University of Milano-Bicocca

About: University of Milano-Bicocca is a education organization based out in Milan, Italy. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Blood pressure. The organization has 8972 authors who have published 22322 publications receiving 620484 citations. The organization is also known as: Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca & Universita degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca.

Merging H/W/Z + 0 and 1 jet at NLO with no merging scale: a path to parton shower + NNLO matching

Abstract: We consider the POWHEG generator for a H/W/Z boson plus one jet, augmented with the recently proposed MiNLO method for the choice of scales and the inclusion of Sudakov form factors. Within this framework, the generator covers all the transverse- momentum region of the H/W/Z boson, i.e. no generation cuts are needed to obtain a finite result. By construction, the generator achieves NLO accuracy for distributions involving a finite (and relatively large) transverse momentum of the boson. We examine the conditions under which also the totally inclusive distributions (e.g. the boson rapidity distribution) achieve NLO accuracy. We find that a minimal modification of the MiNLO prescription is sufficient to achieve such accuracy. We thus construct a NLO generator for H/W/Z boson plus one jet production such that it smoothly merges into a NLO single boson production in the small transverse-momentum region. We notice that, by simply reweighting the boson rapidity distribution to NNLO predictions, we achieve a NNLO accurate generator matched to a shower. The approach applies to all production processes involving a colorless massive system plus one jet. We discuss how it may be extended to general processes.

First seizure definitions and worldwide incidence and mortality

Abstract: While all patients with epilepsy experience seizures, not all individuals with seizures have epilepsy. Seizures may be acute symptomatic or unprovoked. Acute symptomatic seizures are seizures occurring at the time of a systemic insult or in close temporal association with a documented brain insult. Unprovoked seizures are seizures occurring in the absence of precipitating factors and may be caused by a static injury (remote symptomatic seizures) or a progressing injury (progressive symptomatic seizures). Unprovoked seizures may be single or recurrent (epilepsy). The incidence of acute symptomatic seizures is 29-39 per 100,000 per year. These predominate in men, in the youngest age class, and in the elderly. Traumatic brain injury, cerebrovascular disease, drug withdrawal, infarction, and metabolic insults are the commonest causes. The incidence of single unprovoked seizures is 23-61 per 100,000 person-years. As with epilepsy, single unprovoked seizures predominate in men and in patients less than 12 months and older than 65 years. Studies on the mortality of acute symptomatic seizures are lacking. A standardized mortality ratio (SMR) of 2.3 has been reported in patients experiencing a single unprovoked seizure. The SMR in patients with a newly diagnosed unprovoked seizure ranges from 2.5 to 4.1 according to the study population and design. The SMR is highest in the youngest patients and in those with symptomatic seizures.

A Meta-Analysis of Genome-Wide Association Scans Identifies IL18RAP, PTPN2, TAGAP, and PUS10 As Shared Risk Loci for Crohn's Disease and Celiac Disease

Abstract: Crohn's disease (CD) and celiac disease (CelD) are chronic intestinal inflammatory diseases, involving genetic and environmental factors in their pathogenesis. The two diseases can co-occur within families, and studies suggest that CelD patients have a higher risk to develop CD than the general population. These observations suggest that CD and CelD may share common genetic risk loci. Two such shared loci, IL18RAP and PTPN2, have already been identified independently in these two diseases. The aim of our study was to explicitly identify shared risk loci for these diseases by combining results from genome-wide association study (GWAS) datasets of CD and CelD. Specifically, GWAS results from CelD (768 cases, 1,422 controls) and CD (3,230 cases, 4,829 controls) were combined in a meta-analysis. Nine independent regions had nominal association p-value <1.0×10−5 in this meta-analysis and showed evidence of association to the individual diseases in the original scans (p-value <1×10−2 in CelD and <1×10−3 in CD). These include the two previously reported shared loci, IL18RAP and PTPN2, with p-values of 3.37×10−8 and 6.39×10−9, respectively, in the meta-analysis. The other seven had not been reported as shared loci and thus were tested in additional CelD (3,149 cases and 4,714 controls) and CD (1,835 cases and 1,669 controls) cohorts. Two of these loci, TAGAP and PUS10, showed significant evidence of replication (Bonferroni corrected p-values <0.0071) in the combined CelD and CD replication cohorts and were firmly established as shared risk loci of genome-wide significance, with overall combined p-values of 1.55×10−10 and 1.38×10−11 respectively. Through a meta-analysis of GWAS data from CD and CelD, we have identified four shared risk loci: PTPN2, IL18RAP, TAGAP, and PUS10. The combined analysis of the two datasets provided the power, lacking in the individual GWAS for single diseases, to detect shared loci with a relatively small effect.

Generalized Quantiles as Risk Measures

Abstract: In the statistical and actuarial literature several generalizations of quantiles have been considered, by means of the minimization of a suitable asymmetric loss function. All these generalized quantiles share the important property of elicitability, that is recently receiving a lot of attention since it corresponds to the existence of a natural backtesting methodology. In this paper we investigate the case of M-quantiles, defined as the minimizers of an asymmetric convex loss function, in contrast to Orlicz quantiles, that have been considered in Bellini and Rosazza Gianin (2012). We discuss their properties as risk measures and point out the connection with the zero utility premium principle and with shortfall risk measures introduced by Follmer and Schied (2002). In particular, we show that the only M-quantiles that are coherent risk measures are the expectiles, introduced by Newey and Powell (1987) as the minimizers of an asymmetric quadratic loss function. We provide their dual and Kusuoka representations and discuss their relationship with CVaR. We analyze their asymptotic properties and show that for very heavy tailed distributions expectiles are more conservative than the usual quantiles. Finally, we show their robustness in the sense of lipschitzianity with respect to the Wasserstein metric.