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This paper aims to investigate the energy saving and carbon reduction performance of cross-laminated timber residential buildings in the severe cold region of China through a computational simulation approach. The authors selected Harbin as the simulation environment, designed reference residential buildings with different storeys which were constructed using reinforced concrete (RC) and cross-laminated timber (CLT) systems, then simulated the energy performance using the commercial software IESTM and finally made comparisions between the RC and CLT buildings. The results show that the estimated energy consumption and carbon emissions for CLT buildings are 9.9% and 13.2% lower than those of RC buildings in view of life-cycle assessment. This indicates that the CLT construction system has good potential for energy saving when compared to RC in the severe cold region of China. The energy efficiency of residential buildings is closely related to the height for both RC and CLT buildings. In spite of the higher cost of materials for high-rise buildings, both RC and CLT tall residential buildings have better energy efficiency than low-rise and mid-rise buildings in the severe cold region of China.

Reinforcement learning (RL) aims at searching the best policy model for decision making, and has been shown powerful for sequential recommendations. The training of the policy by RL, however, is placed in an environment. In many real-world applications, the policy training in the real environment can cause an unbearable cost due to the exploration. Environment estimation from the past data is thus an appealing way to release the power of RL in these applications. The estimation of the environment is, basically, to extract the causal effect model from the data. However, real-world applications are often too complex to offer fully observable environment information. Therefore, quite possibly there are unobserved variables lying behind the data, which can obstruct an effective estimation of the environment. In this paper, by treating the hidden variables as a hidden policy, we propose a partially-observed multi-agent environment estimation (POMEE) approach to learn the partially-observed environment. To make a better extraction of the causal relationship between actions and rewards, we design a deep uplift inference network (DUIN) model to learn the causal effects of different actions. By implementing the environment model in the DUIN structure, we propose a POMEE with uplift inference (POMEE-UI) approach to generate a partially-observed environment with a causal reward mechanism. We analyze the effect of our method in both artificial and real-world environments. We first use an artificial recommender environment, abstracted from a real-world application, to verify the effectiveness of POMEE-UI. We then test POMEE-UI in the real application of Didi Chuxing. Experiment results show that POMEE-UI can effectively estimate the hidden variables, leading to a more reliable virtual environment. The online A/B testing results show that POMEE can derive a well-performing recommender policy in the real-world application.

Pharidae is one of the most ecologically and commercially significant families of marine Bivalvia; however, the taxonomy and phylogeny of Pharidae has been ongoing for quite some time and remains a contentious issue. Here, to resolve some problematical relationships among this family, the complete mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) of Sinonovacula rivularis (17,159 bp) and Novaculina chinensis (15,957 bp) were assembled, and a comparative mitochondrial genomic analysis was conducted. Both mitogenomes contain 12 protein-coding genes, 22 transfer RNA genes, and two ribosomal RNA genes. Among the published Pharidae mitogenomes, N. chinensis exhibited the smallest genome size but the highest AT content. The results of the phylogenetic trees confirmed the monophyly of the family Solenoidea, and indicated that N. chinensis and Sinonovacula ( S. constricta and S. rivularis ) were closely related in the family Pharidae. From the CREx analysis, we found that transposition and tandem duplication random losses (TDRLs) might have occurred between Pharidae and Solenidae. Moreover, positive selection was detected in nad5 of the foreground N. chinensis , and divergent evolution occurred at site 144 in the freshwater and marine lineages. Overall, our findings provide new molecular data on the phylogenetic and evolutionary relationships of Pharidae, and contribute to unraveling the salinity adaptations of Pharidae.

Three-way clustering uses core region and fringe region to describe a cluster, which divide the dataset into three parts. The division helps identify the central core and outer sparse regions of a cluster. One of the main challenges in three-way clustering is the meaningful construction of the two sets. Aimed at handling high-dimensional data and improving the stability of clustering, this paper proposes a novel three-way clustering method. The proposed method uses dimensionality reduction techniques to reduce data dimensions and eliminate noise. Based on the reduced dataset, random sampling and feature extraction are performed multiple times to introduce randomness and diversity, enhancing the algorithm’s robustness. Ensemble strategies are applied on these subsets, and the k-means algorithm is utilized to obtain multiple clustering results. Based on these results, we obtain co-association frequency between different samples and fused clustering result using the single-linkage method of hierarchical clustering. In order to describe the core region and fringe region of each cluster, the similar class of each sample is defined by co-association frequency. The lower and upper approximations of each cluster are obtained based on similar class. The samples in the lower approximation of each cluster belong to the core region of the cluster. The differences between lower and upper approximations of each cluster are defined as fringe region. Therefore, a three-way explanation of each cluster is naturally formed. By employing various UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository (UCI) datasets and comparing different clustering metrics such as Normalized Mutual Information (NMI), Adjusted Rand Index (ARI), and Accuracy (ACC), the experimental results show that the proposed strategy is effective in improving the structure of clustering results.

