Mehmet Akif Ersoy University

About: Mehmet Akif Ersoy University is a education organization based out in Burdur, Turkey. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 774 authors who have published 1868 publications receiving 16412 citations.

Chaos in a simple nonlinear system with Atangana-Baleanu derivatives with fractional order

Abstract: Recently, Atangana and Baleanu proposed a derivative with fractional order to answer some outstanding questions that were posed by many researchers within the field of fractional calculus. Their derivative has a non-singular and nonlocal kernel. In this paper, we presented further relationship of their derivatives with some integral transform operators. New results are presented. We applied this derivative to a simple nonlinear system. We show in detail the existence and uniqueness of the system solutions of the fractional system. We obtain a chaotic behavior which was not obtained by local derivative.

Conservation status of freshwater mussels in Europe: state of the art and future challenges.

Abstract: Freshwater mussels of the Order Unionida provide important ecosystem functions and services, yet many of their populations are in decline. We comprehensively review the status of the 16 currently recognized species in Europe, collating for the first time their life-history traits, distribution, conservation status, habitat preferences, and main threats in order to suggest future management actions. In northern, central, and eastern Europe, a relatively homogeneous species composition is found in most basins. In southern Europe, despite the lower species richness, spatially restricted species make these basins a high conservation priority. Information on freshwater mussels in Europe is unevenly distributed with considerable differences in data quality and quantity among countries and species. To make conservation more effective in the future, we suggest greater international cooperation using standardized protocols and methods to monitor and manage European freshwater mussel diversity. Such an approach will not only help conserve this vulnerable group but also, through the protection of these important organisms, will offer wider benefits to freshwater ecosystems.

Diversity, loss, and gain of malaria parasites in a globally invasive bird

Abstract: Invasive species can displace natives, and thus identifying the traits that make aliens successful is crucial for predicting and preventing biodiversity loss. Pathogens may play an important role in the invasive process, facilitating colonization of their hosts in new continents and islands. According to the Novel Weapon Hypothesis, colonizers may out-compete local native species by bringing with them novel pathogens to which native species are not adapted. In contrast, the Enemy Release Hypothesis suggests that flourishing colonizers are successful because they have left their pathogens behind. To assess the role of avian malaria and related haemosporidian parasites in the global spread of a common invasive bird, we examined the prevalence and genetic diversity of haemosporidian parasites (order Haemosporida, genera Plasmodium and Haemoproteus) infecting house sparrows (Passer domesticus). We sampled house sparrows (N = 1820) from 58 locations on 6 continents. All the samples were tested using PCR-based methods; blood films from the PCR-positive birds were examined microscopically to identify parasite species. The results show that haemosporidian parasites in the house sparrows’ native range are replaced by species from local host-generalist parasite fauna in the alien environments of North and South America. Furthermore, sparrows in colonized regions displayed a lower diversity and prevalence of parasite infections. Because the house sparrow lost its native parasites when colonizing the American continents, the release from these natural enemies may have facilitated its invasion in the last two centuries. Our findings therefore reject the Novel Weapon Hypothesis and are concordant with the Enemy Release Hypothesis.

Differential evolution for filter feature selection based on information theory and feature ranking

Abstract: Feature selection is an essential step in various tasks, where filter feature selection algorithms are increasingly attractive due to their simplicity and fast speed. A common filter is to use mutual information to estimate the relationships between each feature and the class labels (mutual relevancy), and between each pair of features (mutual redundancy). This strategy has gained popularity resulting a variety of criteria based on mutual information. Other well-known strategies are to order each feature based on the nearest neighbor distance as in ReliefF, and based on the between-class variance and the within-class variance as in Fisher Score. However, each strategy comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. This paper proposes a new filter criterion inspired by the concepts of mutual information, ReliefF and Fisher Score. Instead of using mutual redundancy, the proposed criterion tries to choose the highest ranked features determined by ReliefF and Fisher Score while providing the mutual relevance between features and the class labels. Based on the proposed criterion, two new differential evolution (DE) based filter approaches are developed. While the former uses the proposed criterion as a single objective problem in a weighted manner, the latter considers the proposed criterion in a multi-objective design. Moreover, a well known mutual information feature selection approach (MIFS) based on maximum-relevance and minimum-redundancy is also adopted in single-objective and multi-objective DE algorithms for feature selection. The results show that the proposed criterion outperforms MIFS in both single objective and multi-objective DE frameworks. The results also indicate that considering feature selection as a multi-objective problem can generally provide better performance in terms of the feature subset size and the classification accuracy.