ABSTRACT Animating realistic avatars requires using high‐quality animations for every possible state the avatar can be in. This includes actions like walking or running, but also subtle movements that convey emotions and personality. Idle animations, such as standing, breathing, or looking around, are crucial for realism and believability. In virtual applications, these are often handcrafted or recorded with actors, but this is costly. Furthermore, recording realistic idle animations may be complex, since the actor being aware of the recording could interfere with the genuineness of the movements. Currently, there are no large‐scale idle animation datasets for deep learning, and this recording challenge may partly explain this. Nevertheless, this paper concludes that both acted and genuine idle animations are perceived as real, and users are not able to distinguish between them. It also states that raw recorded idle animations and artist‐retouched ones are perceived differently. These conclusions mean that recording idle animations should be easier than expected, implying that actors can be instructed to act the movements, significantly simplifying the recording process. This should help future efforts to record idle animation datasets. Finally, we publish ReActIdle, the first three dimensional idle animation dataset containing long sequences of real and acted idle motions.

With the rise of genome-wide association studies (GWAS), the analysis of typical GWAS data sets with thousands of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) has become crucial in biomedicine research. Here, we propose a new method to identify SNPs related to disease in case-control studies. The method, based on genetic distances between individuals, takes into account the possible population substructure, and avoids the issues of multiple testing. The method provides two ordered lists of SNPs; one with SNPs which minor alleles can be considered risk alleles for the disease, and another one with SNPs which minor alleles can be considered as protective. These two lists provide a useful tool to help the researcher to decide where to focus attention in a first stage.

BACKGROUND: Microarray technology provides the expression level of many genes. Nowadays, an important issue is to select a small number of informative differentially expressed genes that provide biological knowledge and may be key elements for a disease. With the increasing volume of data generated by modern biomedical studies, software is required for effective identification of differentially expressed genes. Here, we describe an R package, called ORdensity, that implements a recent methodology (Irigoien and Arenas, 2018) developed in order to identify differentially expressed genes. The benefits of parallel implementation are discussed. RESULTS: ORdensity gives the user the list of genes identified as differentially expressed genes in an easy and comprehensible way. The experimentation carried out in an off-the-self computer with the parallel execution enabled shows an improvement in run-time. This implementation may also lead to an important use of memory load. Results previously obtained with simulated and real data indicated that the procedure implemented in the package is robust and suitable for differentially expressed genes identification. CONCLUSIONS: The new package, ORdensity, offers a friendly and easy way to identify differentially expressed genes, which is very useful for users not familiar with programming. AVAILABILITY: https://github.com/rsait/ORdensity.

BACKGROUND: An important issue in microarray data is to select, from thousands of genes, a small number of informative differentially expressed (DE) genes which may be key elements for a disease. If each gene is analyzed individually, there is a big number of hypotheses to test and a multiple comparison correction method must be used. Consequently, the resulting cut-off value may be too small. Moreover, an important issue is the selection's replicability of the DE genes. We present a new method, called ORdensity, to obtain a reproducible selection of DE genes. It takes into account the relation between all genes and it is not a gene-by-gene approach, unlike the usually applied techniques to DE gene selection. RESULTS: The proposed method returns three measures, related to the concepts of outlier and density of false positives in a neighbourhood, which allow us to identify the DE genes with high classification accuracy. To assess the performance of ORdensity, we used simulated microarray data and four real microarray cancer data sets. The results indicated that the method correctly detects the DE genes; it is competitive with other well accepted methods; the list of DE genes that it obtains is useful for the correct classification or diagnosis of new future samples and, in general, it is more stable than other procedures. CONCLUSIONS: ORdensity is a new method for identifying DE genes that avoids some of the shortcomings of the individual gene identification and it is stable when the original sample is changed by subsamples.

This paper presents a solution to the problem of how to identify the units in groups or clusters that have the greatest degree of centrality and best characterize each group. This problem frequently arises in the classification of data such as types of tumor, gene expression profiles or general biomedical data. It is particularly important in the common context that many units do not properly belong to any cluster. Furthermore, in gene expression data classification, good identification of the most central units in a cluster enables recognition of the most important samples in a particular pathological process. We propose a new depth function that allows us to identify central units. As our approach is based on a measure of distance or dissimilarity between any pair of units, it can be applied to any kind of multivariate data (continuous, binary or multiattribute data). Therefore, it is very valuable in many biomedical applications, which usually involve noncontinuous data, such as clinical, pathological, or biological data sources. We validate the approach using artificial examples and apply it to empirical data. The results show the good performance of our statistical approach.

BACKGROUND: Gene expression technologies have opened up new ways to diagnose and treat cancer and other diseases. Clustering algorithms are a useful approach with which to analyze genome expression data. They attempt to partition the genes into groups exhibiting similar patterns of variation in expression level. An important problem associated with gene classification is to discern whether the clustering process can find a relevant partition as well as the identification of new genes classes. There are two key aspects to classification: the estimation of the number of clusters, and the decision as to whether a new unit (gene, tumor sample...) belongs to one of these previously identified clusters or to a new group. RESULTS: ICGE is a user-friendly R package which provides many functions related to this problem: identify the number of clusters using mixed variables, usually found by applied biomedical researchers; detect whether the data have a cluster structure; identify whether a new unit belongs to one of the pre-identified clusters or to a novel group, and classify new units into the corresponding cluster. The functions in the ICGE package are accompanied by help files and easy examples to facilitate its use. CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrate the utility of ICGE by analyzing simulated and real data sets. The results show that ICGE could be very useful to a broad research community.

Time course studies with microarray techniques and experimental replicates are very useful in biomedical research. We present, in replicate experiments, an alternative approach to select and cluster genes according to a new measure for association between genes. First, the procedure normalizes and standardizes the expression profile of each gene, and then, identifies scaling parameters that will further minimize the distance between replicates of the same gene. Then, the procedure filters out genes with a flat profile, detects differences between replicates, and separates genes without significant differences from the rest. For this last group of genes, we define a mean profile for each gene and use it to compute the distance between two genes. Next, a hierarchical clustering procedure is proposed, a statistic is computed for each cluster to determine its compactness, and the total number of classes is determined. For the rest of the genes, those with significant differences between replicates, the procedure detects where the differences between replicates lie, and assigns each gene to the best fitting previously identified profile or defines a new profile. We illustrate this new procedure using simulated data and a representative data set arising from a microarray experiment with replication, and report interesting results.