Statistics and Biology: A Virtuous Cycle Driving Innovation
summary
Work focuses on extracting actionable mechanisms from messy biological data: iterative random forests plus random intersection trees extract decision-rule response surfaces from trees, applied to corn/soy on a 1,000‑acre Arkansas farm to drive fertilizer and save about $20 per acre (~30% uplift). County COVID analysis links Bray‑Curtis beta diversity (from the Thousand Homes Study, ~1,100 homes, ~500 counties) to higher‑quantile IFRs (strong at 75th/90th) but only in low‑turnover counties (residents 10+ years). A graph policy network RL system outperforms baselines on simulated SARS‑CoV‑2 binding but yields an uninterpretable latent space, so design principles remain unknown.
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