Related papers: A Phylogeny-based Test of Mediation Effect in Micr…

Mediation analysis allows one to use observational data to estimate the importance of each potential mediating pathway involved in the causal effect of an exposure on an outcome. However, current approaches to mediation analysis with…

Co-evolution is a powerful problem-solving approach. However, fitness evaluation in co-evolutionary algorithms can be computationally expensive, as the quality of an individual in one population is defined by its interactions with many (or…

Dormancy is an essential strategy for microorganisms to cope with environmental stress. However, global ecosystem models typically ignore microbial dormancy, resulting in major model uncertainties. To facilitate the consideration of…

A number of methods have been developed to infer differential rates of species diversification through time and among clades using time-calibrated phylogenetic trees. However, we lack a general framework that can delineate and quantify…

The bacterial microbiome is increasingly being recognised as a key factor in human health, driven in large part by datasets collected using 16S rRNA (ribosomal ribonucleic acid) gene sequencing, which enable cost-effective quantification of…

Causal mediation analysis seeks to investigate how the treatment effect of an exposure on outcomes is mediated through intermediate variables. Although many applications involve longitudinal data, the existing methods are not directly…

A phylogenetic tree shows the evolutionary relationships among species. Internal nodes of the tree represent speciation events and leaf nodes correspond to species. A goal of phylogenetics is to combine such trees into larger trees, called…

Identifying and understanding the large-scale biodiversity patterns in time and space is vital for conservation and addressing fundamental ecological and evolutionary questions. Network-based methods have proven useful for simplifying and…

Many epidemiological questions concern potential interventions to alter the pathways presumed to mediate an association. For example, we consider a study that investigates the benefit of interventions in young adulthood for ameliorating the…

Missing or corrupted modalities are common in physiological signal-based medical applications owing to hardware constraints or motion artifacts. However, most existing methods assume the availability of all modalities, resulting in…

The phenotype of any organism on earth is, in large part, the consequence of interplay between numerous gene products encoded in the genome, and such interplay between gene products affects the evolutionary fate of the genome itself through…

It is generally accepted that "diversity" is associated with success in evolutionary algorithms. However, diversity is a broad concept that can be measured and defined in a multitude of ways. To date, most evolutionary computation research…

Phylogenetic networks are necessary to represent the tree of life expanded by edges to represent events such as horizontal gene transfers, hybridizations or gene flow. Not all species follow the paradigm of vertical inheritance of their…

Natural experiments are a cornerstone of applied economics, providing settings for estimating causal effects with a compelling argument for treatment randomisation, but give little indication of the mechanisms behind causal effects. Causal…

The model organism Physarum polycephalum is known to perform decentralised problem solving despite absence of nervous system. Experimental evidence and modelling studies have linked these abilities, and in particular maze-solving, to some…

Living tissues experience various external forces on cells, influencing their behaviour, physiology, shape, gene expression, and destiny through interactions with their environment. Despite much research done in this area, challenges remain…

In the genomic era, the identification of gene signatures associated with disease is of significant interest. Such signatures are often used to predict clinical outcomes in new patients and aid clinical decision-making. However, recent…

Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of phylogenetic trees that are used to represent non-tree-like evolutionary histories that arise in organisms such as plants and bacteria, or uncertainty in evolutionary histories. An…

Current advances in next generation sequencing techniques have allowed researchers to conduct comprehensive research on microbiome and human diseases, with recent studies identifying associations between human microbiome and health outcomes…

The present paper proposes a novel method of quantification of the variation in biofilm architecture, in correlation with the alteration of growth conditions that include, variations of substrate and conditioning layer. The polymeric…