Respiratory auscultation is crucial for early detection of pediatric pneumonia, a condition that can quickly worsen without timely intervention. In areas with limited physician access, effective auscultation is challenging. We present a smartphone-based system that leverages built-in microphones and advanced deep learning algorithms to detect abnormal respiratory sounds indicative of pneumonia risk. Our end-to-end deep learning framework employs domain generalization to integrate a large electronic stethoscope dataset with a smaller smartphone-derived dataset, enabling robust feature learning for accurate respiratory assessments without expensive equipment. The accompanying mobile application guides caregivers in collecting high-quality lung sound samples and provides immediate feedback on potential pneumonia risks. User studies show strong classification performance and high acceptance, demonstrating the system's ability to facilitate proactive interventions and reduce preventable childhood pneumonia deaths. By seamlessly integrating into ubiquitous smartphones, this approach offers a promising avenue for more equitable and comprehensive remote pediatric care.

This paper introduces foundational resources and models for natural language processing (NLP) of historical Turkish, a domain that has remained underexplored in computational linguistics. We present the first named entity recognition (NER) dataset, HisTR and the first Universal Dependencies treebank, OTA-BOUN for a historical form of the Turkish language along with transformer-based models trained using these datasets for named entity recognition, dependency parsing, and part-of-speech tagging tasks. Additionally, we introduce Ottoman Text Corpus (OTC), a clean corpus of transliterated historical Turkish texts that spans a wide range of historical periods. Our experimental results show significant improvements in the computational analysis of historical Turkish, achieving promising results in tasks that require understanding of historical linguistic structures. They also highlight existing challenges, such as domain adaptation and language variations across time periods. All of the presented resources and models are made available at https://huggingface.co/bucolin to serve as a benchmark for future progress in historical Turkish NLP.

Divorce is one of the most common social issues in developed countries like in the United States. Almost 50% of the recent marriages turn into an involuntary divorce or separation. While it is evident that people vary to a different extent, and even over time, an incident like Divorce does not interrupt the individual's daily activities; still, Divorce has a severe effect on the individual's mental health, and personal life. Within the scope of this research, the divorce prediction was carried out by evaluating a dataset named by the 'divorce predictor dataset' to correctly classify between married and Divorce people using six different machine learning algorithms- Logistic Regression (LR), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Classification and Regression Trees (CART), Gaussian Na\"ive Bayes (NB), and, Support Vector Machines (SVM). Preliminary computational results show that algorithms such as SVM, KNN, and LDA, can perform that task with an accuracy of 98.57%. This work's additional novel contribution is the detailed and comprehensive explanation of prediction probabilities using Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME). Utilizing LIME to analyze test results illustrates the possibility of differentiating between divorced and married couples. Finally, we have developed a divorce predictor app considering ten most important features that potentially affect couples in making decisions in their divorce, such tools can be used by any one in order to identify their relationship condition.

As machine learning algorithms are deployed ubiquitously to a variety of domains, it is imperative to make these often black-box models transparent. Several recent works explain black-box models by capturing the most influential features for prediction per instance; such explanation methods are univariate, as they characterize importance per feature. We extend univariate explanation to a higher-order; this enhances explainability, as bivariate methods can capture feature interactions in black-box models, represented as a directed graph. Analyzing this graph enables us to discover groups of features that are equally important (i.e., interchangeable), while the notion of directionality allows us to identify the most influential features. We apply our bivariate method on Shapley value explanations, and experimentally demonstrate the ability of directional explanations to discover feature interactions. We show the superiority of our method against state-of-the-art on CIFAR10, IMDB, Census, Divorce, Drug, and gene data.

Developing interpretable machine learning models has become an increasingly important issue. One way in which data scientists have been able to develop interpretable models has been to use dimension reduction techniques. In this paper, we examine several dimension reduction techniques including two recent approaches developed in the network psychometrics literature called exploratory graph analysis (EGA) and unique variable analysis (UVA). We compared EGA and UVA with two other dimension reduction techniques common in the machine learning literature (principal component analysis and independent component analysis) as well as no reduction to the variables real data. We show that EGA and UVA perform as well as the other reduction techniques or no reduction. Consistent with previous literature, we show that dimension reduction can decrease, increase, or provide the same accuracy as no reduction of variables. Our tentative results find that dimension reduction tends to lead to better performance when used for classification tasks.

Detecting influential features in complex (non-linear and/or high-dimensional) datasets is key for extracting the relevant information. Most of the popular selection procedures, however, require assumptions on the underlying data - such as distributional ones -, which barely agree with empirical observations. Therefore, feature selection based on nonlinear methods, such as the model-free HSIC-Lasso, is a more relevant approach. In order to ensure valid inference among the chosen features, the selection procedure must be accounted for. In this paper, we propose selective inference with HSIC-Lasso using the framework of truncated Gaussians together with the polyhedral lemma. Based on these theoretical foundations, we develop an algorithm allowing for low computational costs and the treatment of the hyper-parameter selection issue. The relevance of our method is illustrated using artificial and real-world datasets. In particular, our empirical findings emphasise that type-I error control at the considered level can be achieved.

Several studies have shown that combining machine learning models in an appropriate way will introduce improvements in the individual predictions made by the base models. The key to make well-performing ensemble model is in the diversity of the base models. Of the most common solutions for introducing diversity into the decision trees are bagging and random forest. Bagging enhances the diversity by sampling with replacement and generating many training data sets, while random forest adds selecting a random number of features as well. This has made the random forest a winning candidate for many machine learning applications. However, assuming equal weights for all base decision trees does not seem reasonable as the randomization of sampling and input feature selection may lead to different levels of decision-making abilities across base decision trees. Therefore, we propose several algorithms that intend to modify the weighting strategy of regular random forest and consequently make better predictions. The designed weighting frameworks include optimal weighted random forest based on ac-curacy, optimal weighted random forest based on the area under the curve (AUC), performance-based weighted random forest, and several stacking-based weighted random forest models. The numerical results show that the proposed models are able to introduce significant improvements compared to regular random forest.

One main obstacle for the wide use of deep learning in medical and engineering sciences is its interpretability. While neural network models are strong tools for making predictions, they often provide little information about which features play significant roles in influencing the prediction accuracy. To overcome this issue, many regularization procedures for learning with neural networks have been proposed for dropping non-significant features. Unfortunately, the lack of theoretical results casts doubt on the applicability of such pipelines. In this work, we propose and establish a theoretical guarantee for the use of the adaptive group lasso for selecting important features of neural networks. Specifically, we show that our feature selection method is consistent for single-output feed-forward neural networks with one hidden layer and hyperbolic tangent activation function. We demonstrate its applicability using both simulation and data analysis.