Inconsistency Resolution Research Articles

Do taxon-specific DNA barcodes improve species discrimination relative to universal barcodes in Lauraceae?

Abstract The aim of DNA barcoding is to enable fast and accurate species identification. However, universal plant DNA barcodes often do not provide species-level discrimination, especially in taxonomically complex groups. Here we use Lauraceae for the design and evaluation of DNA barcoding strategies, considering: (1) the efficacy of taxon-specific DNA barcode regions compared with universal barcodes for species discrimination; and (2) how the extent of intra- and interspecific sampling affects species discrimination rates. To address these areas, we targeted the highly polymorphic, taxon-specific barcode regions ycf1 + ndhH–rps15 + trnL–ycf2 for Lauraceae and compared them against the suite of standard plastid loci used for DNA barcoding (rbcL + matK + trnH–psbA) and the standard nuclear barcode ITS. The highest discrimination success came from nrDNA ITS, whereas the plastid regions (rbcL + matK + trnH–psbA) and the taxon-specific regions (ycf1 + ndhH–rps15 + trnL–ycf2) showed limited and inconsistent resolution. These results highlight that taxon-specific plastid barcodes may provide limited gains in discriminatory power in complex, closely related groups like Lauraceae. Moreover, our study showed that species discrimination greatly depends on the taxon sampling scheme, with relatively lower species discrimination observed where there is more comprehensive intra- and interspecific sampling. The outstanding challenge for plant DNA barcoding is the development of assays that allow routine low-cost access to large numbers of nuclear markers to facilitate the sequencing of large numbers of individuals.

Multidisciplinary Tumor Board Smart Virtual Assistant in Locally Advanced Cervical Cancer: A Proof of Concept.

AimThe first prototype of the “Multidisciplinary Tumor Board Smart Virtual Assistant” is presented, aimed to (i) Automated classification of clinical stage starting from different free-text diagnostic reports; (ii) Resolution of inconsistencies by identifying controversial cases drawing the clinician’s attention to particular cases worthy for multi-disciplinary discussion; (iii) Support environment for education and knowledge transfer to junior staff; (iv) Integrated data-driven decision making and standardized language and interpretation.Patients and MethodData from patients affected by Locally Advanced Cervical Cancer (LACC), FIGO stage IB2-IVa, treated between 2015 and 2018 were extracted. Magnetic Resonance (MR), Gynecologic examination under general anesthesia (EAU), and Positron Emission Tomography–Computed Tomography (PET-CT) performed at the time of diagnosis were the items from the Electronic Health Records (eHRs) considered for analysis. An automated extraction of eHR that capture the patient’s data before the diagnosis and then, through Natural Language Processing (NLP), analysis and categorization of all data to transform source information into structured data has been performed.ResultsIn the first round, the system has been used to retrieve all the eHR for the 96 patients with LACC. The system has been able to classify all patients belonging to the training set and - through the NLP procedures - the clinical features were analyzed and classified for each patient. A second important result was the setup of a predictive model to evaluate the patient’s staging (accuracy of 94%). Lastly, we created a user-oriented operational tool targeting the MTB who are confronted with the challenge of large volumes of patients to be diagnosed in the most accurate way.ConclusionThis is the first proof of concept concerning the possibility of creating a smart virtual assistant for the MTB. A significant benefit could come from the integration of these automated methods in the collaborative, crucial decision stages.

FATWA COORDINATION IN MALAYSIA: A LITERATURE REVIEW

Fatwa coordination in Malaysia are non-ending issues due to certain factors whereas debated by many scholars. The issues of non-coordination or inconsistency of fatwa between the State Fatwa Committee and the Muzakarah Committee of the National Council for Islamic Religious Affairs in Malaysia discussed by many reviewers as well as its impact on the community and the fatwa institution itself.Hence, this article aims to highlight past research related to the issue of fatwa coordination in Malaysia.The approach adopted is the method content analysis of past studies. The analysis of this literature uses thematic method approach in understanding selected articles based on random systems and the use of keywords in relation to fatwa coordination. Synthesis analysis carried out has resulted in six (6) themes consisting of factors of inconsistency, impact of inconsistency, importance of coordination, resolution of inconsistencies, minimization of inconsistency and the role of the Muzakarah Committee as the national fatwa institution. Thematic reviews give the advantages of the structured aspects of the discussion to the studies carried out by past surveyors.

