Differential coexpression analysis usually requires the definition of 'distance' or 'similarity' between measured datasets. Until now, the most common choice is Pearson correlation coefficient. However, Pearson correlation coefficient is sensitive to outliers. Biweight midcorrelation is considered to be a good alternative to Pearson correlation since it is more robust to outliers. In this paper, we introduce to use Biweight Midcorrelation to measure 'similarity' between gene expression profiles, and provide a new approach for gene differential coexpression analysis. Firstly, we calculate the biweight midcorrelation coefficients between all gene pairs. Then, we filter out non-informative correlation pairs using the 'half-thresholding' strategy and calculate the differential coexpression value of gene, The experimental results on simulated data show that the new approach performed better than three previously published differential coexpression analysis (DCEA) methods. Moreover, we use the maximum clique analysis to gene subset included genes identified by our approach and previously reported T2D-related genes, many additional discoveries can be found through our method.

How to achieve competitive accuracy and less computation time simultaneously for background estimation is still an intractable task. In this paper, an effective background subtraction approach for video sequences is proposed based on a subsuperpixel model. In our algorithm, the superpixels of the first frame are constructed using a simple linear iterative clustering method. After transforming the frame from a color format to gray level, the initial superpixels are divided into K smaller units, i.e., subsuperpixels, via the k-means clustering algorithm. The background model is then initialized by representing each subsuperpixel as a multidimensional feature vector. For the subsequent frames, moving objects are detected by the subsuperpixel representation and a weighting measure. In order to deal with ghost artifacts, a background model updating strategy is devised, based on the number of pixels represented by each cluster center. As each superpixel is refined via the subsuperpixel representation, the proposed method is more efficient and achieves a competitive accuracy for background subtraction. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

DNA N6-methyladenine (6mA) is produced by the N6 position of the adenine being methylated, which occurs at the molecular level, and is involved in numerous vital biological processes in the rice genome. Given the shortcomings of biological experiments, researchers have developed many computational methods to predict 6mA sites and achieved good performance. However, the existing methods do not consider the occurrence mechanism of 6mA to extract features from the molecular structure. In this paper, a novel deep learning method is proposed by devising DNA molecular graph feature and residual block structure for 6mA sites prediction in rice, named MGF6mARice. Firstly, the DNA sequence is changed into a simplified molecular input line entry system (SMILES) format, which reflects chemical molecular structure. Secondly, for the molecular structure data, we construct the DNA molecular graph feature based on the principle of graph convolutional network. Then, the residual block is designed to extract higher level, distinguishable features from molecular graph features. Finally, the prediction module is used to obtain the result of whether it is a 6mA site. By means of 10-fold cross-validation, MGF6mARice outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. Multiple experiments have shown that the molecular graph feature and residual block can promote the performance of MGF6mARice in 6mA prediction. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to derive a feature of DNA sequence by considering the chemical molecular structure. We hope that MGF6mARice will be helpful for researchers to analyze 6mA sites in rice.

How to accurately segment a solar photovoltaic panel in an infrared image is an intractable problem due to some unfavorable factors. In this article, an effective approach is proposed for solar photovoltaic panel segmentation from infrared images. In order to alleviate the effect of uneven color distribution, a guided filter-based image-enhancement method is first devised to strengthen the edges of solar photovoltaic panels. Moreover, a two-stage method is proposed to detect the contour lines of solar photovoltaic panels. In our algorithm, first, after a thresholding operation, contours in the images are detected by means of a line-segment detector. Then, a method based on k-means clustering is employed to eliminate lines caused by noise or irrelevant background areas. In addition, a background-subtraction strategy is designed to achieve a more accurate segmentation result by removing the remaining background regions. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method for the segmentation of solar photovoltaic panels.