Bruna Wundervald

National University of Ireland, Maynooth | NUI Maynooth · Hamilton Institute

Background Psoriatic Arthritis (PsA) is a chronic, inflammatory disease that severely impacts the quality of life. The disease develops in 20-30% of people with psoriasis (PsO). Known clinical and genetic risk factors lack sensitivity and specificity in ability to predict progression from PsO to PsA. The identification of molecular biomarkers of Ps...

Background The presence of enthesitis in PsA may provide clues to disease pathogenesis, aid diagnosis and contribute to poor prognosis. Ultrasound is an invaluable tool in assessing entheseal disease, but it requires training and is time consuming. We investigated whether enthesitis may be measured by changes in serum proteins and as such allow us...

Background The Group for Research and Assessment of Psoriasis and Psoriatic Arthritis (GRAPPA) has identified a need for biomarkers to predict which patients (pts) with psoriatic arthritis (PsA) are most likely to respond to a specific therapy. Failure to identify effective treatments early on results in sub-optimal PsA disease management. Tofaciti...

We propose a simple yet powerful extension of Bayesian Additive Regression Trees which we name Hierarchical Embedded BART (HE-BART). The model allows for random effects to be included at the terminal node level of a set of regression trees, making HE-BART a non-parametric alternative to mixed effects models which avoids the need for the user to spe...

Music is an important part of most people’s lives and also of the culture of a country. Moreover, the different characteristics of songs, such as genre and the chord sequences, could have different impacts on individual behaviours. Even considering just seven chords and the respective variations, originality can be a crucial element of a song’s suc...

Increasingly, music recommendations are influencing user listening behavior, which naturally impacts the music industry, as well as the cultural and social aspects of our society. This has opened up a research area, namely the identification of biases introduced by recommender systems in the music context. Recent research, which focused on users of...

We develop a new approach for feature selection via gain penalization in tree-based models. First, we show that previous methods do not perform sufficient regularization and often exhibit sub-optimal out-of-sample performance, especially when correlated features are present. Instead, we develop a new gain penalization idea that exhibits a general l...

Many factors are involved in the definition of music genres, making it an active area of research. This work focuses on verifying the connection between harmonic information and genre specification in Brazilian music, through the evaluation of feature importance in machine learning models. We construct four different sets of manually engineered har...

We develop a new approach for feature selection via gain penalization in tree-based models. First, we show that previous methods do not perform sufficient regularization and often exhibit sub-optimal out-of-sample performance, especially when correlated features are present. Instead, we develop a new gain penalization idea that exhibits a general l...

This talk-workshop is suited to all levels of R. You can expect from it: 1. An overview of the theory of tree-based models: decision trees and random forests; 2. Learn how to implement and interpret random forests in R

Bayesian methods are an alternative to standard frequentist methods and as a result, have gained popularity. This report will display some of the fundamental ideas in Bayesian modeling and will present both the theory behind Bayesian statistics and some practical examples of Bayesian linear regression. Simulated data and real-world data were used t...

Music genre can be hard to describe: many factors are involved, such as style, music technique, and historical context. Some genres even have overlapping characteristics. Looking for a better understanding of how music genres are related to musical harmonic structures, we gathered data about the music chords for thousands of popular Brazilian songs...