Congrats to Spencer Farrell, who just graduated with a PhD! Currently looking for a post-doc… See researchgate.net/profile/Spence… or scholar.google.com/citations?user…

Nice paper discussing how DAGs (directed acyclic graphs) push variance around, and how this can distort causal discovery benchmarks but may be exploitable IRL if variables have the same natural units. #APaperADay arxiv.org/abs/2102.13647

Congrats Ken Rockwood, for the Roman prize! dal.ca/news/2021/12/1… rymanhealthcare.co.nz/the-ryman-prize

Glad to say our #ML #aging paper has just been published by PLOS Computational Biology doi.org/10.1371/journa… We call it the DJIN model of aging (dynamic joint interpretable network model) Congratulations Spencer Farrell, who also just received a PhD from Dalhousie!

Joint models of #aging predict both health trajectories and mortality — both are needed to compare to large population studies. It is too easy to just get mortality (#Gompertz) right…

Spencer found doi.org/10.1371/journa… that the interactions between health attributes are well-modelled as linear and time-independent. It will be interesting to see how far that generalizes to other types of data and organisms.

Congrats to Glen Pridham (PhD student) who just published a paper on the importance of imputation for precise FI (Frailty Index) studies link.springer.com/article/10.100…

The idea is that while ignoring missing data still lets the FI (a summary measure of aging health) predict well, the ignored values are (with ignore) replaced with the individual average. This leads to a bias (or inaccuracy).

So in #aging with studies of #frailty, you should use good imputation if you want calibrated (comparable) measures of FI between studies, or between populations, or between individuals — essentially if you want to (as precisely as you can) compare FI.

What #imputation is best for frailty imputation? MICE is good, but with CART rather than default. link.springer.com/article/10.100…

ncl.ac.uk/futures/ageing… Nice to see Newcastle recruiting at a senior level in #aginghealth. “This will require a multidisciplinary approach, drawing upon areas such as: •data science •artificial intelligence and machine learning •software engineering”

Glad to see the #alliance (formerly ComputeCanada) up and running on Earth (and Canada)! alliancecan.ca starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Alliance_…

In Canada it would be great to have this: “[CIHR] should explore the formation of [dedicated funding] devoted to biological physics”. nap.edu/read/26403/cha… [300 pages] nationalacademies.org/news/2022/03/r…

A real pleasure to be part of “A complex systems approach to aging biology” perspective nature.com/articles/s4358… led by Alan Cohen. More open longitudinal data will take veils away… #complexaging #quantitativeaging

We’ve just published a nice paper in eLife on #robustness and #resilience during #aging, using binarized data from mice and humans. Both robustness and resilience decline with age, but the timescales of action vary broadly over different health attributes. doi.org/10.7554/eLife.…

It felt good to study similar measures (#robustness and #resilience) in different organisms (#mice and #humans) during #aging It feels like we can learn the most from model organisms when we can do parallel studies with human data (or vice versa) doi.org/10.7554/eLife.…

nytimes.com/2023/01/04/sci…

Just published "Efficient representations of binarized health deficit data: the frailty index and beyond" in Geroscience: rdcu.be/c4jzt Glen Pridham used PCA on binarized deficit data and showed how the FI (and more) naturally emerges! #aging #geroscience #frailty

We just published a paper in Chaos on ”Network topologies for maximal organismal health span and lifespan”, see aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.… The upshot is that scale-free #networks (as previously assumed) are optimal. #aging #complexaging

Looking forward to our @thekingschorus concert this Saturday. “All the World's a Stage: A Concert of Popular Operatic and Stage Choruses” see facebook.com/events/9693604…