Utilizing Machine Learning Techniques to Predict the Efficacy of Aerobic Exercise Intervention on Young Hypertensive Patients Based on Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing.

Recently, the incidence of hypertension has significantly increased among young adults. While aerobic exercise intervention (AEI) has long been recognized as an effective treatment, individual differences in response to AEI can seriously influence clinicians' decisions. In particular, only a few studies have been conducted to predict the efficacy of AEI on lowering blood pressure (BP) in young hypertensive patients. As such, this paper aims to explore the implications of various cardiopulmonary metabolic indicators in the field by mining patients' cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) data before making treatment plans. CPET data are collected "breath by breath" by using an oxygenation analyzer attached to a mask and then divided into four phases: resting, warm-up, exercise, and recovery. To mitigate the effects of redundant information and noise in the CPET data, a sparse representation classifier based on analytic dictionary learning was designed to accurately predict the individual responsiveness to AEI. Importantly, the experimental results showed that the model presented herein performed better than the baseline method based on BP change and traditional machine learning models. Furthermore, the data from the exercise phase were found to produce the best predictions compared with the data from other phases. This study paves the way towards the customization of personalized aerobic exercise programs for young hypertensive patients.

Effective Removal of Noisy Data Via Batch Effect Processing.

In order to have faith in the analysis of data, a key factor is to have confidence that the data is reliable. In the case of microRNA, reliability includes understanding the collection methods, ensuring that the analysis is appropriate, and ensuring that the data itself is accurate. A key element in ensuring data accuracy is the removal of noise. While there can be several sources of noise, a common source of noise is the batch effect, which can be defined as systematic variability in the data caused by non-biological factors. This chapter will present various techniques designed to remove variability caused by batch effects and the potential effectiveness.

Machine Learning Techniques in Exploring MicroRNA Gene Discovery, Targets, and Functions.

In recent years, the role of miRNAs in post-transcriptional gene regulation has provided new insights into the understanding of several types of cancers and neurological disorders. Although miRNA research has gathered great momentum since its discovery, traditional biological methods for finding miRNA genes and targets continue to remain a huge challenge due to the laborious tasks and extensive time involved. Fortunately, advances in computational methods have yielded considerable improvements in miRNA studies. This literature review briefly discusses recent machine learning-based techniques applied in the discovery of miRNAs, prediction of miRNA targets, and inference of miRNA functions. We also discuss the limitations of how these approaches have been elucidated in previous studies.

Exploiting multi-layered vector spaces for signal peptide detection.

Analysing and classifying sequences based on similarities and differences is a mathematical problem of escalating relevance and importance in many scientific disciplines. One of the primary challenges in applying machine learning algorithms to sequential data, such as biological sequences, is the extraction and representation of significant features from the data. To address this problem, we have recently developed a representation, entitled Multi-Layered Vector Spaces (MLVS), which is a simple mathematical model that maps sequences into a set of MLVS. We demonstrate the usefulness of the model by applying it to the problem of identifying signal peptides. MLVS feature vectors are generated from a collection of protein sequences and the resulting vectors are used to create support vector machine classifiers. Experiments show that the MLVS-based classifiers are able to outperform or perform on par with several existing methods that are specifically designed for the purpose of identifying signal peptides.

Exploitation of 3D stereotactic surface projection for predictive modelling of Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is one major cause of dementia. Previous studies have indicated that the use of features derived from Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans lead to more accurate and earlier diagnosis of AD, compared to the traditional approaches that use a combination of clinical assessments. In this study, we compare Naive Bayes (NB) with variations of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) for the automatic diagnosis of AD. 3D Stereotactic Surface Projection (3D-SSP) is utilised to extract features from PET scans. At the most detailed level, the dimensionality of the feature space is very high. Hence we evaluate the benefits of a correlation-based feature selection method to find a small number of highly relevant features; we also provide an analysis of selected features, which is generally supportive of the literature. However, we have also encountered patterns that may be new and relevant to prediction of the progression of AD.