We present a way to generate heuristic mathematical models based on the Darwinian principles of variation and selection in a pool of individuals over many generations. Each individual has a genotype (the hereditary properties) and a phenotype (the expression of these properties in the environment). Variation is achieved by cross-over and mutation operations on the genotype which consists in the...

Inferring parameters for models of biological processes is a current challenge in systems biology, as is the related problem of comparing competing models that explain the data. In this work we apply Skilling's nested sampling to address both of these problems. Nested sampling is a Bayesian method for exploring parameter space that transforms a multi-dimensional integral to a 1D integration ove...

We describe a method to explore the configurational phase space of chemical systems. It is based on the nested sampling algorithm recently proposed by Skilling (AIP Conf. Proc. 2004, 395; J. Bayesian Anal. 2006, 1, 833) and allows us to explore the entire potential energy surface (PES) efficiently in an unbiased way. The algorithm has two parameters which directly control the trade-off between ...

ÐIn a fuzzy relational database where a relation is a fuzzy set of tuples and ill-known data are represented by possibility distributions, nested fuzzy queries can be expressed in the Fuzzy SQL language, as defined in [25], [23]. Although it provides a very convenient way for users to express complex queries, a nested fuzzy query may be very inefficient to process with the naive evaluation meth...

Query optimization has been an active area of research ever since the first relational systems were implemented. In the last few years, research in the area has experienced renewed impulse, thanks to new development like data warehousing. In this article, we overview some of the recent advances made in complex query optimization. This article assumes knowledge of SQL and relational algebra, as ...

ln a fuzzy relational database where a relation is atuzzy sel of tuples and ill-known data are represented by possibility distributions, nested fuzzy queries can be expressed in lhe Fuzzy SQL language, as defined in [25], [23]. Although it provides a very convenient way for users to express complex queries, a nested fuzzy query may be very inefficient to process with the naive evaluation method...

The Nested Partition algorithm suffers from the lack of information gathering and sharing despite the computational effort dedicated to sampling the different subregions at each step of the algorithm. It is also noticed that the solution quality of the NP algorithm largely depends on the quality of the samples generated. Ants are used in this work as a mean to improve the samples quality throug...