This research aims to optimize intricate learning models by implementing quantization and bit-depth optimization techniques. The objective is to significantly cut time complexity while preserving model efficiency, thus addressing the challenge of extended execution times in intricate models. Two medical datasets were utilized as case studies to apply a Logistic Regression (LR) machine learning model. Using efficient quantization and bit depth optimization strategies the input data is downscaled from float64 to float32 and int32. The results demonstrated a significant reduction in time complexity, with only a minimal decrease in model accuracy post-optimization, showcasing the state-of-the-art optimization approach. This comprehensive study concludes that the impact of these optimization techniques varies depending on a set of parameters.

Extensive research has been done on feature selection (FS) algorithms for high-dimensional datasets aiming to improve model performance, reduce computational cost and identify features of interest. We test the null hypothesis of using randomly selected features to compare against features selected by FS algorithms to validate the performance of the latter. Our results show that FS on high-dimensional datasets (in particular gene expression) in classification tasks is not useful. We find that (1) models trained on small subsets (0.02%-1% of all features) of randomly selected features almost always perform comparably to those trained on all features, and (2) a "typical"- sized random subset provides comparable or superior performance to that of top-k features selected in various published studies. Thus, our work challenges many feature selection results on high dimensional datasets, particularly in computational genomics. It raises serious concerns about studies that propose drug design or targeted interventions based on computationally selected genes, without further validation in a wet lab.

Existing studies on fairness are largely Western-focused, making them inadequate for culturally diverse countries such as India. To address this gap, we introduce INDIC-BIAS, a comprehensive India-centric benchmark designed to evaluate fairness of LLMs across 85 identity groups encompassing diverse castes, religions, regions, and tribes. We first consult domain experts to curate over 1,800 socio-cultural topics spanning behaviors and situations, where biases and stereotypes are likely to emerge. Grounded in these topics, we generate and manually validate 20,000 real-world scenario templates to probe LLMs for fairness. We structure these templates into three evaluation tasks: plausibility, judgment, and generation. Our evaluation of 14 popular LLMs on these tasks reveals strong negative biases against marginalized identities, with models frequently reinforcing common stereotypes. Additionally, we find that models struggle to mitigate bias even when explicitly asked to rationalize their decision. Our evaluation provides evidence of both allocative and representational harms that current LLMs could cause towards Indian identities, calling for a more cautious usage in practical applications. We release INDIC-BIAS as an open-source benchmark to advance research on benchmarking and mitigating biases and stereotypes in the Indian context.

This paper extends Bayesian probability theory by developing a multidimensional space of events (MDSE) theory that accounts for mutual influences between events and hypotheses sets. While traditional Bayesian approaches assume conditional independence between certain variables, real-world systems often exhibit complex interdependencies that limit classical model applicability. Building on established probabilistic foundations, our approach introduces a mathematical formalism for modeling these complex relationships. We developed the MDSE theory through rigorous mathematical derivation and validated it using three complementary methodologies: analytical proofs, computational simulations, and case studies drawn from diverse domains. Results demonstrate that MDSE successfully models complex dependencies with 15-20% improved prediction accuracy compared to standard Bayesian methods when applied to datasets with high interdimensionality. This theory particularly excels in scenarios with over 50 interrelated variables, where traditional methods show exponential computational complexity growth while MDSE maintains polynomial scaling. Our findings indicate that MDSE provides a viable mathematical foundation for extending Bayesian reasoning to complex systems while maintaining computational tractability. This approach offers practical applications in engineering challenges including risk assessment, resource optimization, and forecasting problems where multiple interdependent factors must be simultaneously considered.

Pakistan's military said on Thursday morning that the country's air defence system had brought down 25 Indian drones overnight over some of the country's chief cities, including Lahore and Karachi. At least one civilian has died, and five people were wounded, it said. India's Defence Ministry confirmed hours later that it had targeted Pakistan's air defence radars and claimed that it was able to "neutralize" one defence system in Lahore. It said Pakistan had attempted to attack India and Indian-administered Kashmir with drones and missiles overnight, but that these had been shot down. The drone attacks represent the latest escalation between the nuclear-armed neighbours, a day after India launched deadly missile strikes on Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, killing at least 31 people, according to Islamabad.

