Characteristics of contemporary drug clinical trials regarding the treatment of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis.

Background: Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), a chronic liver disease, has no United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved drugs for treatment.

Objectives: To examine fundamental characteristics of drug clinical trials for NASH treatment on the global clinical trials registry platform.

Methods: Cross-sectional analysis of clinical trials with NASH as medical condition that are registered on ClinicalTrials.

Minimax Estimation of Functionals of Discrete Distributions.

We propose a general methodology for the construction and analysis of essentially minimax estimators for a wide class of functionals of finite dimensional parameters, and elaborate on the case of discrete distributions, where the support size is unknown and may be comparable with or even much larger than the number of observations . We treat the respective regions where the functional is nonsmooth and smooth separately. In the nonsmooth regime, we apply an unbiased estimator for the best polynomial approximation of the functional whereas, in the smooth regime, we apply a bias-corrected version of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE).

CaMoDi: a new method for cancer module discovery.

Background: Identification of genomic patterns in tumors is an important problem, which would enable the community to understand and extend effective therapies across the current tissue-based tumor boundaries. With this in mind, in this work we develop a robust and fast algorithm to discover cancer driver genes using an unsupervised clustering of similarly expressed genes across cancer patients. Specifically, we introduce CaMoDi, a new method for module discovery which demonstrates superior performance across a number of computational and statistical metrics.