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Flow boiling heat transfer characteristics in narrow channels have been investigated extensively by researchers due to its wide range of applications in micro-electromechanical systems, however, being a complex transport process the controlling mechanisms still lack clarity in understanding. Refrigerants related environmental hazards also urged to look for alternative environment friendly refrigerants. It has been noticed that relatively less information is available in the literature specifically for environmentally benign mediums. This study is focused on experimental findings for flow boiling heat transfer performance of low global warming potential refrigerants (R152a, R600a, and R1234yf). The test object was a vertical stainless steel tube (1.60 mm inner diameter and heated surface length 245 mm), experiments were done under upward fluid-flow conditions. The tested conditions were: heat flux 5-245 kW/m2, 50-500 kg/m2s mass velocities while saturation temperatures were 27 ?C and 32 ?C. The effects of operating parameters like heat and mass fluxes, saturation temperature, and vapor quality on heat transfer were analyzed in detail. It was noticed that heat transfer coefficients were significantly influenced by heat flux and operating pressure level whereas the same were not significantly affected by mass flux and vapor quality. The experimental data of heat transfer was compared with the prediction from various macro and micro scale correlations from the literature.

Post-translational modifications (PTMs) either enhance a protein’s activity in various sub-cellular processes, or degrade their activity which leads toward failure of intracellular processes. Tyrosine nitration (NT) modification degrades protein’s activity that initiates and propagates various diseases including neurodegenerative, cardiovascular, autoimmune diseases and carcinogenesis. Identification of NT modification supports development of novel therapies and drug discoveries for associated diseases. Identification of NT modification in biochemical labs is expensive, time consuming and error-prone. To supplement this process, several computational approaches have been proposed. However these approaches fail to precisely identify NT modification, due to the extraction of irrelevant, redundant and less discriminative features from protein sequences. This paper presents the NTpred framework that is competent in extracting comprehensive features from raw protein sequences using four different sequence encoders. To reap the benefits of different encoders, it generates four additional feature spaces by fusing different combinations of individual encodings. Furthermore, it eradicates irrelevant and redundant features from eight different feature spaces through a Recursive Feature Elimination process. Selected features of four individual encodings and four feature fusion vectors are used to train eight different Gradient Boosted Tree classifiers. The probability scores from the trained classifiers are utilized to generate a new probabilistic feature space, which is used to train a Logistic Regression classifier. On the BD1 benchmark dataset, the proposed framework outperforms the existing best-performing predictor in 5-fold cross validation and independent test evaluation with combined improvement of 13.7% in MCC and 20.1% in AUC. Similarly, on the BD2 benchmark dataset, the proposed framework outperforms the existing best-performing predictor with combined improvement of 5.3% in MCC and 1.0% in AUC. NTpred is publicly available for further experimentation and predictive use at: https://sds_genetic_analysis.opendfki.de/PredNTS/.

Accurate prediction of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) modifications is essential to explore and discern the process of cell differentiation, gene expression and epigenetic regulation. Several computational approaches have been proposed for particular type-specific DNA modification prediction. Two recent generalized computational predictors are capable of detecting three different types of DNA modifications; however, type-specific and generalized modifications predictors produce limited performance across multiple species mainly due to the use of ineffective sequence encoding methods. The paper in hand presents a generalized computational approach “DNA-MP” that is competent to more precisely predict three different DNA modifications across multiple species. Proposed DNA-MP approach makes use of a powerful encoding method “position specific nucleotides occurrence based 117 on modification and non-modification class densities normalized difference” (POCD-ND) to generate the statistical representations of DNA sequences and a deep forest classifier for modifications prediction. POCD-ND encoder generates statistical representations by extracting position specific distributional information of nucleotides in the DNA sequences. We perform a comprehensive intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation of the proposed encoder and compare its performance with 32 most widely used encoding methods on $17$ benchmark DNA modifications prediction datasets of $12$ different species using $10$ different machine learning classifiers. Overall, with all classifiers, the proposed POCD-ND encoder outperforms existing $32$ different encoders. Furthermore, combinedly over 5-fold cross validation benchmark datasets and independent test sets, proposed DNA-MP predictor outperforms state-of-the-art type-specific and generalized modifications predictors by an average accuracy of 7% across 4mc datasets, 1.35% across 5hmc datasets and 10% for 6ma datasets. To facilitate the scientific community, the DNA-MP web application is available at https://sds_genetic_analysis.opendfki.de/DNA_Modifications/.

