Since their introduction by Breiman (2001), permutation-based feature importance measures have been widely adopted. However, randomly permuting the entries of a dataset may create new points far from the original data or even "impossible data." In a permuted dataset, we may find children who are retired or individuals who graduated from high school before they were born (Mase et al. 2022, p. 1). Forcing ML models to make predictions at these points causes them to extrapolate, making explanations unreliable (Hooker et al. 2021). Every non-trivial permutation-based variable importance measure, including SHAP (Lundberg and Lee 2017), Knockoffs (Barber and Candés 2015), conditional model reliance (Fisher et al. 2019), and accumulated local effect (ALE) plots (Apley and Zhu 2020) suffer from this. We propose and compare three new strategies to address extrapolation issues. The first combines conditional model reliance from Fisher et al. (2019) with a Gaussian transformation. By mapping data quantiles to a Gaussian distribution and back, we adjust only the quantiles of point values, significantly reducing extrapolation. Under a Gaussian copula assumption for the feature distribution, we prove that the new data points follow the same probability distribution as the original data.

Study Region: Goslar and G\"ottingen, Lower Saxony, Germany. Study Focus: In July 2017, the cities of Goslar and G\"ottingen experienced severe flood events characterized by short warning time of only 20 minutes, resulting in extensive regional flooding and significant damage. This highlights the critical need for a more reliable and timely flood forecasting system. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the impact of radar-based precipitation data on forecasting river water levels in Goslar. Additionally, the study examines how precipitation influences water level forecasts in G\"ottingen. The analysis integrates radar-derived spatiotemporal precipitation patterns with hydrological sensor data obtained from ground stations to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach in improving flood prediction capabilities. New Hydrological Insights for the Region: A key innovation in this paper is the use of residual-based modeling to address the non-linearity between precipitation images and water levels, leading to a Spatiotemporal Radar-based Precipitation Model with residuals (STRPMr). Unlike traditional hydrological models, our approach does not rely on upstream data, making it independent of additional hydrological inputs. This independence enhances its adaptability and allows for broader applicability in other regions with RADOLAN precipitation. The deep learning architecture integrates (2+1)D convolutional neural networks for spatial and temporal feature extraction with LSTM for timeseries forecasting. The results demonstrate the potential of the STRPMr for capturing extreme events and more accurate flood forecasting.

--Detecting design pattern instances in unfamiliar codebases remains a challenging yet essential task for improving software quality and maintainability. Traditional static analysis tools often struggle with the complexity, variability, and lack of explicit annotations that characterize real-world pattern implementations. In this paper, we present a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models to automatically identify design pattern instances across diverse codebases. Our method focuses on recognizing the roles classes play within the pattern instances. By providing clearer insights into software structure and intent, this research aims to support developers, improve comprehension, and streamline tasks such as refactoring, maintenance, and adherence to best practices. Identifying design pattern instances in code is a valuable goal as it enables a deeper understanding of the structural and behavioral principles underlying software systems. By uncovering these patterns, developers and other stakeholders can gain insights into code quality, maintainability, and adherence to best practices, even in unfamiliar code bases. Automating this process can significantly reduce the time and effort required for code comprehension, facilitate knowledge transfer among teams, and improve software evolution and refactoring efforts.

Environment perception is a fundamental part of the dynamic driving task executed by Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS). Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based approaches have prevailed over classical techniques for realizing the environment perception. Current safety-relevant standards for automotive systems, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 26262 and ISO 21448, assume the existence of comprehensive requirements specifications. These specifications serve as the basis on which the functionality of an automotive system can be rigorously tested and checked for compliance with safety regulations. However, AI-based perception systems do not have complete requirements specification. Instead, large datasets are used to train AI-based perception systems. This paper presents a function monitor for the functional runtime monitoring of a two-folded AI-based environment perception for ADS, based respectively on camera and LiDAR sensors. To evaluate the applicability of the function monitor, we conduct a qualitative scenario-based evaluation in a controlled laboratory environment using a model car. The evaluation results then are discussed to provide insights into the monitor's performance and its suitability for real-world applications.

Understanding how images influence the world, interpreting which effects their semantics have on various quantities and exploring the reasons behind changes in image-based predictions are highly difficult yet extremely interesting problems. By adopting a holistic modeling approach utilizing Neural Additive Models in combination with Diffusion Autoencoders, we can effectively identify the latent hidden semantics of image effects and achieve full intelligibility of additional tabular effects. Our approach offers a high degree of flexibility, empowering us to comprehensively explore the impact of various image characteristics. We demonstrate that the proposed method can precisely identify complex image effects in an ablation study. To further showcase the practical applicability of our proposed model, we conduct a case study in which we investigate how the distinctive features and attributes captured within host images exert influence on the pricing of Airbnb rentals.