Resolving Place Recognition Inconsistencies Using Intra-Set Similarities

Place recognition is the problem of finding associations between a query set of place descriptions and a database. It is an important means for loop closure detection in SLAM. The primary source of information to decide about associations is the pairwise similarity of descriptors between the query and the database items (e.g., image descriptor similarities). Beyond better descriptors, significant improvements were achieved by exploiting additional structural information, in particular by comparing sequences instead of individual items. In this letter, we propose to use another systematic source of information: intra-set similarities between items within the query or the database sets. They can be used to detect inconsistencies of groups of associations between database and query items, e.g. to inhibit matchings of multiple query descriptors to the same database descriptor if the query descriptors are mutually different. The underlying idea is a heuristic tightening of the triangle inequality of groups of descriptors. Based on a definition of matching inconsistencies, we propose an Inconsistency Resolution Procedure (IRP) to modify the inter-set similarities between database and query in a way that resolves existing inconsistencies with intra-set similarities. Our experiments show an average place recognition performance gain of >30% in a general place recognition setup with 21 datasets and two state of the art image processing front-ends. The proposed approach does not require additional information beyond descriptor similarities, makes no assumptions of sequences, does not require training, and has no parameter that needs adjustment. It can be combined with other established techniques like descriptor standardization and sequence processing.

Automatic weighted matching rectifying rule discovery for data repairing

Data repairing is a key problem in data cleaning which aims to uncover and rectify data errors. Traditional methods depend on data dependencies to check the existence of errors in data, but they fail to rectify the errors. To overcome this limitation, recent methods define repairing rules on which they depend to detect and fix errors. However, all existing data repairing rules are provided by experts which is an expensive task in time and effort. Besides, rule-based data repairing methods need an external verified data source or user verifications; otherwise they are incomplete where they can repair only a small number of errors. In this paper, we define weighted matching rectifying rules (WMRRs) based on similarity matching to capture more errors. We propose a novel algorithm to discover WMRRs automatically from dirty data in-hand. We also develop an automatic algorithm for rules inconsistency resolution. Additionally, based on WMRRs, we propose an automatic data repairing algorithm (WMRR-DR) which uncovers a large number of errors and rectifies them dependably. We experimentally verify our method on both real-life and synthetic data. The experimental results prove that our method can discover effective WMRRs from the dirty data in-hand, and perform dependable and full-automatic repairing based on the discovered WMRRs, with higher accuracy than the existing dependable methods.

A decision-support method for information inconsistency resolution in direct modeling of CAD models

Direct modeling is a very recent CAD paradigm that can provide unprecedented modeling flexibility. It, however, lacks the parametric capability, which is indispensable to modern CAD systems. For direct modeling to have this capability, an additional associativity information layer in the form of geometric constraint systems needs to be incorporated into direct modeling. This is no trivial matter due to the possible inconsistencies between the associativity information and geometry information in a model after direct edits. The major issue of resolving such inconsistencies is that there often exist many resolution options. The challenge lies in avoiding invalid resolution options and prioritizing valid ones. This paper presents an effective method to support the user in making decisions among the resolution options. In particular, the method can provide automatic information inconsistency reasoning, avoid invalid resolution options completely, and guide the choice among valid resolution options. Case studies and comparisons have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.

Big data inconsistencies and incompleteness: a literature review

The analysis and integration of big data highlight some issues in the identification and resolution of data inconsistencies and knowledge incompleteness. This paper presents an overview of data inconsistencies and a review of approaches to resolve various levels of data inconsistencies. Moreover, we discuss some issues related to incompleteness and stability of known knowledge over specific time periods, and the implication for the decision-making process. In addition, the use of a Bayesian network model in inconsistency resolution in data analysis and knowledge engineering will also be considered.

