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Background: Despite all the medical advances introduced for personalized patient treatment and the research supported in search of genetic patterns inherent to the occurrence of its different manifestations on the human being, the unequivocal and effective treatment of cancer, unfortunately, remains as an unresolved challenge within the scientific panorama. Until a universal solution for its control is achieved, early detection mechanisms for preventative diagnosis increasingly avoid treatments, resulting in unreliable effectiveness. The discovery of unequivocal gene patterns allowing us to discern between multiple pathological states could help shed light on patients suspected of an oncological disease but with uncertainty in the histological and immunohistochemical results. Methods: This study presents an approach for pan-cancer diagnosis based on gene expression analysis that determines a reduced set of 12 genes, making it possible to distinguish between the main 14 cancer diseases. Results: Our cascade machine learning process has been robustly designed, obtaining a mean F1 score of 92% and a mean AUC of 99.37% in the test set. Our study showed heterogeneous over-or underexpression of the analyzed genes, which can act as oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes. Upregulation of LPAR5 and PAX8 was demonstrated in thyroid cancer samples. KLF5 was highly expressed in the majority of cancer types. Conclusion: Our model constituted a useful tool for pan-cancer gene expression evaluation. In addition to providing biological clues about a hypothetical common origin of cancer, the scalability of this study promises to be very useful for future studies to reinforce, confirm, and extend the biological observations presented here. Code availability and datasets are stored in the following GitHub repository to aim for the research reproducibility: https://github.com/CasedUgr/PanCancerClassification.

Objective: Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) represents the most common liver disease worldwide. The Latin American population has the highest obesity rates in the world. The aim was to research the factors associated with NAFLD in young adults. Methods: A cross-sectional study was performed on 171 participants with an average age of 21 years who underwent a physical and laboratory examination, anthropometric evaluation, and abdominal ultrasound. Results: Subjects with NAFLD were significantly overweight, with dyslipidemia, and with atherogenic risk. They had the presence of metabolic syndrome compared to those without NAFLD. Bivariate logistic regression showed that body mass index, atherogenic risk, Homeostatic Model Assessment (HOMA) value, and metabolic syndrome were associated with NAFLD development. Conclusions: The variables of HOMA, metabolic syndrome, and atherogenic risk were most associated as risk predictors of this pathology in young adults.

Intrusion detection is the act of detecting unwanted traffic on a network or a device. Several types of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) technologies exist due to the variance of network configurations. Each type has advantages and disadvantage in detection, configuration, and cost. In general, the traditional IDS relies on the extensive knowledge of security experts, in particular, on their familiarity with the computer system to be protected. To reduce this dependence, various datamining and machine learning techniques have been used in the literature. The experiments and evaluations of the proposed intrusion detection system are performed with the NSL-KDD intrusion detection dataset. We will apply different learning algorithms on NSL-KDD data set, to recognize between normal and attack connections and compare their performing in different scenariosdiscretization, features selections and algorithm method for classification- using a powerful statistical analysis: ANOVA. In this study, both the accuracy of the configuration of different system and methodologies used, and also the computational time and complexity of the methodologies are analyzed.

Estimation of COVID-19 dynamics and its evolution is a multidisciplinary effort, which requires the unification of heterogeneous disciplines (scientific, mathematics, epidemiological, biological/bio-chemical, virologists and health disciplines to mention the most relevant) to work together in a better understanding of this pandemic. Time series analysis is of great importance to determine both the similarity in the behavior of COVID-19 in certain countries/states and the establishment of models that can analyze and predict the transmission process of this infectious disease. In this contribution, an analysis of the different states of the United States will be carried out to measure the similarity of COVID-19 time series, using dynamic time warping distance (DTW) as a distance metric. A parametric methodology is proposed to jointly analyze infected and deceased persons. This metric allows to compare time series that have a different time length, making it very appropriate for studying the United States, since the virus did not spread simultaneously in all the states/provinces. After a measure of the similarity between the time series of the states of United States was determined, a hierarchical cluster was created, which makes it possible to analyze the behavioral relationships of the pandemic between different states and to discover interesting patterns and correlations in the underlying data of COVID-19 in the United States. With the proposed methodology, nine different clusters were obtained, showing a different behavior in the eastern zone and western zone of the United States. Finally, to make a prediction of the evolution of COVID-19 in the states, Logistic, Gompertz and SIR model was computed. With these mathematical model it is possible to have a more precise knowledge of the evolution and forecast of the pandemic.

