Ecological datasets are generally characterised by complex interactions between variables, nonlinearity, missing values, dependence in the observations and/or a continuously expanding size [1-3], especially since the recent increase in the use of remote sensing and automatic recorders [4]. A growing number of those datasets cannot be effectively processed by humans anymore and require methods that can deal with high number of variables and complex data structures [3, 5, 6]. Because of their ability to process large and complicated datasets, machine learning models are expected to become a standard framework in the analysis of ecological data [3, 7, 8]. Over the last few years, machine learning algorithms have become increasingly popular due to their high performance and flexibility [8]. In ecology, they have been successfully applied to perform various tasks such as identifying species from images or sounds [9], monitoring animal behaviour [10] or modelling species distribution [11] and new innovative studies and perspectives keep being regularly documented [3, 12]. However, implementing a machine learning model is not yet a trivial task and may seem intimidating to ecologists with no previous experience in this area. In this paper, we aim to share nine tips to help ecologists avoid some of the most common errors and incorrect practices in machine learning. We focused our tips on classification problems as a substantial number of ecological studies aim to assign data into predefined classes such as ecological states or biological entities. Some typical examples of classification include species identification through pictures [9] or sound recordings [13-15], distinction of different phenological phases in plant life cycle [16, 17], description of animal behaviour [18] and detection of disease in plants [19].

In the end-of-line test of geared motors, the evaluation of product qual-ity is important. Due to time constraints and the high diversity of variants, acous-tic measurements are more economical than vibration measurements. However, the acoustic data is affected by industrial disturbing noise. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the robustness of features used for anomaly detection in geared motor end-of-line testing. A real-world dataset with typical faults and acoustic disturbances is recorded by an acoustic array. This includes industrial noise from the production and systematically produced disturbances, used to compare the robustness. Overall, it is proposed to apply features extracted from a log-envelope spectrum together with psychoacoustic features. The anomaly de-tection is done by using the isolation forest or the more universal bagging random miner. Most disturbances can be circumvented, while the use of a hammer or air pressure often causes problems. In general, these results are important for condi-tion monitoring tasks that are based on acoustic or vibration measurements. Fur-thermore, a real-world problem description is presented to improve common sig-nal processing and machine learning tasks.

Monitoring of prevalent airborne diseases such as COVID-19 characteristically involves respiratory assessments. While auscultation is a mainstream method for preliminary screening of disease symptoms, its utility is hampered by the need for dedicated hospital visits. Remote monitoring based on recordings of respiratory sounds on portable devices is a promising alternative, which can assist in early assessment of COVID-19 that primarily affects the lower respiratory tract. In this study, we introduce a novel deep learning approach to distinguish patients with COVID-19 from healthy controls given audio recordings of cough or breathing sounds. The proposed approach leverages a novel hierarchical spectrogram transformer (HST) on spectrogram representations of respiratory sounds. HST embodies self-attention mechanisms over local windows in spectrograms, and window size is progressively grown over model stages to capture local to global context. HST is compared against state-of-the-art conventional and deep-learning baselines. Demonstrations on crowd-sourced multi-national datasets indicate that HST outperforms competing methods, achieving over 83% area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) in detecting COVID-19 cases.

Code generation from text requires understanding the user's intent from a natural language description and generating an executable code snippet that satisfies this intent. While recent pretrained language models demonstrate remarkable performance for this task, these models fail when the given natural language description is under-specified. In this work, we introduce a novel and more realistic setup for this task. We hypothesize that the under-specification of a natural language description can be resolved by asking clarification questions. Therefore, we collect and introduce a new dataset named CodeClarQA containing pairs of natural language descriptions and code with created synthetic clarification questions and answers. The empirical results of our evaluation of pretrained language model performance on code generation show that clarifications result in more precisely generated code, as shown by the substantial improvement of model performance in all evaluation metrics. Alongside this, our task and dataset introduce new challenges to the community, including when and what clarification questions should be asked. Our code and dataset are available on GitHub.

Adversarial attacks represent a security threat to machine learning based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. To prevent such attacks we propose an adversarial example detection strategy applicable to any ASR system that predicts a probability distribution over output tokens in each time step. We measure a set of characteristics of this distribution: the median, maximum, and minimum over the output probabilities, the entropy, and the Jensen-Shannon divergence of the distributions of subsequent time steps. Then, we fit a Gaussian distribution to the characteristics observed for benign data. By computing the likelihood of incoming new audio we can distinguish malicious inputs from samples from clean data with an area under the receiving operator characteristic (AUROC) higher than 0.99, which drops to 0.98 for less-quality audio. To assess the robustness of our method we build adaptive attacks. This reduces the AUROC to 0.96 but results in more noisy adversarial clips.

