March brings March Madness, the annual conclusion to the U.S. men’s college basketball season with two single elimination basketball tournaments showcasing the best college teams in the country. Almost as mad is the plethora of office pools across the country where the object is to pick a priori as many game winners as possible in the tournament. More generally, the object in an office pool is ...

Let's start with the most familiar context for pooling data (at least to students in introductory courses in statistics), viz., the pooling of sample variances in a t test of the significance of the difference between two independent sample means. The null hypothesis to be tested is that the means of two populations are equal (the populations from which the respective samples have been randomly...

IN this issue of Genetics, Futschik and Schlötterer (2010) present one of the first and the most systematic explorations of the relative merits of pooling vs. individual sequencing for several genetics applications. They argue that pooling individuals is often more effective both for SNP discovery and for the estimation of allele frequencies (and thus for population genomic analyses) and as a r...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS A possible role of host tree identity in the structuring of vascular epiphyte communities has attracted scientific attention for decades. Specifically, it has been suggested that each host tree species has a specific subset of the local species pool according to its own set of properties, e.g. physicochemical characteristics of the bark, tree architecture, or leaf phenology ...

The consensus binding site for the muscle regulatory factor myogenin was determined from an unbiased set of degenerate oligonucleotides using CASTing (cyclic amplification and selection of targets). Stretches of totally random sequence flanked by polymerase chain reaction priming sequences were mixed with purified myogenin or myotube nuclear extracts, DNA-protein complexes were immunoprecipitat...

The paper presents a hypertension type classification task where the decisions should be made only on the basis of blood pressure, general information and basis biochemical data. This problem has a great importance to the medical decision support systems, yet results achieved so far are not satisfactory. When the canonical approaches tend to fail we should look for the compound pattern recognit...

We study a semiparametric pseudo-likelihood inference for nonhomogeneous Gamma process with random effects for degradation data. The setting for degradation data is one in which n independent subjects, each with a nonhomogeneous Gamma process, are observed at possible different times. The random effects are used to represent heterogeneity of degradation paths. To obtain the maximum pseudo-likel...

Active learning (AL) is a branch of machine that deals with problems where unlabeled data abundant yet obtaining labels expensive. The algorithm has the possibility querying limited number samples to obtain corresponding labels, subsequently used for supervised learning. In this work, we consider task choosing subset be labeled from fixed finite pool samples. We assume random matrix and ground ...