Activity recognition using built-in sensors in smart and wearable devices provides great opportunities to understand and detect human behavior in the wild and gives a more holistic view of individuals' health and well being. Numerous computational methods have been applied to sensor streams to recognize different daily activities. However, most methods are unable to capture different layers of activities concealed in human behavior. Also, the performance of the models starts to decrease with increasing the number of activities. This research aims at building a hierarchical classification with Neural Networks to recognize human activities based on different levels of abstraction. We evaluate our model on the Extrasensory dataset; a dataset collected in the wild and containing data from smartphones and smartwatches. We use a two-level hierarchy with a total of six mutually exclusive labels namely, "lying down", "sitting", "standing in place", "walking", "running", and "bicycling" divided into "stationary" and "non-stationary". The results show that our model can recognize low-level activities (stationary/non-stationary) with 95.8% accuracy and overall accuracy of 92.8% over six labels. This is 3% above our best performing baseline.

Determining whether inputs are out-of-distribution (OOD) is an essential building block for safely deploying machine learning models in the open world. However, previous methods relying on the softmax confidence score suffer from overconfident posterior distributions for OOD data. We propose a unified framework for OOD detection that uses an energy score. We show that energy scores better distinguish in- and out-of-distribution samples than the traditional approach using the softmax scores. Unlike softmax confidence scores, energy scores are theoretically aligned with the probability density of the inputs and are less susceptible to the overconfidence issue. Within this framework, energy can be flexibly used as a scoring function for any pre-trained neural classifier as well as a trainable cost function to shape the energy surface explicitly for OOD detection. On a CIFAR-10 pre-trained WideResNet, using the energy score reduces the average FPR (at TPR 95%) by 18.03% compared to the softmax confidence score. With energy-based training, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on common benchmarks.

Logistic Regression is the most widely used classification algorithm in machine learning. It is used in many real-world scenarios like spam detected, cancer detection, IRIS dataset, etc. Mostly it is used in binary classification problems. But it can also be used in multiclass classification. Logistic Regression predicts the probability that the given data point belongs to a certain class or not. In this article, I will be using the famous heart disease dataset from Kaggle. In this dataset, the main goal is to predict whether the given person has heart disease or not.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a gradual loss of renal function over time, and it increases the risk of mortality, decreased quality of life, as well as serious complications. The prevalence of CKD has been increasing in the last couple of decades, which is partly due to the increased prevalence of diabetes and hypertension. To accurately detect CKD in diabetic patients, we propose a novel framework to learn sparse longitudinal representations of patients' medical records. The proposed method is also compared with widely used baselines such as Aggregated Frequency Vector and Bag-of-Pattern in Sequences on real EHR data, and the experimental results indicate that the proposed model achieves higher predictive performance. Additionally, the learned representations are interpreted and visualized to bring clinical insights.

Surface anomaly detection plays an important quality control role in many manufacturing industries to reduce scrap production. Machine-based visual inspections have been utilized in recent years to conduct this task instead of human experts. In particular, deep learning Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been at the forefront of these image processing-based solutions due to their predictive accuracy and efficiency. Training a CNN on a classification objective requires a sufficiently large amount of defective data, which is often not available. In this paper, we address that challenge by training the CNN on surface texture patches with a distance-based anomaly detection objective instead. A deep residual-based triplet network model is utilized, and defective training samples are synthesized exclusively from non-defective samples via random erasing techniques to directly learn a similarity metric between the same-class samples and out-of-class samples. Evaluation results demonstrate the approach's strength in detecting different types of anomalies, such as bent, broken, or cracked surfaces, for known surfaces that are part of the training data and unseen novel surfaces.

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Nowhere could the application of machine learning prove more important -- nor more risky -- than in law enforcement and national security. In this article, I'll review this area and then cover six perplexing and pressing ethical quandaries that arise. Predictive policing introduces a scientific element to law enforcement decisions, such as whether to investigate or detain, how long to sentence, and whether to parole. In making such decisions, judges and officers take into consideration the probability a suspect or defendant will be convicted for a crime in the future -- which is commonly the dependent variable for a predictive policing model. These independent variables may include prior convictions, income level, employment status, family background, neighborhood, education level, and the behavior of family and friends.

With the prevalence of Diabetes, the Diabetes Mellitus Retinopathy (DR) is becoming a major health problem across the world. The long-term medical complications arising due to DR have a significant impact on the patient as well as the society, as the disease mostly affects individuals in their most productive years. Early detection and treatment can help reduce the extent of damage to the patients. The rise of Convolutional Neural Networks for predictive analysis in the medical field paves the way for a robust solution to DR detection. This paper studies the performance of several highly efficient and scalable CNN architectures for Diabetic Retinopathy Classification with the help of Transfer Learning. The research focuses on VGG16, Resnet50 V2 and EfficientNet B0 models. The classification performance is analyzed using several performance metrics including True Positive Rate, False Positive Rate, Accuracy, etc. Also, several performance graphs are plotted for visualizing the architecture performance including Confusion Matrix, ROC Curve, etc. The results indicate that Transfer Learning with ImageNet weights using VGG 16 model demonstrates the best classification performance with the best Accuracy of 95%. It is closely followed by ResNet50 V2 architecture with the best Accuracy of 93%. This paper shows that predictive analysis of DR from retinal images is achieved with Transfer Learning on Convolutional Neural Networks.

The paper proposes a light-weighted stereo frustums matching module for 3D objection detection. The proposed framework takes advantage of a high-performance 2D detector and a point cloud segmentation network to regress 3D bounding boxes for autonomous driving vehicles. Instead of performing traditional stereo matching to compute disparities, the module directly takes the 2D proposals from both the left and the right views as input. Based on the epipolar constraints recovered from the well-calibrated stereo cameras, we propose four matching algorithms to search for the best match for each proposal between the stereo image pairs. Each matching pair proposes a segmentation of the scene which is then fed into a 3D bounding box regression network. Results of extensive experiments on KITTI dataset demonstrate that the proposed Siamese pipeline outperforms the state-of-the-art stereo-based 3D bounding box regression methods.

Algorithmic fairness and privacy are essential elements of trustworthy machine learning for critical decision making processes. Fair machine learning algorithms are developed to minimize discrimination against protected groups in machine learning. This is achieved, for example, by imposing a constraint on the model to equalize its behavior across different groups. This can significantly increase the influence of some training data points on the fair model. We study how this change in influence can change the information leakage of the model about its training data. We analyze the privacy risks of statistical notions of fairness (i.e., equalized odds) through the lens of membership inference attacks: inferring whether a data point was used for training a model. We show that fairness comes at the cost of privacy. However, this privacy cost is not distributed equally: the information leakage of fair models increases significantly on the unprivileged subgroups, which suffer from the discrimination in regular models. Furthermore, the more biased the underlying data is, the higher the privacy cost of achieving fairness for the unprivileged subgroups is. We demonstrate this effect on multiple datasets and explain how fairness-aware learning impacts privacy.