Feature Selection Optimization in Software Product Lines

Feature modeling is a common approach for configuring and capturing commonalities and variations among different Software Product Lines (SPL) products. This process is carried out by a set of SPL design teams, each working on a different configuration of the desired product. The integration of these configurations leads to inconsistencies in the final product design. The typical solution involves extensive deliberation and unnecessary resource usage, which makes SPL inconsistency resolution an expensive and unoptimized process. We present the first comprehensive evaluation of swarm intelligence (using Particle Swarm Optimization) to the problem of resolving inconsistencies in a configured integrated SPL product. We call it ${o}$ -SPLIT ( ${o}$ ptimization-based Software Product LIne Tool) and validate ${o}$ -SPLIT with standard ERP, SPLOT (Software Product Lines Online Tools), and BeTTy (BEnchmarking and TesTing on the analYsis) product configurations along with diverse feature set sizes. The results show that Particle Swarm Optimization can successfully optimize SPL product configurations. Finally, we implement ${o}$ -SPLIT as a decision-support tool in a real, local SPL setting and acquire subjective feedback from SPL designers which shows that the teams are convinced of the usability and high-level decision support provided by ${o}$ -SPLIT.

Moral Consistency Reasoning Reconsidered

Many contemporary ethicists use case-based reasoning to reach consistent beliefs about ethical matters. The idea is that particular cases elicit moral intuitions, which provide defeasible reasons to believe in their content. However, most proponents of case-based moral reasoning are not very explicit about how they resolve inconsistencies and how they abstract principles from judgments about particular cases. The aim of this article is to outline a methodology—called Consistency Reasoning Casuistry—for case-based reasoning in ethics. This methodology draws on Richmond Campbell and Victor Kumar’s naturalistic model for the resolution of inconsistencies between the content of intuitions about particular cases. I argue that reasons similar to those that motivate their model also support a more abstract form of moral reasoning that goes beyond mere resolutions of inconsistencies between case judgments and demands the formulation of more abstract moral norms. Consistency Reasoning Casuistry, it is argued, is a good candidate for a methodology for case-based moral reasoning that is in harmony with paradigms of contemporary moral psychology and that can accommodate the methodology implicit in the work of many contemporary ethicists.

Rule-driven inconsistency resolution for knowledge graph generation rules

Knowledge graphs, which contain annotated descriptions of entities and their interrelations, are often generated using rules that apply semantic annotations to certain data sources. (Re)using ontology terms without adhering to the axioms defined by their ontologies results in inconsistencies in these graphs, affecting their quality. Methods and tools were proposed to detect and resolve inconsistencies, the root causes of which include rules and ontologies. However, these either require access to the complete knowledge graph, which is not always available in a time-constrained situation, or assume that only generation rules can be refined but not ontologies. In the past, we proposed a rule-driven method for detecting and resolving inconsistencies without complete knowledge graph access, but it requires a predefined set of refinements to the rules and does not guide users with respect to the order the rules should be inspected. We extend our previous work with a rule-driven method, called Resglass, that considers refinements for generation rules as well as ontologies. In this article, we describe Resglass, which includes a ranking to determine the order with which rules and ontology elements should be inspected, and its implementation. The ranking is evaluated by comparing the manual ranking of experts to our automatic ranking. The evaluation shows that our automatic ranking achieves an overlap of 80% with experts ranking, reducing this way the effort required during the resolution of inconsistencies in both rules and ontologies.

Body Mass Index and predisposition of patients to knee osteoarthritis

IntroductionObesity is increasingly a prevalent comorbid with potentially substantial adverse effects on pre and postoperative outcomes on osteoarthritis patients. The ablative effect on the joint especially on the weight sustaining joints is the major consequence of osteoarthritis that causes pain and the obese are most susceptible. MethodologyA retrospective cohort study, using a non-probability convenience sampling method. A self-administered twelve item questionnaire on the perception of knee osteoarthritis was used to determine the relationship of obesity with the development of knee osteoarthritis among patients visiting the surgery outpatient clinic of Hospital Universiti Sains Malaysia HUSM. Obesity was described as BMI ≥30 mg/kg2. Descriptive statistics were employed to describe the demographic data in frequency, mean, percentage, and standard deviation while independent T-Test was used to determine the association of obesity on the development of knee osteoarthritis. ResultsFrom the questionnaire analysis, the result revealed that there is a significant mean difference (P-value = 0.001) of BMI among the osteoarthritis group. The mean BMI of patients in the osteoarthritis group 40.97 (SD 3.59) was higher than the mean BMI of patients in the group without osteoarthritis 31.29 (S.D 0.71). Furthermore, it was observed that the mean of the group with osteoarthritis was very high indicating that the population group is highly obese when compared to the groups without osteoarthritis, thus implying that the presence of osteoarthritis can be associated with increasing weight. ConclusionObesity is associated with the development of knee osteoarthritis, however, whether it starts or worsens osteoarthritis progression remains an inconsistent resolution, following these, more prudent research would be required to solve this quest.

