Active learning of molecular data for task-specific objectives.

Active learning (AL) has shown promise to be a particularly data-efficient machine learning approach. Yet, its performance depends on the application, and it is not clear when AL practitioners can expect computational savings. Here, we carry out a systematic AL performance assessment for three diverse molecular datasets and two common scientific tasks: compiling compact, informative datasets and targeted molecular searches.

Bird tolerance to humans in open tropical ecosystems.

Animal tolerance towards humans can be a key factor facilitating wildlife-human coexistence, yet traits predicting its direction and magnitude across tropical animals are poorly known. Using 10,249 observations for 842 bird species inhabiting open tropical ecosystems in Africa, South America, and Australia, we find that avian tolerance towards humans was lower (i.e.

Atlas of type 2 dopamine receptors in the human brain: Age and sex dependent variability in a large PET cohort.

Background: The dopamine system contributes to a multitude of functions ranging from reward and motivation to learning and movement control, making it a key component in goal-directed behavior. Altered dopaminergic function is observed in neurological and psychiatric conditions. Numerous factors have been proposed to influence dopamine function, but due to small sample sizes and heterogeneous data analysis methods in previous studies their specific and joint contributions remain unresolved.

Probabilistic outlier identification for RNA sequencing generalized linear models.

Relative transcript abundance has proven to be a valuable tool for understanding the function of genes in biological systems. For the differential analysis of transcript abundance using RNA sequencing data, the negative binomial model is by far the most frequently adopted. However, common methods that are based on a negative binomial model are not robust to extreme outliers, which we found to be abundant in public datasets.

Qualifying drug dosing regimens in pediatrics using Gaussian processes.

Drug development commonly studies an adult population first and then the pediatric population. The knowledge from the adult population is taken advantage of for the design of the pediatric trials. Adjusted drug doses for these are often derived from adult pharmacokinetic (PK) models which are extrapolated to patients with smaller body size.