YY1-mediated chromatin loops play substantial roles in basic biological processes like gene regulation, cell differentiation, and DNA replication. YY1-mediated chromatin loop prediction is important to understand diverse types of biological processes which may lead to the development of new therapeutics for neurological disorders and cancers. Existing deep learning predictors are capable to predict YY1-mediated chromatin loops in two different cell lines however, they showed limited performance for the prediction of YY1-mediated loops in the same cell lines and suffer significant performance deterioration in cross cell line setting. To provide computational predictors capable of performing large-scale analyses of YY1-mediated loop prediction across multiple cell lines, this paper presents two novel deep learning predictors. The two proposed predictors make use of Word2vec, one hot encoding for sequence representation and long short-term memory, and a convolution neural network along with a gradient flow strategy similar to DenseNet architectures. Both of the predictors are evaluated on two different benchmark datasets of two cell lines HCT116 and K562. Overall the proposed predictors outperform existing DEEPYY1 predictor with an average maximum margin of 4.65%, 7.45% in terms of AUROC, and accuracy, across both of the datases over the independent test sets and 5.1%, 3.2% over 5-fold validation. In terms of cross-cell evaluation, the proposed predictors boast maximum performance enhancements of up to 9.5% and 27.1% in terms of AUROC over HCT116 and K562 datasets.

Discrimination of circular RNA from long non-coding RNA is important to understand its role in different biological processes, disease prediction and cure. Identifying circular RNA through manual laboratories work is expensive, time-consuming and prone to errors. Development of computational methodologies for identification of circular RNA is an active area of research. State-of-the-art circular RNA identification methodologies make use of handcrafted features, which not only increase the feature space, but also extract irrelevant and redundant features. The paper in hand proposes an end-to-end deep learning-based framework named as CircNet, which does not require any handcrafted features. It takes raw RNA sequence as an input and utilises encoder–decoder based convolutional operations to learn lower-dimensional latent representation. This latent representation is further passed to another convolutional architecture to extract discriminative features followed by a classification layer. We performed extensive experimentation to highlight different regions of genome sequence that preserve the most important information for identifying circular RNAs. CircNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches with a considerable margin 10.29% in terms F1 measure.

Small non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are attracting increasing attention as they are now considered potentially valuable resources in the development of new drugs intended to cure several human diseases. A prerequisite for the development of drugs targeting ncRNAs or the related pathways is the identification and correct classification of such ncRNAs. State-of-the-art small ncRNA classification methodologies use secondary structural features as input. However, such feature extraction approaches only take global characteristics into account and completely ignore co-relative effects of local structures. Furthermore, secondary structure based approaches incorporate high dimensional feature space which is computationally expensive. The present paper proposes a novel Robust and Precise ConvNet (RPC-snRC) methodology which classifies small ncRNAs into relevant families by utilizing their primary sequence. RPC-snRC methodology learns hierarchical representation of features by utilizing positioning and information on the occurrence of nucleotides. To avoid exploding and vanishing gradient problems, we use an approach similar to DenseNet in which gradient can flow straight from subsequent layers to previous layers. In order to assess the effectiveness of deeper architectures for small ncRNA classification, we also adapted two ResNet architectures having a different number of layers. Experimental results on a benchmark small ncRNA dataset show that the proposed methodology does not only outperform existing small ncRNA classification approaches with a significant performance margin of 10% but it also gives better results than adapted ResNet architectures. To reproduce the results Source code and data set is available at https://github.com/muas16/small-non-coding-RNA-classification.

