Journal of Data Science

This paper presents an empirical study of a recently compiled workforce analytics data-set modeling employment outcomes of Engineering students. The contributions reported in this paper won the data challenge of the ACM IKDD 2016 Conference on Data Science. Two problems are addressed - regression using heterogeneous information types and the extraction of insights/trends from data to make recommendations; these goals are supported by a range of visualizations. Whereas the data-set is specific to a nation, the underlying techniques and visualization methods are generally applicable. Gaussian processes are proposed to model and predict salary as a function of heterogeneous independent attributes. Key novelties the GP approach brings to the domain of understanding workforce analytics are (a) statistically sound notion of uncertainty of prediction that is data dependent, (b) automatic relevance determination of various independent attributes to the dependent variable (salary),(c) seamless incorporation of both numeric and string attributes within the same regression frame- work without dichotomization; specifically, string attributes include single-word or categorical (e.g. gender) or nominal attributes (e.g. college tier) or multi-word attributes (e.g. specialization) and (d) treatment of all data as being correlated towards making predictions. Insights from both predictive modeling approaches and data analysis were used to suggest factors, that if improved, might lead to better starting salaries for Engineering students. A range of visualization techniques were used to extract key employment patterns from the data.

Abstract: In this study, the data based on nucleic acid amplification tech niques (Polymerase chain reaction) consisting of 23 different transcript vari ables which are involved to investigate genetic mechanism regulating chlamy dial infection disease by measuring two different outcomes of muring C. pneumonia lung infection (disease expressed as lung weight increase and C. pneumonia load in the lung), have been analyzed. A model with fewer reduced transcript variables of interests at early infection stage has been obtained by using some of the traditional (stepwise regression, partial least squares regression (PLS)) and modern variable selection methods (least ab solute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), forward stagewise regres sion and least angle regression (LARS)). Through these variable selection methods, the variables of interest are selected to investigate the genetic mechanisms that determine the outcomes of chlamydial lung infection. The transcript variables Tim3, GATA3, Lacf, Arg2 (X4, X5, X8 and X13) are being detected as the main variables of interest to study the C. pneumonia disease (lung weight increase) or C. pneumonia lung load outcomes. Models including these key variables may provide possible answers to the problem of molecular mechanisms of chlamydial pathogenesis.

Subsampling the data is used in this paper as a learning method about the influence of the data points for drawing inference on the parameters of a fitted logistic regression model. The alternative, alternative regularized, alternative regularized lasso, and alternative regularized ridge estimators are proposed for the parameter estimation of logistic regression models and are then compared with the maximum likelihood estimators. The proposed alternative regularized estimators are obtained by using a tuning parameter but the proposed alternative estimators are not regularized. The proposed alternative regularized lasso estimators are the averaged standard lasso estimators and the alternative regularized ridge estimators are also the averaged standard ridge estimators over subsets of groups where the number of subsets could be smaller than the number of parameters. The values of the tuning parameters are obtained to make the alternative regularized estimators very close to the maximum likelihood estimators and the process is explained with two real data as well as a simulated study. The alternative and alternative regularized estimators always have the closed form expressions in terms of observations that the maximum likelihood estimators do not have. When the maximum likelihood estimators do not have the closed form expressions, the alternative regularized estimators thus obtained provide the approximate closed form expressions for them.

Researchers and public officials tend to agree that until a vaccine is readily available, stopping SARS-CoV-2 transmission is the name of the game. Testing is the key to preventing the spread, especially by asymptomatic individuals. With testing capacity restricted, group testing is an appealing alternative for comprehensive screening and has recently received FDA emergency authorization. This technique tests pools of individual samples, thereby often requiring fewer testing resources while potentially providing multiple folds of speedup. We approach group testing from a data science perspective and offer two contributions. First, we provide an extensive empirical comparison of modern group testing techniques based on simulated data. Second, we propose a simple one-round method based on ${\ell _{1}}$-norm sparse recovery, which outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches at certain disease prevalence rates.

Early in the course of the pandemic in Colorado, researchers wished to fit a sparse predictive model to intubation status for newly admitted patients. Unfortunately, the training data had considerable missingness which complicated the modeling process. I developed a quick solution to this problem: Median Aggregation of penaLized Coefficients after Multiple imputation (MALCoM). This fast, simple solution proved successful on a prospective validation set. In this manuscript, I show how MALCoM performs comparably to a popular alternative (MI-lasso), and can be implemented in more general penalized regression settings. A simulation study and application to local COVID-19 data is included.