Negative sampling has emerged as an effective technique that enables deep learning models to learn better representations by introducing the paradigm of learn-to-compare. The goal of this approach is to add robustness to deep learning models to learn better representation by comparing the positive samples against the negative ones. Despite its numerous demonstrations in various areas of computer vision and natural language processing, a comprehensive study of the effect of negative sampling in an unsupervised domain like topic modeling has not been well explored. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of the impact of different negative sampling strategies on neural topic models. We compare the performance of several popular neural topic models by incorporating a negative sampling technique in the decoder of variational autoencoder-based neural topic models. Experiments on four publicly available datasets demonstrate that integrating negative sampling into topic models results in significant enhancements across multiple aspects, including improved topic coherence, richer topic diversity, and more accurate document classification. Manual evaluations also indicate that the inclusion of negative sampling into neural topic models enhances the quality of the generated topics. These findings highlight the potential of negative sampling as a valuable tool for advancing the effectiveness of neural topic models.

Social media has significantly reshaped interpersonal communication, fostering connectivity while also enabling the proliferation of misinformation. The unchecked spread of false narratives has profound effects on mental health, contributing to increased stress, anxiety, and misinformation-driven paranoia. This study presents a hybrid transformer-based approach using a RoBERTa-LSTM classifier to detect misinformation, assess its impact on mental health, and classify disorders linked to misinformation exposure. The proposed models demonstrate accuracy rates of 98.4, 87.8, and 77.3 in detecting misinformation, mental health implications, and disorder classification, respectively. Furthermore, Pearson's Chi-Squared Test for Independence (p-value = 0.003871) validates the direct correlation between misinformation and deteriorating mental well-being. This study underscores the urgent need for better misinformation management strategies to mitigate its psychological repercussions. Future research could explore broader datasets incorporating linguistic, demographic, and cultural variables to deepen the understanding of misinformation-induced mental health distress.

The Javanese language features a complex system of honorifics that vary according to the social status of the speaker, listener, and referent. Despite its cultural and linguistic significance, there has been limited progress in developing a comprehensive corpus to capture these variations for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we present Unggah-Ungguh, a carefully curated dataset designed to encapsulate the nuances of Unggah-Ungguh Basa, the Javanese speech etiquette framework that dictates the choice of words and phrases based on social hierarchy and context. Using Unggah-Ungguh, we assess the ability of language models (LMs) to process various levels of Javanese honorifics through classification and machine translation tasks. To further evaluate cross-lingual LMs, we conduct machine translation experiments between Javanese (at specific honorific levels) and Indonesian. Additionally, we explore whether LMs can generate contextually appropriate Javanese honorifics in conversation tasks, where the honorific usage should align with the social role and contextual cues. Our findings indicate that current LMs struggle with most honorific levels, exhibitinga bias toward certain honorific tiers.

Pneumonia is a leading cause of illness and death in children, underscoring the need for early and accurate detection. In this study, we propose a novel lightweight ensemble model for detecting pneumonia in children using chest X-ray images. This ensemble model integrates two pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs), MobileNetV2 and NASNetMobile, selected for their balance of computational efficiency and accuracy. These models were fine-tuned on a pediatric chest X-ray dataset and combined to enhance classification performance. Our proposed ensemble model achieved a classification accuracy of 98.63%, significantly outperforming individual models such as MobileNetV2 (97.10%) and NASNetMobile(96.25%) in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. Moreover, the ensemble model outperformed state-of-the-art architectures, including ResNet50, InceptionV3, and DenseNet201, while maintaining computational efficiency. The proposed lightweight ensemble model presents a highly effective and resource-efficient solution for pneumonia detection, making it particularly suitable for deployment in resource-constrained settings.