In order to provide benchmark performance for Urdu text document classification, the contribution of this paper is manifold. First, it provides a publicly available benchmark dataset manually tagged against 6 classes. Second, it investigates the performance impact of traditional machine learning-based Urdu text document classification methodologies by embedding 10 filter-based feature selection algorithms which have been widely used for other languages. Third, for the very first time, it assesses the performance of various deep learning-based methodologies for Urdu text document classification. In this regard, for experimentation, we adapt 10 deep learning classification methodologies which have produced best performance figures for English text classification. Fourth, it also investigates the performance impact of transfer learning by utilizing Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers approach for Urdu language. Fifth, it evaluates the integrity of a hybrid approach which combines traditional machine learning-based feature engineering and deep learning-based automated feature engineering. Experimental results show that feature selection approach named as normalized difference measure along with support vector machine outshines state-of-the-art performance on two closed source benchmark datasets CLE Urdu Digest 1000k, and CLE Urdu Digest 1Million with a significant margin of 32% and 13%, respectively. Across all three datasets, normalized difference measure outperforms other filter-based feature selection algorithms as it significantly uplifts the performance of all adopted machine learning, deep learning, and hybrid approaches. The source code and presented dataset are available at Github repository https://github.com/minixain/Urdu-Text-Classification .

In order to accelerate the performance of various Natural Language Processing tasks for Roman Urdu, this article for the very first time provides 3 neural word embeddings prepared using most widely used approaches namely Word2vec, FastText, and Glove. The integrity of generated neural word embeddings is evaluated using intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation approaches. Considering the lack of publicly available benchmark datasets, it provides a first-ever Roman Urdu public dataset which consists of 3241 sentiments annotated against positive, negative, and neutral classes. To provide benchmark baseline performance over the presented dataset for Roman Urdu sentiment analysis, we adapt diverse machine learning (Support Vector Machine, Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes), deep learning (convolutional neural network, recurrent neural network), and hybrid deep learning approaches. Performance impact of generated neural word embeddings based representation is compared with other most widely used bag of words based feature representation approaches using diverse machine and deep learning classifiers. In order to improve the performance of Roman Urdu sentiment analysis, it proposes a novel precisely extreme multi-channel hybrid methodology which makes use of convolutional and recurrent neural networks along with pre-trained neural word embeddings. The proposed hybrid approach outperforms adapted machine learning approaches by the significant figure of 9% and deep learning approaches by the figure of 4% in terms of F1-score.

Background and objective: Interactions of long non-coding ribonucleic acids (lncRNAs) with micro-ribonucleic acids (miRNAs) play an essential role in gene regulation, cellular metabolic, and pathological processes. Existing purely sequence based computational approaches lack robustness and efficiency mainly due to the high length variability of lncRNA sequences. Hence, the prime focus of the current study is to find optimal length trade-offs between highly flexible length lncRNA sequences. Method The paper at hand performs in-depth exploration of diverse copy padding, sequence truncation approaches, and presents a novel idea of utilizing only subregions of lncRNA sequences to generate fixed-length lncRNA sequences. Furthermore, it presents a novel bag of tricks-based deep learning approach “Bot-Net” which leverages a single layer long-short-term memory network regularized through DropConnect to capture higher order residue dependencies, pooling to retain most salient features, normalization to prevent exploding and vanishing gradient issues, learning rate decay, and dropout to regularize precise neural network for lncRNA–miRNA interaction prediction. Results BoT-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art lncRNA–miRNA interaction prediction approach by 2%, 8%, and 4% in terms of accuracy, specificity, and matthews correlation coefficient. Furthermore, a case study analysis indicates that BoT-Net also outperforms state-of-the-art lncRNA–protein interaction predictor on a benchmark dataset by accuracy of 10%, sensitivity of 19%, specificity of 6%, precision of 14%, and matthews correlation coefficient of 26%. Conclusion In the benchmark lncRNA–miRNA interaction prediction dataset, the length of the lncRNA sequence varies from 213 residues to 22,743 residues and in the benchmark lncRNA–protein interaction prediction dataset, lncRNA sequences vary from 15 residues to 1504 residues. For such highly flexible length sequences, fixed length generation using copy padding introduces a significant level of bias which makes a large number of lncRNA sequences very much identical to each other and eventually derail classifier generalizeability. Empirical evaluation reveals that within 50 residues of only the starting region of long lncRNA sequences, a highly informative distribution for lncRNA–miRNA interaction prediction is contained, a crucial finding exploited by the proposed BoT-Net approach to optimize the lncRNA fixed length generation process. Availability: BoT-Net web server can be accessed at https://sds_genetic_analysis.opendfki.de/lncmiRNA/. Graphic Abstract

