--This study focuses on the problem of credit default prediction, builds a modeling framework based on machine learning, and conducts comparative experiments on a variety of mainstream classification algorithms. Through preprocessing, feature engineering, and model training of the Home Credit dataset, the performance of multiple models including logistic regression, random forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, etc. in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall is evaluated. The results show that the ensemble learning method has obvious advantages in predictive performance, especially in dealing with complex nonlinear relationships between features and data imbalance problems. At the same time, the SHAP method is used to analyze the importance and dependency of features, and it is found that the external credit score variable plays a dominant role in model decision making, which helps to improve the model's interpretability and practical application value. The research results provide effective reference and technical support for the intelligent development of credit risk control systems.

Unsupervised anomaly detection in time series has been a pivotal research area for decades. Current mainstream approaches focus on learning normality, on the assumption that all or most of the samples in the training set are normal. However, anomalies in the training set (i.e., anomaly contamination) can be misleading. Recent studies employ data augmentation to generate pseudo-anomalies and learn the boundary separating the training samples from the augmented samples. Although this approach mitigates anomaly contamination if augmented samples mimic unseen real anomalies, it suffers from several limitations. (1) Covering a wide range of time series anomalies is challenging. (2) It disregards augmented samples that resemble normal samples (i.e., false anomalies). (3) It places too much trust in the labels of training and augmented samples. In response, we propose RedLamp, which employs diverse data augmentations to generate multiclass pseudo-anomalies and learns the multiclass boundary. Such multiclass pseudo-anomalies cover a wide variety of time series anomalies. We conduct multiclass classification using soft labels, which prevents the model from being overconfident and ensures its robustness against contaminated/false anomalies. The learned latent space is inherently explainable as it is trained to separate pseudo-anomalies into multiclasses. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RedLamp in anomaly detection and its robustness against anomaly contamination.

Electronic Health Records (EHR) offer rich real-world data for personalized medicine, providing insights into disease progression, treatment responses, and patient outcomes. However, their sparsity, heterogeneity, and high dimensionality make them difficult to model, while the lack of standardized ground truth further complicates predictive modeling. To address these challenges, we propose SCORE, a semi-supervised representation learning framework that captures multi-domain disease profiles through patient embeddings. SCORE employs a Poisson-Adapted Latent factor Mixture (PALM) Model with pre-trained code embeddings to characterize codified features and extract meaningful patient phenotypes and embeddings. To handle the computational challenges of large-scale data, it introduces a hybrid Expectation-Maximization (EM) and Gaussian Variational Approximation (GVA) algorithm, leveraging limited labeled data to refine estimates on a vast pool of unlabeled samples. We theoretically establish the convergence of this hybrid approach, quantify GVA errors, and derive SCORE's error rate under diverging embedding dimensions. Our analysis shows that incorporating unlabeled data enhances accuracy and reduces sensitivity to label scarcity. Extensive simulations confirm SCORE's superior finite-sample performance over existing methods. Finally, we apply SCORE to predict disability status for patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) using partially labeled EHR data, demonstrating that it produces more informative and predictive patient embeddings for multiple MS-related conditions compared to existing approaches.

-- Understanding how facial affect analysis (F AA) systems perform across different demographic groups requires reliable measurement of sensitive attributes such as ancestry, often approximated by skin tone, which itself is highly influenced by lighting conditions. Using AffectNet and a MobileNet-based model, we assess fairness across skin tone groups defined by each method. Results reveal a severe underrepresentation of dark skin tones ( 2%), alongside fairness disparities in F1-score (up to 0.08) and TPR (up to 0.11) across groups. Grad-CAM analysis further highlights differences in model attention patterns by skin tone, suggesting variation in feature encoding. T o support future mitigation efforts, we also propose a modular fairness-aware pipeline that integrates perceptual skin tone estimation, model interpretability, and fairness evaluation. These findings emphasize the relevance of skin tone measurement choices in fairness assessment and suggest that IT A-based evaluations may overlook disparities affecting darker-skinned individuals. I. INTRODUCTION Predictive algorithms and biometric systems are increasingly used in critical areas such as healthcare, security, and human-computer interaction [1]. However, these systems remain prone to bias arising from demographic imbalances in training data and algorithmic design flaws [1]-[3]. In computer vision applications like EmotionAI and Facial Affect Analysis (FAA), such biases often result in consistent performance disparities across attributes like age, sex, and skin tone [4]-[6]. Given the sensitive deployment of FAA in psychological evaluation, driver monitoring, and educational feedback [1], [7], [8], ensuring fairness, transparency, and robustness across demographic groups is essential.

