Recent advancement in the pattern recognition field stimulates enormous interest in Protein Fold Recognition (PFR). PFR is considered as a crucial step towards protein structure prediction and drug design. Despite all the recent achievements, the PFR still remains as an unsolved issue in biological science and its prediction accuracy still remains unsatisfactory. Furthermore, the impact of usin...

The field of Intelligent Transportation Systems has lately raised increasing interest due to it high socio-economic impact. This work aims on developing efficient techniques for traffic congestion prediction and visualisation. We have designed a simple, yet effective and scalable model to handle sparse data from GPS observations and reduce the problem of congestion prediction to a binary classi...

BACKGROUND Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is common, and associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease and end-stage renal disease, which are potentially preventable through early identification and treatment of individuals at risk. Although risk factors for occurrence and progression of CKD have been identified, their utility for CKD risk stratification through prediction models remai...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major cause of death and disability, especially in young adults. A reliable prediction of outcome after TBI is of great importance in clinical practice and research. We aimed to compare performance of the well-established IMPACT calculator and an alternative method, Disease State Index (DSI), in the prediction of six-month outcome after TBI. Performance of the ...

Siontis and colleagues’ conclusion that comparison of risk prediction models for cardiovascular disease “would benefit from standardised reporting and formal, consistent statistical comparisons” is only part of the story. The other urgent need is for feasibility and impact studies comparing the use of risk prediction models in real clinical practice: Can local computer systems handle the model?...

A simulation study was conducted to address the issue of how purely additive (simple) genetic architecture might impact on the efficacy of parametric and non-parametric genomic prediction methods. For this purpose, we simulated a trait with narrow sense heritability h2= 0.3, with only additive genetic effects for 300 loci in order to compare the predictive ability of 14 more practically used ge...

The phasic dopamine reward prediction error response is a major brain signal underlying learning, approach and decision making. This dopamine response consists of two components that reflect, initially, stimulus detection from physical impact and, subsequenttly, reward valuation; dopamine activations by punishers reflect physical impact rather than aversiveness. The dopamine reward signal is di...

The impact of radar and Oklahoma Mesonet data assimilation on the prediction of mesovortices in a tornadic mesoscale convective system (MCS) is examined. The radar data come from the operational Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) and the Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere’s (CASA) IP-1 radar network. The Advanced Regional Prediction S...

From the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer (VCPOL) held in 1985 to the joint United Nations Convention of Climate Change held in 2010, environmental protection has become increasingly urgent. In 2011, the International Standards Organization launched a new energy management system ISO50001 for improving energy efficiency. As an adjunct to these increasingly stringent inter...