Viral-host protein protein interaction (PPI) analysis is essential to decode the molecular mechanism of viral pathogen and host immunity processes which eventually help to control viral diseases and optimize therapeutics. The state-of-the-art viral-host PPI predictor leverages unsupervised embedding learning technique (doc2vec) to generate statistical representations of viral-host protein sequences and a Random Forest classifier for interaction prediction. However, doc2vec approach generates the statistical representations of viral-host protein sequences by merely modelling the local context of residues which only partially captures residue semantics. The paper in hand proposes a novel technique for generating better statistical representations of viral and host protein sequences based on the infusion of comprehensive local and global contextual information of the residues. While local residue context aware encoding captures semantic relatedness and short range dependencies of residues. Global residue context aware encoding captures comprehensive long-range residues dependencies, positional invariance of residues, and unique residue combination distribution important for interaction prediction. Using concatenated rich statistical representations of viral and host protein sequences, a robust machine learning framework “LGCA-VHPPI” is developed which makes use of a deep forest model to effectively model complex non-linearity of viral-host PPI sequences. An in-depth performance comparison of the proposed LGCA-VHPPI framework with existing diverse sequence encoding schemes based viral-host PPI predictors reveals that LGCA-VHPPI outperforms state-of-the-art predictor by 6%, 2%, and 2% in terms of matthews correlation coefficient over 3 different benchmark viral-host PPI prediction datasets.

There is a rising interest in investigating mechanisms and engineering of integral membrane proteins (MPs) which make crucial contribution in perceiving and controlling cellular response against different external signals. MPs need to be inserted, folded and expressed correctly in lipid bi-layer and transferred to appropriate cellular location to perform its diverse range of functions. Channelrhodopsins (ChRs), light gated ion-channel proteins belonging to microorganisms are imminent for diverse neurobiology applications where expression as well as localization to plasma membrane is a pre-condition for function. Developing robust computational methodologies to accurately identify ChRs localization is an active area of research. Existing computational approaches make use of one-hot-vector encoding or protein embeddings to encode MP sequences that are fed to Gaussian process regression model. These approaches lack to accurately predict the localization of MP proteins. The paper in hand proposes ChRsLoc-Net predictor that makes use of composition-transition-distribution (CTDC) physico-chemical properties based sequence encoder along with Hubber regressor. Over benchmark dataset, proposed ChrSLoc-Net approach outperforms state-of-the-art MP localization predictor with a significant margin of 9% in terms of mean absolute error. We anticipate that this study will largely assist biologist to comprehend diverse biological processes subject to localization patterns of MPs within plasma membrane.

A comprehensive understanding of miRNA sub-cellular localization may leads towards better understanding of physiological processes and support the fixation of diverse irregularities present in a variety of organisms. To date, diverse computational methodologies have been proposed to automatically infer sub-cellular localization of miR-NAs solely using sequence information, however, existing approaches lack in performance. Considering the success of data transformation approaches in Natural Language Processing which primarily transform multi-label classification problem into multi-class classification problem, here, we introduce three different data transformation approaches namely binary relevance, label power set, and classifier chains. Using data transformation approaches, at 1st stage, multi-label miRNA sub-cellular localization problem is transformed into multi-class problem. Then, at 2nd stage, 3 different machine learning classifiers are used to estimate which classifier performs better with what data transformation approach for hand on task. Empirical evaluation on independent test set indicates that L2S-MirLoc selected combination based on binary relevance and deep random forest outperforms state-of-the-art performance values by significant margin.

