The combined effect of mutual association within the co-inhabiting microbes in human body is known to play a major role in determining health status of individuals. The differential taxonomic abundance between healthy and disease are often used to identify microbial markers. However, in order to make a microbial community based inference, it is important not only to consider microbial abundances, but also to quantify the changes observed among inter microbial associations. In the present study, we introduce a method called 'NetShift' to quantify rewiring and community changes in microbial association networks between healthy and disease. Additionally, we devise a score to identify important microbial taxa which serve as 'drivers' from the healthy to disease. We demonstrate the validity of our score on a number of scenarios and apply our methodology on two real world metagenomic datasets. The 'NetShift' methodology is also implemented as a web-based application available at https://web.rniapps.net/netshift
Sports franchises that participate in team sports can make better decisions regarding their players' financial compensation, renewal of the contracts, bidding strategies during the auction, etc., if they can adequately assess the value or worth of their players. Evaluating the value of a player in a team sport is difficult because various team members play different roles. In this study, we resolve this by measuring the value of a player in terms of how his inclusion in the team affects the team's probability of winning. With this notion of value, we develop a technique to measure the worth of a cricket player for his franchise. To illustrate this technique, we evaluate the values of cricket players who play in the Indian Premier League. We also study the relationship between players' values and their salaries. We find that a few popular players earn disproportionately more than others. This disproportionality in the income of popular players cannot be justified by their performance alone, as adjudged by their values in this work. We attribute the disproportionality in the income to the factors not captured via conventional yardsticks, including leadership or brand value.
We examine the sequential auctions of nonidentical and synergistically related (complementary/substitutable) objects. The objects are divided into categories, which are collections of substitutable items. Inter-category objects are complements. Bidders demand one unit from each category and aim to create a bundle of inter-category objects. We solve for all equilibria of the game with an exogenous order of sale. We establish that the sequential auction mechanism can achieve efficient outcomes subject to the order in which objects are presented during the auction. Specifically, we show that an efficient outcome is achieved if, in each category, the object that is valued more by both bidders (if any) is auctioned first. We show that the sequential auction mechanism suffers from the exposure problem in the presence of multiple synergies. We establish that the order in which the categories are presented during the auction may affect objects’ selling prices. Specifically, a decreasing trend in selling prices is observed in some of the outcomes.
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