NORMATIVE-LEGAL FRAMEWORK OF TRANSPORT

The economic category «transport enterprise» is commonly used in economic scientific and practical circulation. However, at the same time, its understanding in the legal field, which defines the basis of economic activity in the field of transport, is not very clear. The above-mentioned raises the problem of identification and attribution to one or another category of business entities in the transport sector. Regulatory support of the transport of Ukraine is based on a set of general laws and codes that regulate the economic activity of any areas of the national economy of the country, as well as on special regulatory acts that take into account the specifics of the transport sphere. Despite the broad legal framework for ensuring transport activity, modern transformations and challenges facing the industry require the resolution of certain inconsistencies in order to properly perceive the concept-categorical apparatus that is formed in the legal field and its development in accordance with the needs of the time. The purpose of the study is to identify entities in the field of transport on the basis of legislative and legal approach. It is recommended to introduce in the legal and regulatory framework the definition of a transport undertaking (transport company), which would correlate with its definition in the Commercial Code of Ukraine. We propose to disclose the term «transport enterprise» as an independent economic entity created by the competent state authority or local self-government body or other entities to meet social and personal needs through the systematic implementation of economic activities in the field of transport in accordance with the Law of Ukraine «On Transport» in accordance with the procedure provided by the Commercial Code and other laws of Ukraine. A clear definition of the conceptual-categorical apparatus relative to the essence of transport enterprises in the legislative field and its combination with the classification of economic activities will allow in the future to correctly form the population for the analytical sample and carry out further classification.

A binocular parallel rendering method for VR globes

ABSTRACT The scene-rendering mechanism based on binocular vision is one of the key techniques for the VR globe to achieve immersion-type visualization of global 3D scenes. However, this special rendering mechanism also requires that the 3D scene is continuously drawn twice within one frame, which significantly affects the rendering efficiency of VR globes. Therefore, we propose a binocular parallel rendering method. This method first improves the current rendering process of VR globes by assigning the rendering tasks for the left and right camera of VR to be processed on different CPU cores, thereby achieving parallel rendering of binocular scenes. Second, due to the problem of inconsistent resolution of binocular scenes caused by different viewpoints for the left and right cameras, we propose a resolution synchronize algorithm. this algorithm conducts real-time synchronization on the resolution of scene in the rendering process and thus avoids the problem of erroneous binocular stereo matching. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of the method in this paper through experiments. The results of experiments indicate that while the method in this paper can ensure the consistency of binocular scene resolution, it can decrease the frame time of VR globes by approximately 27% on average.

Learning of Nonnegative Matrix Factorization Models for Inconsistent Resolution Dataset Analysis

Learning of Nonnegative Matrix Factorization Models for Inconsistent Resolution Dataset Analysis