Web contains a vast amount of data, which are accumulated, studied, and utilized by a huge number of users on a daily basis. A substantial amount of data on the Web is available in an unstructured format, such as Web pages, books, journals, and files. Acquiring appropriate information from such humongous data has become quite challenging and a time-consuming task. Trivial keyword-based information retrieval systems highly depend on the statistics of data, thus facing word mismatch problem due to inevitable semantic and context variations of a certain word. Therefore, this marks the desperate need to organize such massive data into a structured format so that information can be easily processed in a large context by taking data semantics into account. Ontologies are not only being extensively employed in the semantic Web to store unstructured information in an organized and structured way but it has also raised the performance of diverse information retrieval approaches to a great extent. Ontological information retrieval systems retrieve data based on the similarity of semantics between the user query and the indexed data. This paper reviews modern ontology-based information retrieval methods for textual, multimedia, and cross-lingual data types. Furthermore, we compare and categorize the most recent approaches used in the above-mentioned information retrieval methods along with their major drawbacks and advantages.

Text classification automatically assigns text documents to one or more predefined categories based on their content. In text classification, data are characterized by a large number of highly sparse terms and highly skewed categories. Working with all the terms in the data has an adverse impact on the accuracy and efficiency of text classification tasks. A feature selection algorithm helps in selecting the most relevant terms. In this paper, we propose a new feature ranking metric called max-min ratio (MMR). It is a product of max-min ratio of the true positives and false positives and their difference, which allows MMR to select smaller subsets of more relevant terms even in the presence of highly skewed classes. This results in performing text classification with higher accuracy and more efficiency. To investigate the effectiveness of our newly proposed metric, we compare its performance against eight metrics (balanced accuracy measure, information gain, chi-squared, Poisson ratio, Gini index, odds ratio, distinguishing feature selector, and normalized difference measure) on six data sets namely WebACE (WAP, K1a, K1b), Reuters (RE0, RE1), and 20 Newsgroups using the multinomial naive Bayes (MNB) and support vector machines (SVM) classifiers. The statistical significance of MMR has been estimated on 5 different splits of training and test data sets using the one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) method and a multiple comparisons test based on Tukey–Kramer method. We found that performance of MMR is statistically significant than that of the other 8 metrics in 76.2% cases in terms of macro F1 measure and in 74.4% cases in terms of micro F1 measure.

Exponential growth of genome-wide assays of gene expressions and their public access open new horizons for machine learning methodologies to effectively perform genetic analysis. In this work, domain specific pre-train k-mer embeddings of DNA sequences are generated by utilising FastText approach. Sequence co-expression pattern information is embedded into 200 dimensional vectors by training Fasttext model on 317,151 samples of DNA sequences (with k-mers representation). We propose a novel idea to utilize the information of various codons present in amino acids for the evaluation of learned sequence vectors. We employ two diverse techniques to compare the performance of generated task-specific k-mer embeddings with state-of-the-art publicly available generic k-mer embeddings of genome. Firstly, we utilize a dimensionality reduction approach namely PCA to alleviate the dimensions of DNA sequences upto 50 features by preserving almost 85% of sequence features information. Afterwards, TSNE algorithms is used to visualize k-mer embeddings and to make sure whether different codons representing the same amino acid are more closer to each other than the ones representing different amino acids. Secondly, to assess the analogy of k-mer embeddings, generated domain specific k-mer embeddings are compared with state-of-the-art k-mer embeddings by estimating the cosine similarity among those codons vectors which represent same amino acid. Overall, we believe that task-specific distributed representation of k-mers would be useful for DNA methylation and Histone occupancy prediction tasks.

