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Current understanding of the ammonia distribution in Jupiter's atmosphere is provided by observations from major ground-based facilities and spacecraft, and analyzed with sophisticated retrieval models that recover high fidelity information, but are limited in spatial and temporal coverage. Here we show that the ammonia abundance in Jupiter's upper troposphere, which tracks the overturning atmospheric circulation, can be simply, but reliably determined from continuum-divided ammonia and methane absorption-band images made with a moderate-sized Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope (SCT). In 2020-21, Jupiter was imaged in the 647-nm ammonia absorption band and adjacent continuum bands with a 0.28-m SCT, demonstrating that the spatially-resolved ammonia optical depth could be determined with such a telescope. In 2022-23, a 619 nm methane-band filter was added to provide a constant reference against which to correct the ammonia abundances (column-averaged mole fraction) for cloud opacity variations. These 0.28-m SCT results are compared with observations from: a) the MUSE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) b) TEXES mid-infrared spectrometer used on the NASA's InfraRed Telescope Facility (IRTF); and c) the Gemini telescopes, and are shown to provide reliable maps of ammonia abundance. Meridional and longitudinal features are examined, including the Equatorial Zone (EZ) ammonia enhancement, the North Equatorial Belt (NEB) depletion, depletion above the Great Red Spot (GRS), and longitudinal enhancements in the northern EZ. This work demonstrates meaningful ammonia monitoring can be achieved with small telescopes that can complement spacecraft and major ground-based facility observations., Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures

An important problem in the analysis of high-dimensional omics data is to identify subsets of molecular variables that are associated with a phenotype of interest. This requires addressing the challenges of high dimensionality, strong multicollinearity and model uncertainty. We propose a new ensemble learning approach for improving the performance of sparse penalised regression methods, called STructural RANDomised Selection (STRANDS). The approach, that builds and improves upon the Random Lasso method, consists of two steps. In both steps, we reduce dimensionality by repeated subsampling of variables. We apply a penalised regression method to each subsampled dataset and average the results. In the first step, subsampling is informed by variable correlation structure, and in the second step, by variable importance measures from the first step. STRANDS can be used with any sparse penalised regression approach as the "base learner". Using synthetic data and real biological datasets, we demonstrate that STRANDS typically improves upon its base learner, and that taking account of the correlation structure in the first step can help to improve the efficiency with which the model space may be explored.

We present the findings of "The Alzheimer's Disease Prediction Of Longitudinal Evolution" (TADPOLE) Challenge, which compared the performance of 92 algorithms from 33 international teams at predicting the future trajectory of 219 individuals at risk of Alzheimer's disease. Challenge participants were required to make a prediction, for each month of a 5-year future time period, of three key outcomes: clinical diagnosis, Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale Cognitive Subdomain (ADAS-Cog13), and total volume of the ventricles. The methods used by challenge participants included multivariate linear regression, machine learning methods such as support vector machines and deep neural networks, as well as disease progression models. No single submission was best at predicting all three outcomes. For clinical diagnosis and ventricle volume prediction, the best algorithms strongly outperform simple baselines in predictive ability. However, for ADAS-Cog13 no single submitted prediction method was significantly better than random guesswork. Two ensemble methods based on taking the mean and median over all predictions, obtained top scores on almost all tasks. Better than average performance at diagnosis prediction was generally associated with the additional inclusion of features from cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). On the other hand, better performance at ventricle volume prediction was associated with inclusion of summary statistics, such as the slope or maxima/minima of biomarkers. TADPOLE's unique results suggest that current prediction algorithms provide sufficient accuracy to exploit biomarkers related to clinical diagnosis and ventricle volume, for cohort refinement in clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease. However, results call into question the usage of cognitive test scores for patient selection and as a primary endpoint in clinical trials., Comment: Presents final results of the TADPOLE competition. 60 pages, 7 tables, 14 figures

