Performance Analysis
Advancing Hearing Assessment: An ASR-Based Frequency-Specific Speech Test for Diagnosing Presbycusis
Traditional audiometry often fails to fully characterize the functional impact of hearing loss on speech understanding, particularly supra-threshold deficits and frequency-specific perception challenges in conditions like presbycusis. This paper presents the development and simulated evaluation of a novel Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)-based frequency-specific speech test designed to provide granular diagnostic insights. Our approach leverages ASR to simulate the perceptual effects of moderate sloping hearing loss by processing speech stimuli under controlled acoustic degradation and subsequently analyzing phoneme-level confusion patterns. Key findings indicate that simulated hearing loss introduces specific phoneme confusions, predominantly affecting high-frequency consonants (e.g., alveolar/palatal to labiodental substitutions) and leading to significant phoneme deletions, consistent with the acoustic cues degraded in presbycusis. A test battery curated from these ASR-derived confusions demonstrated diagnostic value, effectively differentiating between simulated normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners in a comprehensive simulation. This ASR-driven methodology offers a promising avenue for developing objective, granular, and frequency-specific hearing assessment tools that complement traditional audiometry. Future work will focus on validating these findings with human participants and exploring the integration of advanced AI models for enhanced diagnostic precision.
Minimizing False-Positive Attributions in Explanations of Non-Linear Models
Gjรธlbye, Anders, Haufe, Stefan, Hansen, Lars Kai
Suppressor variables can influence model predictions without being dependent on the target outcome and they pose a significant challenge for Explainable AI (XAI) methods. These variables may cause false-positive feature attributions, undermining the utility of explanations. Although effective remedies exist for linear models, their extension to non-linear models and to instance-based explanations has remained limited. We introduce PatternLocal, a novel XAI technique that addresses this gap. PatternLocal begins with a locally linear surrogate, e.g. LIME, KernelSHAP, or gradient-based methods, and transforms the resulting discriminative model weights into a generative representation, thereby suppressing the influence of suppressor variables while preserving local fidelity. In extensive hyperparameter optimization on the XAI-TRIS benchmark, PatternLocal consistently outperformed other XAI methods and reduced false-positive attributions when explaining non-linear tasks, thereby enabling more reliable and actionable insights.
Learnable Kernel Density Estimation for Graphs
Wang, Xudong, Sun, Ziheng, Ding, Chris, Fan, Jicong
This work proposes a framework LGKDE that learns kernel density estimation for graphs. The key challenge in graph density estimation lies in effectively capturing both structural patterns and semantic variations while maintaining theoretical guarantees. Combining graph kernels and kernel density estimation (KDE) is a standard approach to graph density estimation, but has unsatisfactory performance due to the handcrafted and fixed features of kernels. Our method LGKDE leverages graph neural networks to represent each graph as a discrete distribution and utilizes maximum mean discrepancy to learn the graph metric for multi-scale KDE, where all parameters are learned by maximizing the density of graphs relative to the density of their well-designed perturbed counterparts. The perturbations are conducted on both node features and graph spectra, which helps better characterize the boundary of normal density regions. Theoretically, we establish consistency and convergence guarantees for LGKDE, including bounds on the mean integrated squared error, robustness, and complexity. We validate LGKDE by demonstrating its effectiveness in recovering the underlying density of synthetic graph distributions and applying it to graph anomaly detection across diverse benchmark datasets. Extensive empirical evaluation shows that LGKDE demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines on most benchmark datasets.
Leveraging large language models and traditional machine learning ensembles for ADHD detection from narrative transcripts
Zhu, Yuxin, Guo, Yuting, Marchuck, Noah, Sarker, Abeed, Wang, Yun
Despite rapid advances in large language models (LLMs), their integration with traditional supervised machine learning (ML) techniques that have proven applicability to medical data remains underexplored. This is particularly true for psychiatric applications, where narrative data often exhibit nuanced linguistic and contextual complexity, and can benefit from the combination of multiple models with differing characteristics. In this study, we introduce an ensemble framework for automatically classifying Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnosis (binary) using narrative transcripts. Our approach integrates three complementary models: LLaMA3, an open-source LLM that captures long-range semantic structure; RoBERTa, a pre-trained transformer model fine-tuned on labeled clinical narratives; and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier trained using TF-IDF-based lexical features. These models are aggregated through a majority voting mechanism to enhance predictive robustness. The dataset includes 441 instances, including 352 for training and 89 for validation. Empirical results show that the ensemble outperforms individual models, achieving an F$_1$ score of 0.71 (95\% CI: [0.60-0.80]). Compared to the best-performing individual model (SVM), the ensemble improved recall while maintaining competitive precision. This indicates the strong sensitivity of the ensemble in identifying ADHD-related linguistic cues. These findings demonstrate the promise of hybrid architectures that leverage the semantic richness of LLMs alongside the interpretability and pattern recognition capabilities of traditional supervised ML, offering a new direction for robust and generalizable psychiatric text classification.