“A Completely New Chemistry”: Lichtenberg’s Generative Paradigmata

“A Completely New Chemistry”: Lichtenberg’s Generative Paradigmata Carolina Malagon (bio) In an article for the Goettinger Taschen Calender of 1798, the Göttingen physics professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg proposed that discovery was prompted by the perception of inconsistencies in a dominant system of thought. As though to encourage such perception, he proposed that a table of duties (Haustafel) be nailed to the wall of every physical and chemical laboratory. Instead of being prescribed by scripture, these duties would be prescribed by the “history of the discovery of the true world system” in astronomy (Lichtenberg, “Geologisch-Meteorologische Phantasien” 93).1 The lesson of this history might be paraphrased as follows: to perceive inconsistencies, it had in the past been necessary to draw on competing systems of thought. That is to say, Tycho Brahe had improved upon Ptolemy. Copernicus had overthrown the Ptolemaic system, and as a result, Tycho had been held in contempt by “boys” unworthy of “untying his shoe straps” (Lichtenberg, “Geologisch-Meteorologische Phantasien” 94). Yet by building on Tycho’s observations, Kepler was able to perceive “absurdities” in the Copernican system he so greatly admired, to recognize that planets moved in “simple, constant ellipses” (and not in circular orbits with epicycles). Through a mediation of new and [End Page 591] old, rather than a one-sided favoring of novelty, he had discovered the “true world system.” In proposing that this history lesson be nailed to the walls of laboratories, Lichtenberg generalized the “procedure of the astronomers in expanding their science” to a “paradigma” according to which physics and chemistry could and should be patterned (“Geologisch-Meteorologische Phantasien” 93). As Lichtenberg defined the term for himself elsewhere, a paradigma was a “rule of invention,” according to which a model from one field of study was used to model problems in another (Schriften II: 455).2 By applying Kepler’s procedure to physics and chemistry, Lichtenberg was therefore not simply making claims about the history of those disciplines. Rather, he was applying this paradigma in at least two ways: as a guideline for invention, but also as a regulative principle for scientific conduct. Discovery entailed not only the perception and resolution of inconsistency between a system and the world, but that resolution also depended upon the ability to draw from systems themselves deemed incompatible. Moreover, Lichtenberg stressed that physics and chemistry would not be “in a good way” until Kepler’s procedure had become obligatory. For history had already begun to repeat itself. In chemistry, the new “anti-phlogistonist” system of the French chemist Lavoisier appeared to have overthrown an older system based on a principle called phlogiston. In the wake of this equivalent to the Copernican revolution, however, Lavoisier’s followers had acted like the detractors of Tycho. To be sure, “no absurdity has yet to be imputed to the Copernicus of chemistry” (Lichtenberg, “Geologisch-Meteorologische Phantasien” 95).3 But it would be imprudent to scorn those who did not blindly follow Lavoisier in everything, Lichtenberg warned, as though fearing such scorn might delay or even preclude the emergence of the Kepler of chemistry. In Lichtenberg’s account of discovery and progress, inconsistencies play a generative role. As he put it in a private notebook, to better understand the “whole,” physicists studied its individual parts in great detail. The resulting “mingle-mangle” of specialist observations contained the seeds for theories that, like Newton’s theory of gravity, would explain an “endless amount of anomalies”(Schriften II: 484).4 [End Page 592] By looking to nature rather than to a system as a guide, by considering as wide a range of observations as possible, inconsistencies would be perceived and resolved, bringing each successive system closer to a “true” representation of the world. As his commentary on chemistry suggests, however, Lichtenberg’s paradigma was not a rule applied unanimously by contemporaries. To scholars with the benefit of hindsight, moreover, Lichtenberg’s defense of phlogiston theory has appeared like a textbook example of conservative “resistance” to a necessary “paradigm shift” in the terms set by Thomas Kuhn.5 This paper draws on the comparison between Kuhn and Lichtenberg in a different sense. Lichtenberg has been called the first to use paradigma to...

Street View House Number Identification Based on Deep Learning

Abstract In this paper, the difficult problem of character recognition in natural scenes caused by many factors such as variability of light in the natural scene, background clutter and inaccurate viewing angle, and inconsistent resolution. Based on the deep learning framework PyTorch, a convolutional neural network is implemented. Based on the classic LeNet-5 network, the network optimizes the input layer to accept three-channel images, changes the pooling method to maximum pooling to simplify parameters, and the activation function is replaced by Rectified Linear Unit with faster convergence. The cross-entropy loss is used instead of the minimum mean square error to mitigate the slow learning. Furthermore, we also enroll the gradient descent optimization algorithm RMSprop and L2 regularization to improve the accuracy, speed up the convergence and suppress the over-fitting. The experiment results show that our model achieved an accuracy of 92.32% after training for 7h24min on the street view house number(SVHN) dataset, effectively improving the performance of LeNet-5.

