Surgery Duration Prediction Using Multi-Task Feature Selection.

Efficient optimization of operating room (OR) activity poses a significant challenge for hospital managers due to the complex and risky nature of the environment. The traditional "one size fits all" approach to OR scheduling is no longer practical, and personalized medicine is required to meet the diverse needs of patients, care providers, medical procedures, and system constraints within limited resources. This paper aims to introduce a scientific and practical tool for predicting surgery durations and improving OR performance for maximum benefit to patients and the hospital.

Best Invariant and Minimax Estimation of Quantiles in Finite Populations.

The theoretical literature on quantile and distribution function estimation in infinite populations is very rich, and invariance plays an important role in these studies. This is not the case for the commonly occurring problem of estimation of quantiles in finite populations. The latter is more complicated and interesting because an optimal strategy consists not only of an estimator, but also of a sampling design, and the estimator may depend on the design and on the labels of sampled individuals, whereas in iid sampling, design issues and labels do not exist.

Pervasive adaptive protein evolution apparent in diversity patterns around amino acid substitutions in Drosophila simulans.

In Drosophila, multiple lines of evidence converge in suggesting that beneficial substitutions to the genome may be common. All suffer from confounding factors, however, such that the interpretation of the evidence-in particular, conclusions about the rate and strength of beneficial substitutions-remains tentative. Here, we use genome-wide polymorphism data in D.

Shifts in the intensity of purifying selection: an analysis of genome-wide polymorphism data from two closely related yeast species.

How much does the intensity of purifying selection vary among populations and species? How uniform are the shifts in selective pressures across the genome? To address these questions, we took advantage of a recent, whole-genome polymorphism data set from two closely related species of yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and S. paradoxus, paying close attention to the population structure within these species. We found that the average intensity of purifying selection on amino acid sites varies markedly among populations and between species.