The emissions from coal power plants have serious implication on the environment protection, and there is an increasing effort around the globe to control these emissions by the flue gas cleaning technologies. This research was carried out on the limestone forced oxidation (LSFO) flue gas desulfurization (FGD) system installed at the 2*660 MW supercritical coal-fired power plant. Nine input variables of the FGD system: pH, inlet sulfur dioxide (SO2), inlet temperature, inlet nitrogen oxide (NOx), inlet O2, oxidation air, absorber slurry density, inlet humidity, and inlet dust were used for the development of effective neural network process models for a comprehensive emission analysis constituting outlet SO2, outlet Hg, outlet NOx, and outlet dust emissions from the LSFO FGD system. Monte Carlo experiments were conducted on the artificial neural network process models to investigate the relationships between the input control variables and output variables. Accordingly, optimum operating ranges of all input control variables were recommended. Operating the LSFO FGD system under optimum conditions, nearly 35% and 24% reduction in SO2 emissions are possible at inlet SO2 values of 1500 mg/m3 and 1800 mg/m3, respectively, as compared to general operating conditions. Similarly, nearly 42% and 28% reduction in Hg emissions are possible at inlet SO2 values of 1500 mg/m3 and 1800 mg/m3, respectively, as compared to general operating conditions. The findings are useful for minimizing the emissions from coal power plants and the development of optimum operating strategies for the LSFO FGD system.

Nitrate (NO3–) and auxin are key regulators of root growth and development, modulating the signalling cascades in auxin-induced lateral root formation. Auxin biosynthesis, transport, and transduction are significantly altered by nitrate. A decrease in nitrate (NO3–) supply tends to promote auxin translocation from shoots to roots and vice-versa. This nitrate mediated auxin biosynthesis regulating lateral roots growth is induced by the nitrate transporters and its downstream transcription factors. Most nitrate responsive genes (short-term and long-term) are involved in signalling overlap between nitrate and auxin, thereby inducing lateral roots initiation, emergence, and development. Moreover, in the auxin signalling pathway, the varying nitrate supply regulates lateral roots development by modulating the auxin accumulation in the roots. Here, we focus on the roles of nitrate responsive genes in mediating auxin biosynthesis in Arabidopsis root, and the mechanism involved in the transport of auxin at different nitrate levels. In addition, this review also provides an insight into the significance of nitrate responsive regulatory module and their downstream transcription factors in root system architecture in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana.

MicroRNAs are special RNA sequences containing 22 nucleotides and are capable of regulating almost 60% of highly complex mammalian transcriptome. Presently, there exists very limited approaches capable of visualizing miRNA locations inside cell to reveal the hidden pathways, and mechanisms behind miRNA functionality, transport, and biogenesis. State-of-the-art miRNA sub-cellular location prediction MIRLocatar approach makes use of sequence to sequence model along with pre-train k-mer embeddings. Existing pre-train k-mer embedding generation methodologies focus on the extraction of semantics of k-mers. In RNA sequences, rather than semantics, positional information of nucleotides is more important because distinct positions of four basic nucleotides actually define the functionality of RNA molecules. Considering the dynamicity and importance of nucleotides positions, instead of learning representation on the basis of k-mers semantics, we propose a novel kmerRP2vec feature representation approach that fuses positional information of k-mers to randomly initialized neural k-mer embeddings. Effectiveness of proposed feature representation approach is evaluated with two deep learning based convolutional neural network CNN and recurrent neural network RNN methodologies using 8 evaluation measures. Experimental results on a public benchmark miRNAsubloc dataset prove that proposed kmerRP2vec approach along with a simple CNN model outperforms state-of-the-art MirLocator approach with a significant margin of 18% and 19% in terms of precision and recall.

Identification of enhancers and their strength prediction plays an important role in gene expression regulation and currently an active area of research. However, its identification specifically through experimental approaches is extremely time consuming and labor-intensive task. Several machine learning methodologies have been proposed to accurately discriminate enhancers from regulatory elements and to estimate their strength. Existing approaches utilise different statistical measures for feature encoding which mainly capture residue specific physico-chemical properties upto certain extent but ignore semantic and positional information of residues. This paper presents “Enhancer-DSNet”, a two-layer precisely deep neural network which makes use of a novel k-mer based sequence representation scheme prepared by fusing associations between k-mer positions and sequence type. Proposed Enhancer-DSNet methodology is evaluated on a publicly available benchmark dataset and independent test set. Experimental results over benchmark independent test set indicate that proposed Enhancer-DSNet methodology outshines the performance of most recent predictor by the figure of 2%, 1%, 2%, and 5% in terms of accuracy, specificity, sensitivity and matthews correlation coefficient for enhancer identification task and by the figure of 15%, 21%, and 39% in terms of accuracy, specificity, and matthews correlation coefficient for strong/weak enhancer prediction task.