We want to thank the great work done by the reviewers of each of the papers, together with the great interest shown by the editorial of BMC Bioinformatics in IWBBIO Conference. Special thanks to D. Omar El Bakry for his interest and great help to make this Special Issue. Thank the Ministry of Spain for the economic resources within the project with reference RTI2018-101674-B-I00., In the current supplement, we are proud to present seventeen relevant contributions from the 6th International Work-Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering (IWBBIO 2018), which was held during April 25-27, 2018 in Granada (Spain). These contributions have been chosen because of their quality and the importance of their findings., This research has been partially supported by the proyects with reference RTI2018-101674-B-I00 (Ministry of Spain) and B-TIC-414-UGR18 (FEDER, Junta Andalucia and UGR).

This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Sciences, Innovation and Universities under Project RTI-2018-101674-B-I00 and the projects from Junta de Andalucia CV20-64934 and P20-00163., The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused millions of deaths and one of the greatest health crises of all time. In this disease, one of the most important aspects is the early detection of the infection to avoid the spread. In addition to this, it is essential to know how the disease progresses in patients, to improve patient care. This contribution presents a novel method based on a hierarchical intelligent system, that analyzes the application of deep learning models to detect and classify patients with COVID-19 using both X-ray and chest computed tomography (CT). The methodology was divided into three phases, the first being the detection of whether or not a patient suffers from COVID-19, the second step being the evaluation of the percentage of infection of this disease and the final phase is to classify the patients according to their severity. Stratification of patients suffering from COVID-19 according to their severity using automatic systems based on machine learning on medical images (especially X-ray and CT of the lungs) provides a powerful tool to help medical experts in decision making. In this article, a new contribution is made to a stratification system with three severity levels (mild, moderate and severe) using a novel histogram database (which defines how the infection is in the different CT slices for a patient suffering from COVID-19). The first two phases use CNN Densenet-161 pre-trained models, and the last uses SVM with LDA supervised learning algorithms as classification models. The initial stage detects the presence of COVID-19 through X-ray multi-class (COVID-19 vs. No-Findings vs. Pneumonia) and the results obtained for accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score values are 88%, 91%, 87%, and 89%, respectively. The following stage manifested the percentage of COVID-19 infection in the slices of the CT-scans for a patient and the results in the metrics evaluation are 0.95 in Pearson Correlation coefficient, 5.14 in MAE and 8.47 in RMSE. The last stage finally classifies a patient in three degrees of severity as a function of global infection of the lungs and the results achieved are 95% accurate., Spanish Government RTI-2018-101674-B-I00, Junta de Andalucia CV20-64934 P20-00163

Many clinical studies have revealed the high biological similarities existing among different skin pathological states. These similarities create difficulties in the efficient diagnosis of skin cancer, and encourage to study and design new intelligent clinical decision support systems. In this sense, gene expression analysis can help find differentially expressed genes (DEGs) simultaneously discerning multiple skin pathological states in a single test. The integration of multiple heterogeneous transcriptomic datasets requires different pipeline stages to be properly designed: from suitable batch merging and efficient biomarker selection to automated classification assessment. This article presents a novel approach addressing all these technical issues, with the intention of providing new sights about skin cancer diagnosis. Although new future efforts will have to be made in the search for better biomarkers recognizing specific skin pathological states, our study found a panel of 8 highly relevant multiclass DEGs for discerning up to 10 skin pathological states: 2 healthy skin conditions a priori, 2 cataloged precancerous skin diseases and 6 cancerous skin states. Their power of diagnosis over new samples was widely tested by previously well-trained classification models. Robust performance metrics such as overall and mean multiclass F1-score outperformed recognition rates of 94% and 80%, respectively. Clinicians should give special attention to highlighted multiclass DEGs that have high gene expression changes present among them, and understand their biological relationship to different skin pathological states.