Understanding online conversations has attracted research attention with the growth of social networks and online discussion forums. Content analysis of posts and replies in online conversations is difficult because each individual utterance is usually short and may implicitly refer to other posts within the same conversation. Thus, understanding individual posts requires capturing the conversational context and dependencies between different parts of a conversation tree and then encoding the context dependencies between posts and comments/replies into the language model. To this end, we propose a general-purpose mechanism to discover appropriate conversational context for various aspects about an online post in a conversation, such as whether it is informative, insightful, interesting or funny. Specifically, we design two families of Conversation Kernels, which explore different parts of the neighborhood of a post in the tree representing the conversation and through this, build relevant conversational context that is appropriate for each task being considered. We apply our developed method to conversations crawled from slashdot.org,

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 2.3 million women were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020, making it the most diagnosed cancer worldwide and the leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women (WHO, 2021). The incidence of breast cancer is rising by around 3% per year, with higher mortality rates observed in lower-income countries due to limited access to early screening and treatment. In wealthier nations, 1 in 12 women are diagnosed with breast cancer, whereas in lower-income countries, the rate is 1 in 27. More concerning is the disparity in mortality--1 in 48 women die from breast cancer in low-income countries compared to 1 in 71 in high-income countries (WHO, 2022). In sub-Saharan Africa, breast cancer now has the highest mortality rate among all cancers affecting women, surpassing cervical cancer.

Background and objective: Micro-ultrasound (micro-US) is a novel imaging modality with diagnostic accuracy comparable to MRI for detecting clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa). We investigated whether artificial intelligence (AI) interpretation of micro-US can outperform clinical screening methods using PSA and digital rectal examination (DRE). Methods: We retrospectively studied 145 men who underwent micro-US guided biopsy (79 with csPCa, 66 without). A self-supervised convolutional autoencoder was used to extract deep image features from 2D micro-US slices. Random forest classifiers were trained using five-fold cross-validation to predict csPCa at the slice level. Patients were classified as csPCa-positive if 88 or more consecutive slices were predicted positive. Model performance was compared with a classifier using PSA, DRE, prostate volume, and age. Key findings and limitations: The AI-based micro-US model and clinical screening model achieved AUROCs of 0.871 and 0.753, respectively. At a fixed threshold, the micro-US model achieved 92.5% sensitivity and 68.1% specificity, while the clinical model showed 96.2% sensitivity but only 27.3% specificity. Limitations include a retrospective single-center design and lack of external validation. Conclusions and clinical implications: AI-interpreted micro-US improves specificity while maintaining high sensitivity for csPCa detection. This method may reduce unnecessary biopsies and serve as a low-cost alternative to PSA-based screening. Patient summary: We developed an AI system to analyze prostate micro-ultrasound images. It outperformed PSA and DRE in detecting aggressive cancer and may help avoid unnecessary biopsies.

Phishing is a semantic attack which targets the user rather than the computer. It is a new Internet crime in comparison with other forms such as virus and hacking. Considering the damage phishing websites has caused to various economies by collapsing organizations, stealing information and financial diversion, various researchers have embarked on different ways of detecting phishing websites but there has been no agreement about the best algorithm to be used for prediction. This study is interested in integrating the strengths of two algorithms, Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Multi-Class Classification Rules based on Association Rules (MCAR) to establish a strong and better means of predicting phishing websites. A total of 11,056 websites were used from both PhishTank and yahoo directory to verify the effectiveness of this approach. Feature extraction and rules generation were done by the MCAR technique; classification and prediction were done by SVM technique. The result showed that the technique achieved 98.30% classification accuracy with a computation time of 2205.33s with minimum error rate. It showed a total of 98% Area under the Curve (AUC) which showed the proportion of accuracy in classifying phishing websites. The model showed 82.84% variance in the prediction of phishing websites based on the coefficient of determination. The use of two techniques together in detecting phishing websites produced a more accurate result as it combined the strength of both techniques respectively. This research work centralized on this advantage by building a hybrid of two techniques to help produce a more accurate result.

Membership Inference Attacks (MIA) aim to infer whether a target data record has been utilized for model training or not. Existing MIAs designed for large language models (LLMs) can be bifurcated into two types: reference-free and reference-based attacks. Although reference-based attacks appear promising performance by calibrating the probability measured on the target model with reference models, this illusion of privacy risk heavily depends on a reference dataset that closely resembles the training set. Both two types of attacks are predicated on the hypothesis that training records consistently maintain a higher probability of being sampled. However, this hypothesis heavily relies on the overfitting of target models, which will be mitigated by multiple regularization methods and the generalization of LLMs. Thus, these reasons lead to high false-positive rates of MIAs in practical scenarios.We propose a Membership Inference Attack based on Self-calibrated Probabilistic Variation (SPV-MIA).

Differential privacy (DP) is a widely used approach for mitigating privacy risks when training machine learning models on sensitive data. DP mechanisms add noise during training to limit the risk of information leakage. The scale of the added noise is critical, as it determines the trade-off between privacy and utility. The standard practice is to select the noise scale to satisfy a given privacy budget ε. This privacy budget is in turn interpreted in terms of operational attack risks, such as accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of inference attacks aimed to recoverinformation about the training data records.