An approach to classification of data with highly localized unmarked features using neural networks

To face the increasing demand on quality healthcare, cutting edge automation technology is being applied in such demanding areas as medical imaging. This paper proposes a novel approach to classification problems on datasets with sparse, highly localized features. It is based on the use of saliency map in amplification of features. Unlike previous efforts, this approach does not use any prior information about feature localization. We present an experimental study based on Diabetic Retinopathy classification problem, in which our method has shown to achieve over 20\% higher accuracy in solving a two-class Diabetic Retinopathy classification problem than a naive approach based solely on residual neural networks. The dataset consists of 35120 images of various quality, inconsistent resolution and aspect ratio.

Signal, Uncertainty, and Conflict in Phylogenomic Data for a Diverse Lineage of Microbial Eukaryotes (Diatoms, Bacillariophyta)

Diatoms (Bacillariophyta) are a species-rich group of eukaryotic microbes diverse in morphology, ecology, and metabolism. Previous reconstructions of the diatom phylogeny based on one or a few genes have resulted in inconsistent resolution or low support for critical nodes. We applied phylogenetic paralog pruning techniques to a data set of 94 diatom genomes and transcriptomes to infer perennially difficult species relationships, using concatenation and summary-coalescent methods to reconstruct species trees from data sets spanning a wide range of thresholds for taxon and column occupancy in gene alignments. Conflicts between gene and species trees decreased with both increasing taxon occupancy and bootstrap cutoffs applied to gene trees. Concordance between gene and species trees was lowest for short internodes and increased logarithmically with increasing edge length, suggesting that incomplete lineage sorting disproportionately affects species tree inference at short internodes, which are a common feature of the diatom phylogeny. Although species tree topologies were largely consistent across many data treatments, concatenation methods appeared to outperform summary-coalescent methods for sparse alignments. Our results underscore that approaches to species-tree inference based on few loci are likely to be misled by unrepresentative sampling of gene histories, particularly in lineages that may have diversified rapidly. In addition, phylogenomic studies of diatoms, and potentially other hyperdiverse groups, should maximize the number of gene trees with high taxon occupancy, though there is clearly a limit to how many of these genes will be available.

Plutonium Bioassay Testing of United States Atmospheric Nuclear Test Participants and Occupation Forces of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

The pilot urine plutonium bioassay testing program engaged 100 atomic veterans and 58 persons representative of the United States general population using the fission track analysis technique, developed by Brookhaven National Laboratory. The methodology, collected data, scientific challenges, and test results are presented herein. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency and its predecessor agencies conducted this program in the late 1990s to the mid-2000s to determine the feasibility of bioassay testing to supplement dose reconstruction to estimate atomic veterans' doses under the agency's Nuclear Test Personnel Review Program. In summary, Pu urine bioassay using fission track analysis showed inconsistencies in sample measurement repeatability. To use the analysis as a tool to enhance current processes to perform accurate dose reconstructions requires extensive understanding and resolution of the measurement inconsistencies well beyond the scope of this pilot study. Therefore, fission track analysis (FTA) was found not feasible for implementation on a wide scale basis for atomic veterans.

Multi-locus phylogenetic analyses support the monophyly and the Miocene diversification of Iksookimia (Teleostei: Cypriniformes: Cobitidae)

The genus Iksookimia contains six species of primary freshwater fishes that are endemic to South Korea. Previous phylogenetic studies, based on DNA sequence data from three or fewer loci, have suggested non-monophyly of the genus, providing inconsistent resolutions of the relationships of Iksookimia. Our coalescent and concatenation-based phylogenetic analyses, utilizing seven unlinked nuclear-encoded genes, strongly supported Iksookimia as a monophyletic group, emphasizing the importance of multi-locus data in investigating complicated phylogenetic relationships. A relaxed molecular clock analysis using fossil calibrations, indicated that the origin of the major lineages of Iksookimia occurred between ∼12 to 5 Ma, which is consistent with the Miocene uplift of the Taebaek and Sobaek Mountains and the Miocene activation of the major south-eastern faults. These palaeogeographic events may have served as vicariant events in the diversification of Iksookimia.