Crop recommendation with machine learning: leveraging environmental and economic factors for optimal crop selection
Sam, Steven, DAbreo, Silima Marshal
Department of Computer Science College of Engineering, Design and Physical Science Brunel University London steven.sam@brunel.ac.uk Abstract Agriculture constitut es a primary source of food production, economic growth and employment in India, but the sector is confronted with low farm productivity and yields aggravated by increased pressure on natural resources and adverse climate change variability. Efforts involv ing green revolution, land irrigations, improved seeds and organic farming have yielded suboptimal outcomes. The adoption of innovative computational solutions such as crop recommendation systems is considered as a new frontier to provide insights and help farmers adapt and address the challenge of low productivity. However, existing agricultural recommendation systems have predominantly focused on environmental factors and narrow geographical coverage in India, resulting in limited and robust predictions o f suitable crops with both maximum yields and profits. This work incorporates both environmental and economic factors and 19 crop varieties across 15 states as input parameters to develop and evaluate two recommendation module s - Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) - using 10 - fold Cross Validation, Time - series Split and Lag Variables approaches. Results show that the 10 - fold cross validation approach produced exceptionally high accuracy (RF: 99.96%, SVM: 94.71%), raising concerns of overfitting. However, the introduction of temporal order, which aligns more with real - world scenarios, reduces the model performance (RF: 78.55%, SVM: 71.18%) in the Time - series Split approach. To further increase the model accuracy while maintaining the temporal order, the Lag Variables approach was employed, which resulted in improved performance (RF: 83.62%, SVM: 74.38%) compared to the 10 - fold cross validation approach. Consequently, the study shows the Random Forest model developed based on the Lag Variables as the most preferred algorithm for op timal crop recommendation in the Indian context. Key words: Crop recommendation model; Random forest; Support vector machines; Indian agriculture; Exploratory data analysis 1. Introduction Agriculture is not only fundamental for food production but also constitutes a primary source for economic growth, employment and improvement of the wellbeing of many people globally. For example, the World Bank reports that agriculture constitutes about 4 % of the world's total gross domestic product (GDP), and in certain least developed nations, its contribution to GDP exceeds 25%.
Leveraging GANs for citation intent classification and its impact on citation network analysis
Bezerra, Davi A., Silva, Filipi N., Amancio, Diego R.
Citations play a fundamental role in the scientific ecosystem, serving as a foundation for tracking the flow of knowledge, acknowledging prior work, and assessing scholarly influence. In scientometrics, they are also central to the construction of quantitative indicators. Not all citations, however, serve the same function: some provide background, others introduce methods, or compare results. Therefore, understanding citation intent allows for a more nuanced interpretation of scientific impact. In this paper, we adopted a GAN-based method to classify citation intents. Our results revealed that the proposed method achieves competitive classification performance, closely matching state-of-the-art results with substantially fewer parameters. This demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of leveraging GAN architectures combined with contextual embeddings in intent classification task. We also investigated whether filtering citation intents affects the centrality of papers in citation networks. Analyzing the network constructed from the unArXiv dataset, we found that paper rankings can be significantly influenced by citation intent. All four centrality metrics examined- degree, PageRank, closeness, and betweenness - were sensitive to the filtering of citation types. The betweenness centrality displayed the greatest sensitivity, showing substantial changes in ranking when specific citation intents were removed.
Towards Objective Fine-tuning: How LLMs' Prior Knowledge Causes Potential Poor Calibration?
Wang, Ziming, Shi, Zeyu, Zhou, Haoyi, Gao, Shiqi, Sun, Qingyun, Li, Jianxin
Fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) often demonstrate poor calibration, with their confidence scores misaligned with actual performance. While calibration has been extensively studied in models trained from scratch, the impact of LLMs' prior knowledge on calibration during fine-tuning remains understudied. Our research reveals that LLMs' prior knowledge causes potential poor calibration due to the ubiquitous presence of known data in real-world fine-tuning, which appears harmful for calibration. Specifically, data aligned with LLMs' prior knowledge would induce overconfidence, while new knowledge improves calibration. Our findings expose a tension: LLMs' encyclopedic knowledge, while enabling task versatility, undermines calibration through unavoidable knowledge overlaps. To address this, we propose CogCalib, a cognition-aware framework that applies targeted learning strategies according to the model's prior knowledge. Experiments across 7 tasks using 3 LLM families prove that CogCalib significantly improves calibration while maintaining performance, achieving an average 57\% reduction in ECE compared to standard fine-tuning in Llama3-8B. These improvements generalize well to out-of-domain tasks, enhancing the objectivity and reliability of domain-specific LLMs, and making them more trustworthy for critical human-AI interaction applications.
Interpretable Credit Default Prediction with Ensemble Learning and SHAP
Yang, Shiqi, Huang, Ziyi, Xiao, Wengran, Shen, Xinyu
--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.
Robust and Explainable Detector of Time Series Anomaly via Augmenting Multiclass Pseudo-Anomalies
Obata, Kohei, Matsubara, Yasuko, Sakurai, Yasushi
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.
Semi-supervised Clustering Through Representation Learning of Large-scale EHR Data
Wang, Linshanshan, Li, Mengyan, Xia, Zongqi, Liu, Molei, Cai, Tianxi
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.