Our previous genome analysis of Sinonovacula constricta revealed an expansion of the monocarboxylate transporter gene family, which is crucial for metabolic dynamic balance and intracellular pH regulation. To further elucidate the role of these expanded MCT genes in response to variable environmental conditions, we conducted a comprehensive genome-wide identification, phylogenetic evolution and expression analysis. In this study, 16 sodium-coupled monocarboxylate transporter genes (designated as ScSMCTs) and 54 proton-coupled monocarboxylate transporter genes (designated as ScMCTs) were identified from the S. constricta genome. The results of gene number comparison indicated significant expansion of ScSMCTs and ScMCTs in mollusks compared to vertebrates, likely due to tandem repeats and dispersed duplications in S. constricta. The syntenic analysis demonstrated that the razor-clam MCT genes had the highest number of homologous gene pairs with Meretrix meretrix. The phylogenetic tree showed that MCT and SMCT proteins were distinctly clustered in two large branches. Moreover, positive selection analysis revealed three positive selection sites in the MCT amino acid sequences sites. Multi-transcriptome analyses and the temporal expression patterns displayed that ScSMCTs and ScMCTs play distinct roles in response to salinity and ammonia stressors. It is worth noting that the majority of these genes involved in abiotic stresses belong to MCTs. Overall, our findings revealed the important roles of ScSMCTs and ScMCTs under abiotic stress, and provided valuable information for the evolution of this family in mollusks, as well as a theoretical basis for the further study of the mechanism and function of this gene family in S. constricta.

In this paper, we investigate the inverse of the set of unknown functions (v,g) of the Burgers equation in the framework of optimal theory. Firstly, we prove the existence of functional minimizers in the optimal control problem and derive the necessary conditions for the optimal solution. Subsequently, the global uniqueness of the optimal solution and its stability are explored. After completing the ill-posed analysis of the Burgers equation, we can apply it to the problem of sonic vibration velocity in water. The desired result is obtained by inverse-performing an unknown initial state with known terminal vibration velocity. This is important for solving practical problems.

The razor clam Sinonovacula constricta , is one of the most commercially important cultured bivalves in China and Southeast Asia, while S. rivularis is its closer relatives discovered more than a decade ago. In order to obtain offspring with faster growth rate and stronger salt tolerance of S. constricta and S. rivularis , interspecific hybrids were produced, and the hybridity of the interspecific hybrids was confirmed by microsatellite markers. Microsatellite markers exhibit a high potential for transfer through cross-amplification in related species, and the transferability of 48 pairs of microsatellite marker primers from S. constricta were assessed in S. rivularis . Here, 24 universal microsatellite markers were successfully amplified in S. rivularis , of which 18 were polymorphic with the allele number from 2 to 5. The genetic diversity of two razor clams evaluated by 18 polymorphic microsatellite markers indicated that two species were both above the middle level, with a relatively higher genetic diversity, while S. constricta showed higher genetic diversity than S. rivularis according to the genetic parameters of Na , Ho , He and PIC . Furthermore, a total of two species-specific microsatellite markers were screened, which could be used for quick genetic identification of S. constricta , S. rivularis and their hybrids. The results suggest the induced interspecific hybrids are true hybrids between S. constricta and S. rivularis , which provide a basis for breeding, subsequent protection, and germplasm resources utilization of the razor clams.

In this paper, we considered the Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instability for two incompressible, immisicible, invisid coupled fluids, which were Euler and magnetohydrodynamic with zero resistivity. Under the action of the uniform gravitational field, the two fluids interacted at a free interface. We utilized the flow map to denote the Lorentz force under the Lagrangian coordinates. We first showed the ill-posedness to the linear problem around the RT steady state solution. By virtue of such an ill-posed result, we showed that the nonlinear system is also ill-posed.

Our aim of the article is to report an efficient numerical method to enhance the accuracy in solving fractional Riccati differential equations. The main idea is to change the original differential equation into a simple algebraic one, by employing the operational matrix of Bernstein wavelets merged with the collocation method. The details of our method are summarized in this paper. The numerical examples are devoted to make known that the method can obtain numerical solutions effectively and accurately. Compared with the existing results, the method proposed in the article can reduce errors and improve accuracy.

In the present study, the complete mitogenome sequence of Acrossocheilus wenchowensis was obtained using PCR amplification. The complete mitochondrial genome of A. wenchowensis was 16,591 bp in length, it contains 13 protein-coding genes, 22 transfer RNA genes, two ribosomal RNA genes, and one non-coding region. The gene arrangement and organization in the mitogenome of A. wenchowensis were consistent with other Cyprinidae fishes. The phylogenetic analysis was carried out, and the results showed that the mitogenome sequence could be useful data in the field of population genetics and conservation biology for A. wenchowensis and other Cyprinidae fishes.