Penalized likelihood approaches are widely used for high-dimensional regression. Although many methods have been proposed and the associated theory is now well-developed, the relative efficacy of different approaches in finite-sample settings, as encountered in practice, remains incompletely understood. There is therefore a need for empirical investigations in this area that can offer practical insight and guidance to users. In this paper we present a large-scale comparison of penalized regression methods. We distinguish between three related goals: prediction, variable selection and variable ranking. Our results span more than 2,300 data-generating scenarios, including both synthetic and semi-synthetic data (real covariates and simulated responses), allowing us to systematically consider the influence of various factors (sample size, dimensionality, sparsity, signal strength and multicollinearity). We consider several widely-used approaches (Lasso, Adaptive Lasso, Elastic Net, Ridge Regression, SCAD, the Dantzig Selector and Stability Selection). We find considerable variation in performance between methods. Our results support a `no panacea' view, with no unambiguous winner across all scenarios or goals, even in this restricted setting where all data align well with the assumptions underlying the methods. The study allows us to make some recommendations as to which approaches may be most (or least) suitable given the goal and some data characteristics. Our empirical results complement existing theory and provide a resource to compare methods across a range of scenarios and metrics., Comment: This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Statistics and Computing. The final authenticated version is available online (open access) at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11222-019-09914-9

This paper frames causal structure estimation as a machine learning task. The idea is to treat indicators of causal relationships between variables as `labels' and to exploit available data on the variables of interest to provide features for the labelling task. Background scientific knowledge or any available interventional data provide labels on some causal relationships and the remainder are treated as unlabelled. To illustrate the key ideas, we develop a distance-based approach (based on bivariate histograms) within a manifold regularization framework. We present empirical results on three different biological data sets (including examples where causal effects can be verified by experimental intervention), that together demonstrate the efficacy and general nature of the approach as well as its simplicity from a user's point of view.

Graphical models are widely used to study biological networks. Interventions on network nodes are an important feature of many experimental designs for the study of biological networks. In this paper we put forward a causal variant of dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) for the purpose of modeling time-course data with interventions. The models inherit the simplicity and computational efficiency of DBNs but allow interventional data to be integrated into network inference. We show empirical results, on both simulated and experimental data, that demonstrate the need to appropriately handle interventions when interventions form part of the design., Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS806 in the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

In many applications, multivariate samples may harbor previously unrecognized heterogeneity at the level of conditional independence or network structure. For example, in cancer biology, disease subtypes may differ with respect to subtype-specific interplay between molecular components. Then, both subtype discovery and estimation of subtype-specific networks present important and related challenges. To enable such analyses, we put forward a mixture model whose components are sparse Gaussian graphical models. This brings together model-based clustering and graphical modeling to permit simultaneous estimation of cluster assignments and cluster-specific networks. We carry out estimation within an L1-penalized framework, and investigate several specific penalization regimes. We present empirical results on simulated data and provide general recommendations for the formulation and use of mixtures of L1-penalized Gaussian graphical models., Comment: A version of this work also appears in the first author's PhD Thesis (Sparse Graphical Models for Cancer Signalling, University of Warwick, 2012), which can be accessed at http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/49626

Recently, Li et al. (Bioinformatics 27(19), 2686-91, 2011) proposed a method, called Differential Equation-based Local Dynamic Bayesian Network (DELDBN), for reverse engineering gene regulatory networks from time-course data. We commend the authors for an interesting paper that draws attention to the close relationship between dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) and differential equations (DEs). Their central claim is that modifying a DBN to model Euler approximations to the gradient rather than expression levels themselves is beneficial for network inference. The empirical evidence provided is based on time-course data with equally-spaced observations. However, as we discuss below, in the particular case of equally-spaced observations, Euler approximations and conventional DBNs lead to equivalent statistical models that, absent artefacts due to the estimation procedure, yield networks with identical inter-gene edge sets. Here, we discuss further the relationship between DEs and conventional DBNs and present new empirical results on unequally spaced data which demonstrate that modelling Euler approximations in a DBN can lead to improved network reconstruction.

Small world networks interpolate between fully regular and fully random topologies and simultaneously exhibit large local clustering as well as short average path length. Small world topology has therefore been suggested to support network synchronization. Here we study the asymptotic speed of synchronization of coupled oscillators in dependence on the degree of randomness of their interaction topology in generalized Watts-Strogatz ensembles. We find that networks with fixed in-degree synchronize faster the more random they are, with small worlds just appearing as an intermediate case. For any generic network ensemble, if synchronization speed is at all extremal at intermediate randomness, it is slowest in the small world regime. This phenomenon occurs for various types of oscillators, intrinsic dynamics and coupling schemes., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Europhys. Lett., EPL style