Today I discovered the Public Domain Image Archive attached to the Public Domain Review which has some great essays and commentary on image collections, like the one below.
Utagawa Hiroshige: Last Great Master of Ukiyo-e
Just before Hiroshige died, possibly of cholera, he wrote the following poem:
I leave my brush in the East
And set forth on my journey.
I shall see the famous places in the Western Land.
This was a fortelling of sorts because Hiroshige
was a hugely influential figure, not only in his homeland but also on Western painting. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as a part of the trend in “Japonism”, European artists such as Monet, Whistler, and Cézanne, looked to Hiroshige’s work for inspiration, and a certain Vincent van Gogh was known to paint copies of his prints.
Los Angeles Burns
Driven by global climate change, the Santa Ana “Devil” winds were intense this year parching the land.
Part of the reason for spread was the rerouting of funds away from the fire department which reduced the ability to respond appropriately.
Besides the immense personal damage, NASA’s JPL was shut down.
Though not all happy memories, LA was home once. It’s where I discovered my love bio bio and computers, not to mention the tremendous library system and the Tar Pits.
Rethinking Dose-Response Analysis with Bayesian Inference
Analyzing dose-response experiments is tricky and the standard Marquardt-Levenberg algorithm “does not evaluate the certainty (or uncertainty) of the estimates nor does it allow for the statistical comparison of two datasets,”. This can lead to biased conclusions as a lot of subjectivity and wishful thinking has scope to creep in.
A Bayesian Approach?
The authors propose a Bayesian inference methodology that addresses these limitations. This approach can “characterize the noise of dataset while inferring probable values distributions for the efficacy metrics,”.
- It also allows for the statistical comparison of two datasets and can “compute the probability that one value is greater than the other”.
- Critically, it incorporates prior knowledge (and intution) through prior distributions: “The model incorporates the notion of intuition through prior distributions and computes the most probable value distribution for each of the efficacy metrics”.
Beyond Single Point Estimates
This method moves beyond single-point estimates, which can be misleading, and “explicitly quantifies the reliability of the efficacy metrics taking into account the noise over the data”. The goal is to help researchers “analyze and interpret dose–response experiments by including uncertainty in their reasoning and providing them a simple and visual approach to do so”.
So What?
By “considering distributions of probable values instead of single point estimates,” this Bayesian approach provides a more robust interpretation of your data. This is particularly important when dealing with noisy or unresponsive datasets, which can often occur in drug discovery.
Though their demo is offline, the code is available.
This was on repeat today
Image source: Book Cover: Ignatius Donnelly. Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel. New York, D. Appleton and Company, 1883
Aneesh Sathe 
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