Interpretability for Table Question Answering (Table QA) is critical, particularly in high-stakes industries like finance or healthcare. Although recent approaches using Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved Table QA performance, their explanations for how the answers are generated are ambiguous. To fill this gap, we introduce Plan-of-SQLs ( or POS), an interpretable, effective, and efficient approach to Table QA that answers an input query solely with SQL executions. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations with human and LLM judges, we show that POS is most preferred among explanation methods, helps human users understand model decision boundaries, and facilitates model success and error identification. Furthermore, when evaluated in standard benchmarks (TabFact, WikiTQ, and FetaQA), POS achieves competitive or superior accuracy compared to existing methods, while maintaining greater efficiency by requiring significantly fewer LLM calls and database queries.

Credit card fraud is a major cause of national concern in the Nigerian financial sector, affecting hundreds of transactions per second and impacting international e-commerce negatively. Despite the rapid spread and adoption of online marketing, millions of Nigerians are prevented from transacting in several countries with local credit cards due to bans and policies directed at restricting credit card fraud. Presently, a myriad of technologies exist to detect fraudulent transactions, a few of which are adopted by Nigerian financial institutions to proactively manage the situation. Fraud detection allows institutions to restrict offenders from networks and with a centralized banking identity management system, such as the Bank Verification Number used by the Central Bank of Nigeria, offenders who may have stolen other people's identities can be back-traced and their bank accounts frozen. This paper aims to compare the effectiveness of two fraud detection technologies that are projected to work fully independent of human intervention to possibly predict and detect fraudulent credit card transactions. Autoencoders as an Unsupervised Tensorflow-Based Anomaly Detection Technique generally offers greater performance in dimensionality reduction than the Principal Component Analysis, and this theory was tested out on Nigerian credit card transaction data. Results demonstrate that autoencoders are better suited to analyzing complex and extensive datasets and offer more reliable results with minimal mislabeling than the PCA algorithm.

The Smart home possesses the capability of facilitating home services to their users with the systematic advance in The Internet of Things (IoT) and information and communication technologies (ICT) in recent decades. The home service offered by the smart devices helps the users in utilize maximized level of comfort for the objective of improving life quality. As the user and smart devices communicate through an insecure channel, the smart home environment is prone to security and privacy problems. A secure authentication protocol needs to be established between the smart devices and the user, such that a situation for device authentication can be made feasible in smart home environments. Most of the existing smart home authentication protocols were identified to fail in facilitating a secure mutual authentication and increases the possibility of lunching the attacks of session key disclosure, impersonation and stolen smart device. In this paper, Secure Supervised Learning-based Smart Home Authentication Framework (SSL-SHAF) is proposed as are liable mutual authentication that can be contextually imposed for better security. The formal analysis of the proposed SSL-SHAF confirmed better resistance against session key disclosure, impersonation and stolen smart device attacks. The results of SSL-SHAF confirmed minimized computational costs and security compared to the baseline protocols considered for investigation.

Given the nonlinearity of the interaction between weather and soil variables, a novel deep neural network regressor (DNNR) was carefully designed with considerations to the depth, number of neurons of the hidden layers, and the hyperparameters with their optimizations. Additionally, a new metric, the average of absolute root squared error (ARSE) was proposed to address the shortcomings of root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) while combining their strengths. Using the ARSE metric, the random forest regressor (RFR) and the extreme gradient boosting regressor (XGBR), were compared with DNNR. The RFR and XGBR achieved yield errors of 0.0000294 t/ha, and 0.000792 t/ha, respectively, compared to the DNNR(s) which achieved 0.0146 t/ha and 0.0209 t/ha, respectively. All errors were impressively small. However, with changes to the explanatory variables to ensure generalizability to unforeseen data, DNNR(s) performed best. The unforeseen data, different from unseen data, is coined to represent sudden and unexplainable change to weather and soil variables due to climate change. Further analysis reveals that a strong interaction does exist between weather and soil variables. Using precipitation and silt, which are strong-negatively and strong-positively correlated with yield, respectively, yield was observed to increase when precipitation was reduced and silt increased, and vice-versa.

Predictive modeling in healthcare continues to be an active actuarial research topic as more insurance companies aim to maximize the potential of Machine Learning approaches to increase their productivity and efficiency. In this paper, the authors deployed three regression-based ensemble ML models that combine variations of decision trees through Extreme Gradient Boosting, Gradient-boosting Machine, and Random Forest) methods in predicting medical insurance costs. Explainable Artificial Intelligence methods SHapley Additive exPlanations and Individual Conditional Expectation plots were deployed to discover and explain the key determinant factors that influence medical insurance premium prices in the dataset. The dataset used comprised 986 records and is publicly available in the KAGGLE repository. The models were evaluated using four performance evaluation metrics, including R-squared, Mean Absolute Error, Root Mean Squared Error, and Mean Absolute Percentage Error. The results show that all models produced impressive outcomes; however, the XGBoost model achieved a better overall performance although it also expanded more computational resources, while the RF model recorded a lesser prediction error and consumed far fewer computing resources than the XGBoost model. Furthermore, we compared the outcome of both XAi methods in identifying the key determinant features that influenced the PremiumPrices for each model and whereas both XAi methods produced similar outcomes, we found that the ICE plots showed in more detail the interactions between each variable than the SHAP analysis which seemed to be more high-level. It is the aim of the authors that the contributions of this study will help policymakers, insurers, and potential medical insurance buyers in their decision-making process for selecting the right policies that meet their specific needs.

