* Department of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Nizwa, P. O. Box 33, PC 616, Birkat Al Mouz, Oman e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] ** Department of Statistics, St. Anthony’s College, Shillong, Meghalaya, India e-mail: [email protected]

Moment closure approximations are used to provide analytic approximations to non-linear stochastic population models. They often provide insights into model behaviour and help validate simulation results. However, existing closure schemes typically fail in situations where the population distribution is highly skewed or extinctions occur. In this study we address these problems by introducing n...

RNA interference screening using pooled, short hairpin RNA (shRNA) is a powerful, high-throughput tool for determining the biological relevance of genes for a phenotype. Assessing an shRNA pooled screen's performance is difficult in practice; one can estimate the performance only by using reproducibility as a proxy for power or by employing a large number of validated positive and negative cont...

BACKGROUND Airway microbiota dynamics during lower respiratory infection (LRI) are still poorly understood due, in part, to insufficient longitudinal studies and lack of uncontaminated lower airways samples. Furthermore, the similarity between upper and lower airway microbiomes is still under debate. Here we compare the diversity and temporal dynamics of microbiotas directly sampled from the tr...

1. We investigated the relationships of seed size, dispersal mode and other species characteristics to interspecific variation in mean primary seed dispersal distances, mean annual seed production per unit basal area, and clumping of seed deposition among 41 tropical tree species on Barro Colorado Island, Panama. 2. A hierarchical Bayesian model incorporating interannual variation in seed produ...

On the basis of a recently introduced generalization of the negative binomial distribution the influence of higher-order perturbative QCD effects on multiplicity fluctuations are studied for deep inelastic e + p scattering at HERA energies. It is found that the multiplicity distributions measured by the H1 Collaboration indicate violation of infinite divisibility in agreement with pQCD calculat...

We describe an approach to the evaluation of the moments of the time of ruin in the classical Poisson risk model. The methodology employed involves the expression of these moments in terms of linear combinations of convolutions involving compound negative binomial distributions. We then adapt the results for use in the practically important case involving phase-type claim size distributions. We...

Causal independence modelling is a well-known method both for reducing the size of probability tables and for explaining the underlying mechanisms in Bayesian networks. Many Bayesian network models incorporate causal independence assumptions; however, only the noisy OR and noisy AND, two examples of causal independence models, are used in practice. Their underlying assumption that either at lea...

We analyze the passengers' traffic pattern for 1.58 million taxi trips of Shanghai, China. By employing the non-negative matrix factorization and optimization methods, we find that, people travel on workdays mainly for three purposes: commuting between home and workplace, traveling from workplace to workplace, and others such as leisure activities. Therefore, traffic flow in one area or between...

A nonparametric upper tolerance limit (UTL) bounds a specified percentage of the population distribution with specified confidence. The most common UTL is based on the largest order statistic (the maximum) where the number of samples required for a given confidence and coverage is easily derived for an infinitely large population. However, for other order statistics such as the second largest, ...