Build-to-order (BTO) supply chains have become common-place in industries such as electronics, automotive and fashion. They enable building products based on individual requirements with a short lead time and minimum inventory and production costs. Due to their nature, they differ significantly from traditional supply chains. However, there have not been studies dedicated to demand forecasting methods for this type of setting. This work makes two contributions. First, it presents a new and unique data set from a manufacturer in the BTO sector. Second, it proposes a novel data transformation technique for demand forecasting of BTO products. Results from thirteen forecasting methods show that the approach compares well to the state-of-the-art while being easy to implement and to explain to decision-makers.

The main aim of this work is to develop and implement an automatic anomaly detection algorithm for meteorological time-series. To achieve this goal we develop an approach to constructing an ensemble of anomaly detectors in combination with adaptive threshold selection based on artificially generated anomalies. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method by integrating the corresponding implementation into ``Minimax-94'' road weather information system.

Methods based on additive-noise (AN) models have been proposed to further discriminate between causal structures that are equivalent in terms of conditional independencies. These methods rely on a particular form of the generative functional equations, with an additive noise structure, which allows inferring the directionality of causation by testing the independence between the residuals of a nonlinear regression and the predictors (nrr-independencies). Full causal structure identifiability has been proven for systems that contain only additive-noise equations and have no hidden variables. We extend the AN framework in several ways. We introduce alternative regression-free tests of independence based on conditional variances (cv-independencies). We consider conditionally-additive-noise (CAN) models, in which the equations may have the AN form only after conditioning. We exploit asymmetries in nrr-independencies or cv-independencies resulting from the CAN form to derive a criterion that infers the causal relation between a pair of variables in a multivariate system without any assumption about the form of the equations or the presence of hidden variables.

We discuss a concept denoted as Conformal Prediction (CP) in this paper. While initially stemming from the world of machine learning, it was never applied or analyzed in the context of short-term electricity price forecasting. Therefore, we elaborate the aspects that render Conformal Prediction worthwhile to know and explain why its simple yet very efficient idea has worked in other fields of application and why its characteristics are promising for short-term power applications as well. We compare its performance with different state-of-the-art electricity price forecasting models such as quantile regression averaging (QRA) in an empirical out-of-sample study for three short-term electricity time series. We combine Conformal Prediction with various underlying point forecast models to demonstrate its versatility and behavior under changing conditions. Our findings suggest that Conformal Prediction yields sharp and reliable prediction intervals in short-term power markets. We further inspect the effect each of Conformal Prediction's model components has and provide a path-based guideline on how to find the best CP model for each market.

Software analytics can be improved by surveying; i.e. rechecking and (possibly) revising the labels offered by prior analysis. Surveying is a time-consuming task and effective surveyors must carefully manage their time. Specifically, they must balance the cost of further surveying against the additional benefits of that extra effort. This paper proposes SURVEY0, an incremental Logistic Regression estimation method that implements cost/benefit analysis. Some classifier is used to rank the as-yet-unvisited examples according to how interesting they might be. Humans then review the most interesting examples, after which their feedback is used to update an estimator for estimating how many examples are remaining. This paper evaluates SURVEY0 in the context of self-admitted technical debt. As software project mature, they can accumulate "technical debt" i.e. developer decisions which are sub-optimal and decrease the overall quality of the code. Such decisions are often commented on by programmers in the code; i.e. it is self-admitted technical debt (SATD). Recent results show that text classifiers can automatically detect such debt. We find that we can significantly outperform prior results by SURVEYing the data. Specifically, for ten open-source JAVA projects, we can find 83% of the technical debt via SURVEY0 using just 16% of the comments (and if higher levels of recall are required, SURVEY0can adjust towards that with some additional effort).

Concrete is the most widely used engineered material in the world with more than 10 billion tons produced annually. Unfortunately, with that scale comes a significant burden in terms of energy, water, and release of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. As such, there is interest in creating concrete formulas that minimize this environmental burden, while satisfying engineering performance requirements. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have enabled machines to generate highly plausible artifacts, such as images of realistic looking faces. Semi-supervised generative models allow generation of artifacts with specific, desired characteristics. In this work, we use Conditional Variational Autoencoders (CVAE), a type of semi-supervised generative model, to discover concrete formulas with desired properties. Our model is trained using open data from the UCI Machine Learning Repository joined with environmental impact data computed using a web-based tool. We demonstrate CVAEs can design concrete formulas with lower emissions and natural resource usage while meeting design requirements. To ensure fair comparison between extant and generated formulas, we also train regression models to predict the environmental impacts and strength of discovered formulas. With these results, a construction engineer may create a formula that meets structural needs and best addresses local environmental concerns.

Technology is changing how we practice medicine. Sensors and wearables are getting smaller and cheaper, and algorithms are becoming powerful enough to predict medical outcomes. Yet despite rapid advances, healthcare lags behind other industries in truly putting these technologies to use. A major barrier to entry is the cross-disciplinary approach required to create such tools, requiring knowledge from many people across many fields. We aim to drive the field forward by unpacking that barrier, providing a brief introduction to core concepts and terms that define digital medicine. Specifically, we contrast "clinical research" versus routine "clinical care," outlining the security, ethical, regulatory, and legal issues developers must consider as digital medicine products go to market. We classify types of digital measurements and how to use and validate these measures in different settings. To make this resource engaging and accessible, we have included illustrations and figures ...

Field canals improvement projects (FCIPs) are one of the ambitious projects constructed to save fresh water. To finance this project, Conceptual cost models are important to accurately predict preliminary costs at the early stages of the project. The first step is to develop a conceptual cost model to identify key cost drivers affecting the project. Therefore, input variables selection remains an important part of model development, as the poor variables selection can decrease model precision. The study discovered the most important drivers of FCIPs based on a qualitative approach and a quantitative approach. Subsequently, the study has developed a parametric cost model based on machine learning methods such as regression methods, artificial neural networks, fuzzy model and case-based reasoning.

The recently proposed Lottery Ticket Hypothesis of Frankle and Carbin (2019) suggests that the performance of over-parameterized deep networks is due to the random initialization seeding the network with a small fraction of favorable weights. These weights retain their dominant status throughout training -- in a very real sense, this sub-network "won the lottery" during initialization. The authors find sub-networks via unstructured magnitude pruning with 85-95% of parameters removed that train to the same accuracy as the original network at a similar speed, which they call winning tickets. In this paper, we extend the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis to a variety of transfer learning tasks. We show that sparse sub-networks with approximately 90-95% of weights removed achieve (and often exceed) the accuracy of the original dense network in several realistic settings. We experimentally validate this by transferring the sparse representation found via pruning on CIFAR-10 to SmallNORB and FashionMNIST for object recognition tasks.

Data in the real world, of course, isn't as simple as it is in the previous example. There are always complexities and nuances to data. To stick with our housing market example, the value of houses might also be influenced by dwelling type, lot size, recent upgrades, proximity to a neighborhood park and intangible variables like curbside appeal. And, in the real world, houses wouldn't all be in the same neighborhood, so your machine learning model must also consider the ZIP code for the property. To consider this wider range of variables, we need to dig deeper into the data scientist's toolbox and pull out some more sophisticated machine learning methods, including random forests and gradient boosting.