An ensemble learning framework for potential miRNA-disease association prediction with positive-unlabeled data

To explore the pathogenic mechanisms of MicroRNA (miRNA) on diverse diseases, many researchers have concentrated on discovering the potential associations between miRNA and disease using machine learning methods. However, the prediction accuracy of supervised machine learning methods is limited by lacking of experimentally-validated uncorrelated miRNA-disease pairs. Without these negative samples, training a highly accurate model is much more difficult. Different from traditional miRNA-disease prediction models using randomly selected unknown samples as negative training samples, we propose an ensemble learning framework to solve this positive-unlabeled (PU) learning problem. The framework incorporates two steps, i.e., a novel semi-supervised Kmeans (SS-Kmeans) to extract reliable negative samples from unknown miRNA-disease pairs and subagging method to generate diverse training sample sets to make full use of those reliable negative samples for ensemble learning. Combined with effective random vector functional link (RVFL) network as prediction model, the proposed framework showed superior prediction accuracy comparing with other popular approaches. A case study on lung and gastric neoplasms further confirms the framework’s efficacy at identifying miRNA disease associations.     

Structural and immunogenicity analysis of reconstructed ancestral and consensus P48/45 for cross-species anti malaria transmission-blocking vaccine

The development of the anti-malaria vaccine holds a promising future in malaria control. One of the anti-malaria vaccine strategies known as the transmission-blocking vaccine (TBV) is to inhibit the parasite transmission between humans and mosquitoes by targeting the parasite gametocyte. Previously, we found that P48/45 included in the 6-Cysteine protein family shared by Plasmodium sp. We also detected vaccine properties possessed by all human-infecting Plasmodium and could be used as a cross-species anti-malaria vaccine. In this study, we investigated the efficacy of P48/45 through the ancestral and consensus reconstruction approach. P48/45 phylogenetic and time tree analysis was done by RAXML and BEAST2. GRASP server and Ugene software were used to reconstruct ancestral and consensus sequences, respectively. The protein structural prediction was made by using a psipred and Rosetta program. Each protein characteristic of P48/45 was analyzed by assessing hydrophobicity and Post-Translational Modification sites. Meanwhile, the Epitope sequence for B-cell, T-cell, and HLA was determined using an immunoinformatics approach. Lastly, molecular docking simulation was done to determine native binding interactions of P48/45-P230. The result showed a distinct protein characteristic of ancestral and consensus sequences. The immunogenicity analysis revealed the number of epitopes in the ancestral sequence is greater than the consensus sequence. The study also found a conserved epitope located in the binding site and consists of specific Post-Translational Modification sites. Hence, our research provides detailed insight into ancestral and consensus P48/45 efficacy for the cross-species anti-malaria vaccine.     

Dynamic stress intensity factor for cracked functionally graded orthotropic medium under time-harmonic loading

Dynamic stress intensity factor for a Griffith crack in functionally graded orthotropic materials under time-harmonic loading is investigated in the present paper. By using the Fourier transform and defining the jumps of displacement components across the crack surface as the unknown functions, two pairs of dual integral equations are derived. To solve the dual integral equations, the jumps of the displacement components across the crack surface are expanded in a series of Jacobi polynomial. Numerical examples are provided to show the effects of material properties and the crack configuration on the dynamic stress intensity factors of the functionally graded orthotropic materials with a Griffith crack.     

Horizon structure of rotating Bardeen black hole and particle acceleration

We investigate the horizon structure and ergosphere in a rotating Bardeen regular black hole, which has an additional parameter (g) due to the magnetic charge, apart from the mass (M) and the rotation parameter (a). Interestingly, for each value of the parameter g, there exists a critical rotation parameter (\(a=a_{E}\)), which corresponds to an extremal black hole with degenerate horizons, while for \(a<a_{E}\) it describes a non-extremal black hole with two horizons, and no black hole for \(a>a_{E}\). We find that the extremal value \(a_E\) is also influenced by the parameter g, and so is the ergosphere. While the value of \(a_E\) remarkably decreases when compared with the Kerr black hole, the ergosphere becomes thicker with the increase in g. We also study the collision of two equal mass particles near the horizon of this black hole, and explicitly show the effect of the parameter g. The center-of-mass energy (\(E_\mathrm{CM}\)) not only depend on the rotation parameter a, but also on the parameter g. It is demonstrated that the \(E_\mathrm{CM}\) could be arbitrarily high in the extremal cases when one of the colliding particles has a critical angular momentum, thereby suggesting that the rotating Bardeen regular black hole can act as a particle accelerator.     

Equal shadow wealth: A new concept of fairness in exchange economies

In this paper I introduce a new notion of fairness in exchange economies as well as a measure of unfairness. First, I consider the benchmark case in which agents have identical preferences, and I then extend the framework to allow for heterogeneous tastes. In both cases, I identify an appropriate egalitarian benchmark which requires that a numeraire commodity be distributed in such a way so as to offset differences in the holdings of other commodities. Inequality is then measured as the deviation between the actual distribution of the numeraire and such an ideal distribution. This renders a complete social ordering. Next, I contrast this notion of equal shadow wealth with the notion of no-envy (Foley, 1967) and with the envy-intensity measures proposed by Chaudhuri (1986) and Diamantaras and Thomson (1990). I also investigate conditions which ensure the existence of equitable and efficient allocations. The concepts developed here may be generalizable to a wide range of environments including economies with externalities and indivisible goods as well as relatively unstructured environments such as those involving abstract opportunity sets. In addition, this approach offers a simple method to measure multidimensional inequality.     

On the concept and existence of solutions for fractional impulsive systems with Hadamard derivatives

In this paper, a class of nonlinear fractional order differential impulsive systems with Hadamard derivative is discussed. First, a reasonable concept on the solutions of fractional impulsive Cauchy problems with Hadamard derivative and the corresponding fractional integral equations are established. Second, two fundamental existence results are presented by using standard fixed point methods. Finally, two examples are given to illustrate our theoretical results.     

Explicit iteration and unbounded solutions for fractional integral boundary value problem on an infinite interval

By employing the monotone iterative technique, we not only establish the existence of the unique solution for a fractional integral boundary value problem on semi-infinite intervals, but also develop an explicit iterative sequence for approximating the solution and give an error estimate for the approximation, which is an important improvement of existing results.