11 research outputs found
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
Recent Advances and New Perspectives in Surgery of Renal Cell Carcinoma
Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is one of the most common types of cancer in the urogenital system. For localized renal cell carcinoma, nephron-sparing surgery (NSS) is becoming the optimal choice because of its advantage in preserving renal function. Traditionally, partial nephrectomy is performed with renal pedicle clamping to decrease blood loss. Furthermore, both renal pedicle clamping and the subsequent warm renal ischemia time affect renal function and increase the risk of postoperative renal failure. More recently, there has also been increasing interest in creating surgical methods to meet the requirements of nephron preservation and shorten the renal warm ischemia time including assisted or unassisted zero-ischemia surgery. As artificial intelligence increasingly integrates with surgery, the three-dimensional visualization technology of renal vasculature is applied in the NSS to guide surgeons. In addition, the renal carcinoma complexity scoring system is also constantly updated to guide clinicians in the selection of appropriate treatments for patients individually. In this article, we provide an overview of recent advances and new perspectives in NSS
Sparse Model Identification for High Dimensional Data.
In this thesis, several methods are proposed to construct sparse models in different situations with the special structures of group variable selection, partial correlation estimation and transcript regulation network construction. Traditional variable selection methods do not consider the special structures or cannot directly be applied to these situations. The methods proposed in this thesis are extensions and improvements of the Lasso method done by considering the special structures of different problems. These methods can be applied to high-dimensional data where the number of parameters are much larger than the number of observations. Simulation studies and real data analysis showed that these methods performed favorably, compared with some other recently developed models.Ph.D.StatisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/63691/1/nfzhou_1.pd