Developing accurate models for traffic trajectory predictions is crucial for achieving fully autonomous driving. Various deep neural network models have been employed to address this challenge, but their black-box nature hinders transparency and debugging capabilities in a deployed system. Glass-box models offer a solution by providing full interpretability through methods like Generalized Additive Models (GAM). In this study, we evaluate an efficient additive model called Explainable Boosting Machines (EBM) for traffic prediction on three popular mixed traffic datasets: Stanford drone dataset (SDD), Intersection Drone Dataset (InD), and Argoverse. Our results show that the EBM models perform competitively in predicting pedestrian destinations within SDD and InD while providing modest predictions for vehicle-dominant Argoverse dataset. Additionally, our transparent trained models allow us to analyse feature importance and interactions, as well as provide qualitative examples of predictions explanation. The full training code will be made public upon publication.

The degradation of sewer pipes poses significant economical, environmental and health concerns. The maintenance of such assets requires structured plans to perform inspections, which are more efficient when structural and environmental features are considered along with the results of previous inspection reports. The development of such plans requires degradation models that can be based on statistical and machine learning methods. This work proposes a methodology to assess their suitability to plan inspections considering three dimensions: accuracy metrics, ability to produce long-term degradation curves and explainability. Results suggest that although ensemble models yield the highest accuracy, they are unable to infer the long-term degradation of the pipes, whereas the Logistic Regression offers a slightly less accurate model that is able to produce consistent degradation curves with a high explainability. A use case is presented to demonstrate this methodology and the efficiency of model-based planning compared to the current inspection plan.

This paper introduces a method based on a deep neural network (DNN) that is perfectly capable of processing radar data from extremely thinned radar apertures. The proposed DNN processing can provide both aliasing-free radar imaging and super-resolution. The results are validated by measuring the detection performance on realistic simulation data and by evaluating the Point-Spread-function (PSF) and the target-separation performance on measured point-like targets. Also, a qualitative evaluation of a typical automotive scene is conducted. It is shown that this approach can outperform state-of-the-art subspace algorithms and also other existing machine learning solutions. The presented results suggest that machine learning approaches trained with sufficiently sophisticated virtual input data are a very promising alternative to compressed sensing and subspace approaches in radar signal processing. The key to this performance is that the DNN is trained using realistic simulation data that perfectly mimic a given sparse antenna radar array hardware as the input. As ground truth, ultra-high resolution data from an enhanced virtual radar are simulated. Contrary to other work, the DNN utilizes the complete radar cube and not only the antenna channel information at certain range-Doppler detections. After training, the proposed DNN is capable of sidelobe- and ambiguity-free imaging. It simultaneously delivers nearly the same resolution and image quality as would be achieved with a fully occupied array.

Predicting trajectories of pedestrians based on goal information in highly interactive scenes is a crucial step toward Intelligent Transportation Systems and Autonomous Driving. The challenges of this task come from two key sources: (1) complex social interactions in high pedestrian density scenarios and (2) limited utilization of goal information to effectively associate with past motion information. To address these difficulties, we integrate social forces into a Transformer-based stochastic generative model backbone and propose a new goal-based trajectory predictor called ForceFormer. Differentiating from most prior works that simply use the destination position as an input feature, we leverage the driving force from the destination to efficiently simulate the guidance of a target on a pedestrian. Additionally, repulsive forces are used as another input feature to describe the avoidance action among neighboring pedestrians. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method achieves on-par performance measured by distance errors with the state-of-the-art models but evidently decreases collisions, especially in dense pedestrian scenarios on widely used pedestrian datasets.

Background: Embedded feature selection in high-dimensional data with very small sample sizes requires optimized hyperparameters for the model building process. For this hyperparameter optimization, nested cross-validation must be applied to avoid a biased performance estimation. The resulting repeated training with high-dimensional data leads to very long computation times. Moreover, it is likely to observe a high variance in the individual performance evaluation metrics caused by outliers in tiny validation sets. Therefore, early stopping applying standard pruning algorithms to save time risks discarding promising hyperparameter sets. Result: To speed up feature selection for high-dimensional data with tiny sample size, we adapt the use of a state-of-the-art asynchronous successive halving pruner. In addition, we combine it with two complementary pruning strategies based on domain or prior knowledge. One pruning strategy immediately stops computing trials with semantically meaningless results for the selected hyperparameter combinations. The other is a new extrapolating threshold pruning strategy suitable for nested-cross-validation with a high variance of performance evaluation metrics. In repeated experiments, our combined pruning strategy keeps all promising trials. At the same time, the calculation time is substantially reduced compared to using a state-of-the-art asynchronous successive halving pruner alone. Up to 81.3\% fewer models were trained achieving the same optimization result. Conclusion: The proposed combined pruning strategy accelerates data analysis or enables deeper searches for hyperparameters within the same computation time. This leads to significant savings in time, money and energy consumption, opening the door to advanced, time-consuming analyses.