MicroRNAs (miRNA) are small noncoding RNA sequences consisting of about 22 nucleotides that are involved in the regulation of almost 60% of mammalian genes. Presently, there are very limited approaches for the visualization of miRNA locations present inside cells to support the elucidation of pathways and mechanisms behind miRNA function, transport, and biogenesis. MIRLocator, a state-of-the-art tool for the prediction of subcellular localization of miRNAs makes use of a sequence-to-sequence model along with pretrained k-mer embeddings. Existing pretrained k-mer embedding generation methodologies focus on the extraction of semantics of k-mers. However, in RNA sequences, positional information of nucleotides is more important because distinct positions of the four nucleotides define the function of an RNA molecule. Considering the importance of the nucleotide position, we propose a novel approach (kmerPR2vec) which is a fusion of positional information of k-mers with randomly initialized neural k-mer embeddings. In contrast to existing k-mer-based representation, the proposed kmerPR2vec representation is much more rich in terms of semantic information and has more discriminative power. Using novel kmerPR2vec representation, we further present an end-to-end system (MirLocPredictor) which couples the discriminative power of kmerPR2vec with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for miRNA subcellular location prediction. The effectiveness of the proposed kmerPR2vec approach is evaluated with deep learning-based topologies (i.e., Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)) and by using 9 different evaluation measures. Analysis of the results reveals that MirLocPredictor outperform state-of-the-art methods with a significant margin of 18% and 19% in terms of precision and recall.

Term mismatch is a serious problem effecting the performance of information retrieval systems. The problem is more severe in biomedical domain where lot of term variations, abbreviations and synonyms exist. We present query paraphrasing and various term selection combination techniques to overcome this problem. To perform paraphrasing, we use noun words to generate synonyms from Metathesaurus. The new synthesized paraphrases are ranked using statistical information derived from the corpus and relevant documents are retrieved based on top n selected paraphrases. We compare the results with state-of-the-art pseudo relevance feedback based retrieval techniques. In quest of enhancing the results of pseudo relevance feedback approach, we introduce two term selection combination techniques namely Borda Count and Intersection. Surprisingly, combinational techniques performed worse than single term selection techniques. In pseudo relevance feedback approach best algorithms are IG, Rochio and KLD which are performing 33%, 30% and 20% better than other techniques respectively. However, the performance of paraphrasing technique is 20% better than pseudo relevance feedback approach.

This paper presents hourly Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI) measured data at three stations (Lahore, Multan, Bahawalpur) in Punjab, Pakistan. The estimated GHI data from three reanalysis datasets have also been presented. Clearness index (KT), Solar zenith angle (θsza) and Periodicity factor (Pf) were calculated and used to develop bias correction models. The estimated corrected GHI data using best model M20 for years 2015 and 2016 is also presented.

The disaster risk management cycle is a recognized instrument for managing disaster events and their impacts. However, the usefulness of the cycle has become questionable in diverse urban settings. Thus, this research uses a pragmatic approach to identify challenges in the effectiveness of the conventional disaster risk management cycle and its phases in the context of urban flooding in Pakistan. Institutions involved in flood risk management were interviewed using semi-structured questionnaires. Three focus group discussions were also held to understand the viewpoints of selected communities. Thematic analysis was used to categorize views and responses under each phase. The analysis reveals that, despite the advent of disaster risk reduction strategies, local institutions are still relying on reactive approaches and are managing flood risk on an ad-hoc basis. Weak governance and limited corrective measures for existing development patterns are making it difficult to manage flood risks. There is an urgent need to perform multi-hazard vulnerability and risk assessment, and develop specific strategies under the philosophies of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. This study recommends the inclusion of climate change adaptation and resilience in the current management cycle for reducing future urban risks.