scholarly journals Local mortality estimates during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy

Author(s):  
Augusto Cerqua ◽  
Roberta Di Stefano ◽  
Marco Letta ◽  
Sara Miccoli

AbstractEstimates of the real death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic have proven to be problematic in many countries, Italy being no exception. Mortality estimates at the local level are even more uncertain as they require stringent conditions, such as granularity and accuracy of the data at hand, which are rarely met. The “official” approach adopted by public institutions to estimate the “excess mortality” during the pandemic draws on a comparison between observed all-cause mortality data for 2020 and averages of mortality figures in the past years for the same period. In this paper, we apply the recently developed machine learning control method to build a more realistic counterfactual scenario of mortality in the absence of COVID-19. We demonstrate that supervised machine learning techniques outperform the official method by substantially improving the prediction accuracy of the local mortality in “ordinary” years, especially in small- and medium-sized municipalities. We then apply the best-performing algorithms to derive estimates of local excess mortality for the period between February and September 2020. Such estimates allow us to provide insights about the demographic evolution of the first wave of the pandemic throughout the country. To help improve diagnostic and monitoring efforts, our dataset is freely available to the research community.

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela Bitencourt-Ferreira ◽  
Amauri Duarte da Silva ◽  
Walter Filgueira de Azevedo

Background: The elucidation of the structure of cyclin-dependent kinase 2 (CDK2) made it possible to develop targeted scoring functions for virtual screening aimed to identify new inhibitors for this enzyme. CDK2 is a protein target for the development of drugs intended to modulate cellcycle progression and control. Such drugs have potential anticancer activities. Objective: Our goal here is to review recent applications of machine learning methods to predict ligand- binding affinity for protein targets. To assess the predictive performance of classical scoring functions and targeted scoring functions, we focused our analysis on CDK2 structures. Methods: We have experimental structural data for hundreds of binary complexes of CDK2 with different ligands, many of them with inhibition constant information. We investigate here computational methods to calculate the binding affinity of CDK2 through classical scoring functions and machine- learning models. Results: Analysis of the predictive performance of classical scoring functions available in docking programs such as Molegro Virtual Docker, AutoDock4, and Autodock Vina indicated that these methods failed to predict binding affinity with significant correlation with experimental data. Targeted scoring functions developed through supervised machine learning techniques showed a significant correlation with experimental data. Conclusion: Here, we described the application of supervised machine learning techniques to generate a scoring function to predict binding affinity. Machine learning models showed superior predictive performance when compared with classical scoring functions. Analysis of the computational models obtained through machine learning could capture essential structural features responsible for binding affinity against CDK2.


Author(s):  
Linwei Hu ◽  
Jie Chen ◽  
Joel Vaughan ◽  
Soroush Aramideh ◽  
Hanyu Yang ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
M. M. Ata ◽  
K. M. Elgamily ◽  
M. A. Mohamed

The presented paper proposes an algorithm for palmprint recognition using seven different machine learning algorithms. First of all, we have proposed a region of interest (ROI) extraction methodology which is a two key points technique. Secondly, we have performed some image enhancement techniques such as edge detection and morphological operations in order to make the ROI image more suitable for the Hough transform. In addition, we have applied the Hough transform in order to extract all the possible principle lines on the ROI images. We have extracted the most salient morphological features of those lines; slope and length. Furthermore, we have applied the invariant moments algorithm in order to produce 7 appropriate hues of interest. Finally, after performing a complete hybrid feature vectors, we have applied different machine learning algorithms in order to recognize palmprints effectively. Recognition accuracy have been tested by calculating precision, sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, dice, Jaccard coefficients, correlation coefficients, and training time. Seven different supervised machine learning algorithms have been implemented and utilized. The effect of forming the proposed hybrid feature vectors between Hough transform and Invariant moment have been utilized and tested. Experimental results show that the feed forward neural network with back propagation has achieved about 99.99% recognition accuracy among all tested machine learning techniques.


Author(s):  
V Umarani ◽  
A Julian ◽  
J Deepa

Sentiment analysis has gained a lot of attention from researchers in the last year because it has been widely applied to a variety of application domains such as business, government, education, sports, tourism, biomedicine, and telecommunication services. Sentiment analysis is an automated computational method for studying or evaluating sentiments, feelings, and emotions expressed as comments, feedbacks, or critiques. The sentiment analysis process can be automated using machine learning techniques, which analyses text patterns faster. The supervised machine learning technique is the most used mechanism for sentiment analysis. The proposed work discusses the flow of sentiment analysis process and investigates the common supervised machine learning techniques such as multinomial naive bayes, Bernoulli naive bayes, logistic regression, support vector machine, random forest, K-nearest neighbor, decision tree, and deep learning techniques such as Long Short-Term Memory and Convolution Neural Network. The work examines such learning methods using standard data set and the experimental results of sentiment analysis demonstrate the performance of various classifiers taken in terms of the precision, recall, F1-score, RoC-Curve, accuracy, running time and k fold cross validation and helps in appreciating the novelty of the several deep learning techniques and also giving the user an overview of choosing the right technique for their application.


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