CALL FOR PAPERS
International Journal of Approximate Reasoning
Special issue on Statistical and Computational methods for genomics and integrative genomics
Background and Scope:
In the last decade, the advent of microarray and next-generation sequencing technologies has created the need of statistical and computational methodologies specifically developed for dealing with these types of data and novel biomedical research goals. Genomic data measure quantities (such as, gene-expression, copy number, genotype, methylation) at several thousands or millions of positions along the genome, resulting in an enormous amount of information from which to extract the relevant content. They are usually noisy and subject to uncertainties due to non-biological variations, which must be taken into account during the modelling and inferential processes. Many other issues arise when the field of application regards the study of complex genetic diseases, since patients can be highly heterogeneous and several different lesions may alter the same biological pathway. Moreover, the number of patients is usually small with respect to the number of variables, which brings another facet to the problem. Approaches that try to overcome all these difficulties rely on biological assumptions and integrate established knowledge and multiple types of data. Data integration may comprise not only different genomic data, but also clinical and other patient information. Combining all this information by an accurate biological and statistical modelling may allow us to achieve reliable biomedical discoveries. Inferential and computational issues must be also considered, as data have very high dimension and computational resources are limited.
Papers are sought on theoretical and practical considerations involving statistical and computational approaches to address problems and data from the biomedical domain, including but not limited to:
Next generation sequencing data
Microarray data
Data integration in genomics
Genetic network modelling and inference
Gene pattern discovery
Disease classification and prediction
Biomarker discovery
Computational biology
General methodological and algorithmic developments are also welcome as long as they have a clear applicability to the biomedical domain. If unsure about the fit of your intended paper or for any additional information, please do not hesitate to contact the guest editors.
Important Dates:
Deadline for expression of interest to submit a paper (suggested): September 15, 2015 (by sending an email to the guest editors with a possible title and one/two sentences explaining the topic).
Deadline for first submission: October 15, 2015
Reviews available: December, 2015
Expected online publication: April, 2016
Submission and Review Process:
Authors should prepare their papers according to the Guide for Authors of the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning (http://ees.elsevier.com/ija/). All submissions must be made electronically through the Elsevier’s EES submission system at http://ees.elsevier.com/ija/ with the Article Type ‘SI: Statistical genomics’. All papers will be peer-reviewed following the IJAR review guidelines.
Guest Editors:
Paola M.V. Rancoita
University Centre for Statistics for the Biomedical Sciences
Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Italy
http://www.unisr.it/persona.asp?id=8888&linguacv=english
Cassio P. de Campos
School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Queen’s University Belfast, UK
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/~c.decampos/