In more recent years, a significant increase in the number of available biological experiments has taken place due to the widespread use of massive sequencing data. Furthermore, the continuous developments in the machine learning and in the high performance computing areas, are allowing a faster and more efficient analysis and processing of this type of data. However, biological information about a certain disease is normally widespread due to the use of different sequencing technologies and different manufacturers, in different experiments along the years around the world. Thus, nowadays it is of paramount importance to attain a correct integration of biologically-related data in order to achieve genuine benefits from them. For this purpose, this work presents an integration of multiple Microarray and RNA-seq platforms, which has led to the design of a multiclass study by collecting samples from the main four types of leukemia, quantified at gene expression. Subsequently, in order to find a set of differentially expressed genes with the highest discernment capability among different types of leukemia, an innovative parameter referred to as coverage is presented here. This parameter allows assessing the number of different pathologies that a certain gen is able to discern. It has been evaluated together with other widely known parameters under assessment of an ANOVA statistical test which corroborated its filtering power when the identified genes are subjected to a machine learning process at multiclass level. The optimal tuning of gene extraction evaluated parameters by means of this statistical test led to the selection of 42 highly relevant expressed genes. By the use of minimum- Redundancy Maximum-Relevance (mRMR) feature selection algorithm, these genes were reordered and assessed under the operation of four different classification techniques. Outstanding results were achieved by taking exclusively the first ten genes of the ranking into consideration. Finally, specific literature was consulted on this last subset of genes, revealing the occurrence of practically all of them with biological processes related to leukemia. At sight of these results, this study underlines the relevance of considering a new parameter which facilitates the identification of highly valid expressed genes for simultaneously discerning multiple types of leukemia., This work was supported by Project TIN2015-71873-R (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness -MINECO- and the European Regional Development Fund -ERDF) and Junta de Andalucı´a (P12–TIC–2082).

Preface -- Advanced Statistical Methods for Time Series Analysis and Forecasting -- Advanced Computational Intelligence Methods for Time Series Analysis and Forecasting -- Econometric Models, Financial Forecasting and Risk Analysis -- Time Series Analysis in Earth Sciences -- Energy Time Series Forecasting -- Time Series Analysis and Prediction in Other Real Problems.

Heart disease is currently one of the leading causes of death in developed countries. The electrocardiogram is an important source of information for identifying these conditions, therefore, becomes necessary to seek an advanced system of diagnosis based on these signals. In this paper we used samples of electrocardiograms of MIT-related database with ten types of pathologies and a rate corresponding to normal (healthy patient), which are processed and used for extraction from its two branches of a wide range of features. Next, various techniques have been applied to feature selection based on genetic algorithms, principal component analysis and mutual information. To carry out the task of intelligent classification, 3 different scenarios have been considered. These techniques allow us to achieve greater efficiency in the classification methods used, namely support vector machines (SVM) and decision trees (DT) to perform a comparative analysis between them. Finally, during the development of this contribution, the use of very non-invasive devices (2 channel ECG) was analyzed, we could practically classify them as wearable, which would not need interaction by the user, and whose energy consumption is very small to extend the average life of the user been on it.

The evaluation of multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) is still an open task in bioinformatics. Current MSA scores do not agree about how alignments must be accurately evaluated. Consequently, it is not trivial to know the quality of MSAs when reference alignments are not provided. Recent scores tend to use more complex evaluations adding supplementary biological features. In this work, a set of novel regression approaches are proposed for the MSA evaluation, comparing several supervised learning and mathematical methodologies. Therefore, the following models specifically designed for regression are applied: regression trees, a bootstrap aggregation of regression trees (bagging trees), least-squares support vector machines (LS-SVMs) and Gaussian processes. These algorithms consider a heterogeneous set of biological features together with other standard MSA scores in order to predict the quality of alignments. The most relevant features are then applied to build novel score schemes for the evaluation of alignments. The proposed algorithms are validated by using the BAliBASE benchmark. Additionally, an statistical ANOVA test is performed to study the relevance of these scores considering three alignment factors. According to the obtained results, the four regression models provide accurate evaluations, even outperforming other standard scores such as BLOSUM, PAM or STRIKE.

Smart coaching systems are named to play a central role in both prevention and intervention strategies for behavioral change. While relevant progresses have been made in terms of automatic and continuous monitoring of behavioral aspects, e.g. amount and variety of physical activity, coaching and feedback techniques are still in an infancy stage. Current smart coaching strategies are mostly based on handcrafted messages which hardly personalize to the needs, context and preferences of each user. In order to make these recommendations more realistic, engaging and effective more flexible and sophisticated strategies are needed. This paper presents an ontology-based approach to model personalizable motivational messages for promoting healthy physical activity. The proposed ontology not only models the message intention and its components, e.g. argument, feedback or followup, but also its content, i.e. action, place, time or object required to perform the recommended activity. Through this ontology the messages can also be categorized into multiple classes, e.g. sedentary, mild or vigorous activities, and retrieved based on the preferences, needs and context of the user. Additional information not explicitly present on the messages can be inferred from the ontology by applying reasoning techniques and used to enhance the message retrieval process.