Biomedical subjects

Björn Olsson

Publications and source records attributed to Björn Olsson.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Economic valuation for sustainable development in the Swedish coastal zone.

The Swedish coastal zone is a scene of conflicting interests about various goods and services provided by nature. Open-access conditions and the public nature of many services increase the difficulty in resolving these conflicts. "Sustainability" is a vague but widely accepted guideline for finding reasonable trade-offs between different interests. The UN view of sustainable development suggests that coastal zone management should aim at a sustainable ecological, economic, and social-cultural development. Looking closer at economic sustainability, it is observed that economic analyses about whether changes in society imply a gain or a loss should take into account the economic value of the environment. Methods used for making such economic valuation in the context of the Swedish coastal zone are briefly reviewed. It is noted that the property rights context matters for the results of a valuation study. This general background is followed by a concise presentation of the design and results of four valuation studies on Swedish coastal zone issues. One study is on the economic value of an improved bathing water quality in the Stockholm archipelago. The other studies are a travel cost study about the economic value of improved recreational fisheries in the Stockholm archipelago, a replacement cost study on the value of restoring habitats for sea trout, and a choice experiment study on the economic value of improved water quality along the Swedish westcoast.

Animals↗

PubMed2003

Genetic network inference: the effects of preprocessing.

Clustering of gene expression data and gene network inference from such data has been a major research topic in recent years. In clustering, pairwise measurements are performed when calculating the distance matrix upon which the clustering is based. Pairwise measurements can also be used for gene network inference, by deriving potential interactions above a certain correlation or distance threshold. Our experiments show how interaction networks derived by this simple approach exhibit low-but significant-sensitivity and specificity. We also explore the effects that normalization and prefiltering have on the results of methods for identifying interactions from expression data. Before derivation of interactions or clustering, preprocessing is often performed by applying normalization to rescale the expression profiles and prefiltering where genes that do not appear to contribute to regulation are removed. In this paper, different ways of normalizing in combination with different distance measurements are tested on both unfiltered and prefiltered data, different prefiltering criteria are considered.

Cluster Analysis↗

PubMed2002

Artificial intelligence techniques for bioinformatics.

This review provides an overview of the ways in which techniques from artificial intelligence (AI) can be usefully employed in bioinformatics, both for modelling biological data and for making new discoveries. The paper covers three techniques: symbolic machine learning approaches (nearest neighbour and identification tree techniques), artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms. Each technique is introduced and supported with examples taken from the bioinformatics literature. These examples include folding prediction, viral protease cleavage prediction, classification, multiple sequence alignment and microarray gene expression analysis.

Algorithms↗