This paper presents the development of an intelligent system for the detection of coronavirus using artificial neural network. This was done after series of literature review which indicated that high fever accounts for 87.9% of the COVID-19 symptoms. 683 temperature data of COVID-19 patients at >= 38C^o were collected from Colliery hospital Enugu, Nigeria and used to train an artificial neural network detective model for the detection of COVID-19. The reference model generated was used converted into Verilog codes using Hardware Description Language (HDL) and then burn into a Field Programming Gate Array (FPGA) controller using FPGA tool in Matlab. The performance of the model when evaluated using confusion matrix, regression and means square error (MSE) showed that the regression value is 0.967; the accuracy is 97% and then MSE is 0.00100Mu. These results all implied that the new detection system for is reliable and very effective for the detection of COVID-19.

Ensuring financial protection and access to needed healthcare is integral to achieving Universal Health coverage (UHC) which is integral to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3. The uptake of health insurance has been poor in Nigeria, and this has been due to a lot of challenges which include access to healthcare facilities, beliefs, low level of awareness about health insurance, policy challenges, poverty, and where to get required information (2-4). A significant step to improving this includes improved awareness, access to information and tools to support decision making (5). Recommender systems are designed to assist individuals to deal with a vast array of choices, it takes advantage of several sources of information to predict options and preferences around specific items (6-8). Recommender systems enhance the user experience by giving fast and coherent suggestions. Artificial intelligence (AI) based recommender systems have gained popularity in helping individuals find movies, books, music and different types of products on the internet including diverse applications in healthcare (9-12). It has also been used in the insurance industry to support decision making on insurance products (13). Recommender systems are in three main categories which include: collaborative filtering, content-based and hybrid filtering (9). Collaborative filtering method uses the data from other users rating of items to make recommendation for a user for those items.

In this paper, we explore self-supervised learning (SSL) for analyzing a first-of-its-kind database of cry recordings containing clinical indications of more than a thousand newborns. Specifically, we target cry-based detection of neurological injury as well as identification of cry triggers such as pain, hunger, and discomfort. Annotating a large database in the medical setting is expensive and time-consuming, typically requiring the collaboration of several experts over years. Leveraging large amounts of unlabeled audio data to learn useful representations can lower the cost of building robust models and, ultimately, clinical solutions. In this work, we experiment with self-supervised pre-training of a convolutional neural network on large audio datasets. We show that pre-training with SSL contrastive loss (SimCLR) performs significantly better than supervised pre-training for both neuro injury and cry triggers. In addition, we demonstrate further performance gains through SSL-based domain adaptation using unlabeled infant cries. We also show that using such SSL-based pre-training for adaptation to cry sounds decreases the need for labeled data of the overall system.

Language is inherent and compulsory for human communication. Whether expressed in a written or spoken way, it ensures understanding between people of the same and different regions. With the growing awareness and effort to include more low-resourced languages in NLP research, African languages have recently been a major subject of research in machine translation, and other text-based areas of NLP. However, there is still very little comparable research in speech recognition for African languages. Interestingly, some of the unique properties of African languages affecting NLP, like their diacritical and tonal complexities, have a major root in their speech, suggesting that careful speech interpretation could provide more intuition on how to deal with the linguistic complexities of African languages for text-based NLP. OkwuGb\'e is a step towards building speech recognition systems for African low-resourced languages. Using Fon and Igbo as our case study, we conduct a comprehensive linguistic analysis of each language and describe the creation of end-to-end, deep neural network-based speech recognition models for both languages. We present a state-of-art ASR model for Fon, as well as benchmark ASR model results for Igbo. Our linguistic analyses (for Fon and Igbo) provide valuable insights and guidance into the creation of speech recognition models for other African low-resourced languages, as well as guide future NLP research for Fon and Igbo. The Fon and Igbo models source code have been made publicly available.

Research in NLP lacks geographic diversity, and the question of how NLP can be scaled to low-resourced languages has not yet been adequately solved. "Low-resourced"-ness is a complex problem going beyond data availability and reflects systemic problems in society. In this paper, we focus on the task of Machine Translation (MT), that plays a crucial role for information accessibility and communication worldwide. Despite immense improvements in MT over the past decade, MT is centered around a few high-resourced languages. As MT researchers cannot solve the problem of low-resourcedness alone, we propose participatory research as a means to involve all necessary agents required in the MT development process. We demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of participatory research with a case study on MT for African languages. Its implementation leads to a collection of novel translation datasets, MT benchmarks for over 30 languages, with human evaluations for a third of them, and enables participants without formal training to make a unique scientific contribution. Benchmarks, models, data, code, and evaluation results are released under https://github.com/masakhane-io/masakhane-mt.