologically sensible and compares favorably with
previous estimates.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS350 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Multimedia retrieval in MultiMatch: The impact of speech transcript errors on search behaviour
This study discusses the findings of an evaluation study on the performance of a multimedia multimodal information access sub-system (MIAS), incorporating automatic speech recognition technology (ASR) to automatically transcribe the speech content of video soundtracks. The studyâs results indicate that an information-rich but minimalist graphical interface is preferred. It was also discovered that users tend to have a misplaced confidence in the accuracy of ASR-generated speech transcripts, thus they are not inclined to conduct a systematic auditory inspection (their usual search behaviour) of a videoâs soundtrack if the query term does not appear in the transcript. In order to alert the user to the possibility that a search term may be incorrectly recognised as some other word, a matching algorithm is proposed that searches for word sequences of similar phonemic structure to the query term
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