A benchmark generator for dynamic multi-objective optimization problems

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Many real-world optimization problems appear to not only have multiple objectives that conflict each other but also change over time. They are dynamic multi-objective optimization problems (DMOPs) and the corresponding field is called dynamic multi-objective optimization (DMO), which has gained growing attention in recent years. However, one main issue in the field of DMO is that there is no standard test suite to determine whether an algorithm is capable of solving them. This paper presents a new benchmark generator for DMOPs that can generate several complicated characteristics, including mixed Pareto-optimal front (convexity-concavity), strong dependencies between variables, and a mixed type of change, which are rarely tested in the literature. Experiments are conducted to compare the performance of five state-of-the-art DMO algorithms on several typical test functions derived from the proposed generator, which gives a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these tested algorithms for DMOPs

A pathway analysis of genome-wide association study highlights novel type 2 diabetes risk pathways.

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been widely used to identify common type 2 diabetes (T2D) variants. However, the known variants just explain less than 20% of the overall estimated genetic contribution to T2D. Pathway-based methods have been applied into T2D GWAS datasets to investigate the biological mechanisms and reported some novel T2D risk pathways. However, few pathways were shared in these studies. Here, we performed a pathway analysis using the summary results from a large-scale meta-analysis of T2D GWAS to investigate more genetic signals in T2D. Here, we selected PLNK and VEGAS to perform the gene-based test and WebGestalt to perform the pathway-based test. We identified 8 shared KEGG pathways after correction for multiple tests in both methods. We confirm previous findings, and highlight some new T2D risk pathways. We believe that our results may be helpful to study the genetic mechanisms of T2D