Marine animals and deep underwater objects are difficult to recognize and monitor for safety of aquatic life. There is an increasing challenge when the water is saline with granular particles and impurities. In such natural adversarial environment, traditional approaches like CNN start to fail and are expensive to compute. This project involves implementing and evaluating various object detection models, including EfficientDet, YOLOv5, YOLOv8, and Detectron2, on an existing annotated underwater dataset, called the Brackish-Dataset. The dataset comprises annotated image sequences of fish, crabs, starfish, and other aquatic animals captured in Limfjorden water with limited visibility. The aim of this research project is to study the efficiency of newer models on the same dataset and contrast them with the previous results based on accuracy and inference time. Firstly, I compare the results of YOLOv3 (31.10% mean Average Precision (mAP)), YOLOv4 (83.72% mAP), YOLOv5 (97.6%), YOLOv8 (98.20%), EfficientDet (98.56% mAP) and Detectron2 (95.20% mAP) on the same dataset. Secondly, I provide a modified BiSkFPN mechanism (BiFPN neck with skip connections) to perform complex feature fusion in adversarial noise which makes modified EfficientDet robust to perturbations. Third, analyzed the effect on accuracy of EfficientDet (98.63% mAP) and YOLOv5 by adversarial learning (98.04% mAP). Last, I provide class activation map based explanations (CAM) for the two models to promote Explainability in black box models. Overall, the results indicate that modified EfficientDet achieved higher accuracy with five-fold cross validation than the other models with 88.54% IoU of feature maps.

Multi-view datasets offer diverse forms of data that can enhance prediction models by providing complementary information. However, the use of multi-view data leads to an increase in high-dimensional data, which poses significant challenges for the prediction models that can lead to poor generalization. Therefore, relevant feature selection from multi-view datasets is important as it not only addresses the poor generalization but also enhances the interpretability of the models. Despite the success of traditional feature selection methods, they have limitations in leveraging intrinsic information across modalities, lacking generalizability, and being tailored to specific classification tasks. We propose a novel genetic algorithm strategy to overcome these limitations of traditional feature selection methods for multi-view data. Our proposed approach, called the multi-view multi-objective feature selection genetic algorithm (MMFS-GA), simultaneously selects the optimal subset of features within a view and between views under a unified framework. The MMFS-GA framework demonstrates superior performance and interpretability for feature selection on multi-view datasets in both binary and multiclass classification tasks. The results of our evaluations on three benchmark datasets, including synthetic and real data, show improvement over the best baseline methods. This work provides a promising solution for multi-view feature selection and opens up new possibilities for further research in multi-view datasets.

During crisis situations, social media allows people to quickly share information, including messages requesting help. This can be valuable to emergency responders, who need to categorise and prioritise these messages based on the type of assistance being requested. However, the high volume of messages makes it difficult to filter and prioritise them without the use of computational techniques. Fully supervised filtering techniques for crisis message categorisation typically require a large amount of annotated training data, but this can be difficult to obtain during an ongoing crisis and is expensive in terms of time and labour to create. This thesis focuses on addressing the challenge of low data availability when categorising crisis messages for emergency response. It first presents domain adaptation as a solution for this problem, which involves learning a categorisation model from annotated data from past crisis events (source domain) and adapting it to categorise messages from an ongoing crisis event (target domain). In many-to-many adaptation, where the model is trained on multiple past events and adapted to multiple ongoing events, a multi-task learning approach is proposed using pre-trained language models. This approach outperforms baselines and an ensemble approach further improves performance...

This work explores the use of gradient boosting in the context of classification. Four popular implementations, including original GBM algorithm and selected state-of-the-art gradient boosting frameworks (i.e. XGBoost, LightGBM and CatBoost), have been thoroughly compared on several publicly available real-world datasets of sufficient diversity. In the study, special emphasis was placed on hyperparameter optimization, specifically comparing two tuning strategies, i.e. randomized search and Bayesian optimization using the Tree-stuctured Parzen Estimator. The performance of considered methods was investigated in terms of common classification accuracy metrics as well as runtime and tuning time. Additionally, obtained results have been validated using appropriate statistical testing. An attempt was made to indicate a gradient boosting variant showing the right balance between effectiveness, reliability and ease of use.

Optimizing the phrasing of argumentative text is crucial in higher education and professional development. However, assessing whether and how the different claims in a text should be revised is a hard task, especially for novice writers. In this work, we explore the main challenges to identifying argumentative claims in need of specific revisions. By learning from collaborative editing behaviors in online debates, we seek to capture implicit revision patterns in order to develop approaches aimed at guiding writers in how to further improve their arguments. We systematically compare the ability of common word embedding models to capture the differences between different versions of the same text, and we analyze their impact on various types of writing issues. To deal with the noisy nature of revision-based corpora, we propose a new sampling strategy based on revision distance. Opposed to approaches from prior work, such sampling can be done without employing additional annotations and judgments. Moreover, we provide evidence that using contextual information and domain knowledge can further improve prediction results. How useful a certain type of context is, depends on the issue the claim is suffering from, though.