Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is considered as one of the main causes of death in the world. Accordingly, scientists look for methods to recognize normal/abnormal heart patterns. Over recent years, researchers have been interested in to investigate CVDs based on heart sounds. The physionet 2016 corpus is presented to provide a standard database for researchers in this field. In this study we proposed an approach for normal/abnormal heart sound detection, based on i-vector features on phiysionet 2016 corpus. In this method, a fixed length vector, namely i-vector, is extracted from each record, and then Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is applied. Then Variational AuotoEncoders (VAE) is used to reduce dimensions of the obtained i-vector. After that, this i-vector and its transmitted version by PCA and VAE are used for training two Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). Finally, test set is scored using these trained GMMs. In the next step we applied a simple global threshold to classify the obtained scores. We reported the results based on Equal Error Rate (EER) and Modified Accuracy (MAcc). Experimental results show the obtained Accuracy by our proposed system could improve the results reported on the baseline system by 16%.

Accurate diagnosis is crucial for preventing the progression of Parkinson's, as well as improving the quality of life with individuals with Parkinson's disease. In this paper, we develop a gender specific and age dependent classification method to diagnose the Parkinson's disease using the handwriting based measurements. The gender specific and age dependent classifier was observed significantly outperforming the generalized classifier. An improved accuracy of 83.75% (SD=1.63) with the female specific classifier, and 79.55% (SD=1.58) with the old age dependent classifier was observed in comparison to 75.76% (SD=1.17) accuracy with the generalized classifier. Finally, combining the age and gender information proved to be encouraging in classification. We performed a rigorous analysis to observe the dominance of gender specific and age dependent features for Parkinson's detection and ranked them using the support vector machine(SVM) ranking method. Distinct set of features were observed to be dominating for higher classification accuracy in different category of classification.

This work analyses the potential of restarts for probSAT, a quite successful algorithm for k-SAT, by estimating its runtime distributions on random 3-SAT instances that are close to the phase transition. We estimate an optimal restart time from empirical data, reaching a potential speedup factor of 1.39. Calculating restart times from fitted probability distributions reduces this factor to a maximum of 1.30. A spin-off result is that the Weibull distribution approximates the runtime distribution for over 93% of the used instances well. A machine learning pipeline is presented to compute a restart time for a fixed-cutoff strategy to exploit this potential. The main components of the pipeline are a random forest for determining the distribution type and a neural network for the distribution's parameters. ProbSAT performs statistically significantly better than Luby's restart strategy and the policy without restarts when using the presented approach. The structure is particularly advantageous on hard problems.

The task of recognizing goals and plans from missing and full observations can be done efficiently by using automated planning techniques. In many applications, it is important to recognize goals and plans not only accurately, but also quickly. To address this challenge, we develop novel goal recognition approaches based on planning techniques that rely on planning landmarks. In automated planning, landmarks are properties (or actions) that cannot be avoided to achieve a goal. We show the applicability of a number of planning techniques with an emphasis on landmarks for goal and plan recognition tasks in two settings: (1) we use the concept of landmarks to develop goal recognition heuristics; and (2) we develop a landmark-based filtering method to refine existing planning-based goal and plan recognition approaches. These recognition approaches are empirically evaluated in experiments over several classical planning domains. We show that our goal recognition approaches yield not only accuracy comparable to (and often higher than) other state-of-the-art techniques, but also substantially faster recognition time over such techniques.

Assessing whether an agent has abandoned a goal or is actively pursuing it is important when multiple agents are trying to achieve joint goals, or when agents commit to achieving goals for each other. Making such a determination for a single goal by observing only plan traces is not trivial as agents often deviate from optimal plans for various reasons, including the pursuit of multiple goals or the inability to act optimally. In this article, we develop an approach based on domain independent heuristics from automated planning, landmarks, and fact partitions to identify sub-optimal action steps - with respect to a plan - within a plan execution trace. Such capability is very important in domains where multiple agents cooperate and delegate tasks among themselves, e.g. through social commitments, and need to ensure that a delegating agent can infer whether or not another agent is actually progressing towards a delegated task. We demonstrate how an agent can use our technique to determine - by observing a trace - whether an agent is honouring a commitment. We empirically show, for a number of representative domains, that our approach infers sub-optimal action steps with very high accuracy and detects commitment abandonment in nearly all cases.

In recent years, there has been an exponential growth in the number of complex documents and texts that require a deeper understanding of machine learning methods to be able to accurately classify texts in many applications. Many machine learning approaches have achieved surpassing results in natural language processing. The success of these learning algorithms relies on their capacity to understand complex models and non-linear relationships within data. However, finding suitable structures, architectures, and techniques for text classification is a challenge for researchers. In this paper, a brief overview of text classification algorithms is discussed. This overview covers different text feature extractions, dimensionality reduction methods, existing algorithms and techniques, and evaluations methods. Finally, the limitations of each technique and their application in the real-world problem are discussed.

Navigating urban environments represents a complex task for automated vehicles. They must reach their goal safely and efficiently while considering a multitude of traffic participants. We propose a modular decision making algorithm to autonomously navigate intersections, addressing challenges of existing rule-based and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches. We first present a safe RL algorithm relying on a model-checker to ensure safety guarantees. To make the decision strategy robust to perception errors and occlusions, we introduce a belief update technique using a learning based approach. Finally, we use a scene decomposition approach to scale our algorithm to environments with multiple traffic participants. We empirically demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms rule-based methods and reinforcement learning techniques on a complex intersection scenario.

This paper describes a prototype system that integrates social media analysis into the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS). This integration allows the collection of social media data to be automatically triggered by flood risk warnings determined by a hydro-meteorological model. Then, we adopt a multi-lingual approach to find flood-related messages by employing two state-of-the-art methodologies: language-agnostic word embeddings and language-aligned word embeddings. Both approaches can be used to bootstrap a classifier of social media messages for a new language with little or no labeled data. Finally, we describe a method for selecting relevant and representative messages and displaying them back in the interface of EFAS.

A great deal of attention has been recently given to Machine Learning (ML) techniques in many different application fields. This paper provides a vision of what ML can do in Power Line Communications (PLC). We firstly and briefly describe classical formulations of ML, and distinguish deterministic problems from statistical problems with relevance to communications. We then discuss ML applications in PLC for each layer, namely, for characterization and modeling, for physical layer algorithms, for media access control and networking algorithms. Finally, other applications of PLC that can benefit from the usage of ML, as grid diagnostics, are analyzed. Illustrative numerical examples are reported to serve the purpose of validating the ideas and motivate future research endeavors in this stimulating signal/data processing field.

Anomaly detection is the process of finding data points that deviate from a baseline. In a real-life setting, anomalies are usually unknown or extremely rare. Moreover, the detection must be accomplished in a timely manner or the risk of corrupting the system might grow exponentially. In this work, we propose a two level framework for detecting anomalies in sequences of discrete elements. First, we assess whether we can obtain enough information from the statistics collected from the discriminator's layers to discriminate between out of distribution and in distribution samples. We then build an unsupervised anomaly detection module based on these statistics. As to augment the data and keep track of classes of known data, we lean toward a semi-supervised adversarial learning applied to discrete elements.