Air pollution is a vital issue emerging from the uncontrolled utilization of traditional energy sources as far as developing countries are concerned. Hence, ingenious air pollution forecasting methods are indispensable to minimize the risk. To that end, this paper proposes an Internet of Things (IoT) enabled system for monitoring and controlling air pollution in the cloud computing environment. A method called Linear Regression and Multiclass Support Vector (LR-MSV) IoT-based Air Pollution Forecast is proposed to monitor the air quality data and the air quality index measurement to pave the way for controlling effectively. Extensive experiments carried out on the air quality data in the India dataset have revealed the outstanding performance of the proposed LR-MSV method when benchmarked with well-established state-of-the-art methods. The results obtained by the LR-MSV method witness a significant increase in air pollution forecasting accuracy by reducing the air pollution forecasting time and error rate compared with the results produced by the other state-of-the-art methods

The continuous rise in CO2 emission into the environment is one of the most crucial issues facing the whole world. Many countries are making crucial decisions to control their carbon footprints to escape some of their catastrophic outcomes. There has been a lot of research going on to project the amount of carbon emissions in the future, which can help us to develop innovative techniques to deal with it in advance. Machine learning is one of the most advanced and efficient techniques for predicting the amount of carbon emissions from current data. This paper provides the methods for predicting carbon emissions (CO2 emissions) for the next few years. The predictions are based on data from the past 50 years. The dataset, which is used for making the prediction, is collected from World Bank datasets. This dataset contains CO2 emissions (metric tons per capita) of all the countries from 1960 to 2018. Our method consists of using machine learning techniques to take the idea of what carbon emission measures will look like in the next ten years and project them onto the dataset taken from the World Bank's data repository. The purpose of this research is to compare how different machine learning models (Decision Tree, Linear Regression, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine) perform on a similar dataset and measure the difference between their predictions.

Historically, the analysis of stimulus-dependent time-frequency patterns has been the cornerstone of most electroencephalography (EEG) studies. The abnormal oscillations in high-frequency waves associated with psychotic disorders during sensory and cognitive tasks have been studied many times. However, any significant dissimilarity in the resting-state low-frequency bands is yet to be established. Spectral analysis of the alpha and delta band waves shows the effectiveness of stimulus-independent EEG in identifying the abnormal activity patterns of pathological brains. A generalized model incorporating multiple frequency bands should be more efficient in associating potential EEG biomarkers with First-Episode Psychosis (FEP), leading to an accurate diagnosis. We explore multiple machine-learning methods, including random-forest, support vector machine, and Gaussian Process Classifier (GPC), to demonstrate the practicality of resting-state Power Spectral Density (PSD) to distinguish patients of FEP from healthy controls. A comprehensive discussion of our preprocessing methods for PSD analysis and a detailed comparison of different models are included in this paper. The GPC model outperforms the other models with a specificity of 95.78% to show that PSD can be used as an effective feature extraction technique for analyzing and classifying resting-state EEG signals of psychiatric disorders.

In this paper, we use tools from rate-distortion theory to establish new upper bounds on the generalization error of statistical distributed learning algorithms. Specifically, there are $K$ clients whose individually chosen models are aggregated by a central server. The bounds depend on the compressibility of each client's algorithm while keeping other clients' algorithms un-compressed, and leverage the fact that small changes in each local model change the aggregated model by a factor of only $1/K$. Adopting a recently proposed approach by Sefidgaran et al., and extending it suitably to the distributed setting, this enables smaller rate-distortion terms which are shown to translate into tighter generalization bounds. The bounds are then applied to the distributed support vector machines (SVM), suggesting that the generalization error of the distributed setting decays faster than that of the centralized one with a factor of $\mathcal{O}(\log(K)/\sqrt{K})$. This finding is validated also experimentally. A similar conclusion is obtained for a multiple-round federated learning setup where each client uses stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD).

Deep learning has been successfully applied to recognizing both natural images and medical images. However, there remains a gap in recognizing 3D neuroimaging data, especially for psychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia and depression that have no visible alteration in specific slices. In this study, we propose to process the 3D data by a 2+1D framework so that we can exploit the powerful deep 2D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) networks pre-trained on the huge ImageNet dataset for 3D neuroimaging recognition. Specifically, 3D volumes of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) metrics (grey matter, white matter, and cerebrospinal fluid) are decomposed to 2D slices according to neighboring voxel positions and inputted to 2D CNN models pre-trained on the ImageNet to extract feature maps from three views (axial, coronal, and sagittal). Global pooling is applied to remove redundant information as the activation patterns are sparsely distributed over feature maps. Channel-wise and slice-wise convolutions are proposed to aggregate the contextual information in the third view dimension unprocessed by the 2D CNN model. Multi-metric and multi-view information are fused for final prediction. Our approach outperforms handcrafted feature-based machine learning, deep feature approach with a support vector machine (SVM) classifier and 3D CNN models trained from scratch with better cross-validation results on publicly available Northwestern University Schizophrenia Dataset and the results are replicated on another independent dataset.

This paper discusses a crowdsourcing based method that we designed to quantify the importance of different attributes of a dataset in determining the outcome of a classification problem. This heuristic, provided by humans acts as the initial weight seed for machine learning models and guides the model towards a better optimal during the gradient descent process. Often times when dealing with data, it is not uncommon to deal with skewed datasets, that over represent items of certain classes, while underrepresenting the rest. Skewed datasets may lead to unforeseen issues with models such as learning a biased function or overfitting. Traditional data augmentation techniques in supervised learning include oversampling and training with synthetic data. We introduce an experimental approach to dealing with such unbalanced datasets by including humans in the training process. We ask humans to rank the importance of features of the dataset, and through rank aggregation, determine the initial weight bias for the model. We show that collective human bias can allow ML models to learn insights about the true population instead of the biased sample. In this paper, we use two rank aggregator methods Kemeny Young and the Markov Chain aggregator to quantify human opinion on importance of features. This work mainly tests the effectiveness of human knowledge on binary classification (Popular vs Not-popular) problems on two ML models: Deep Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines. This approach considers humans as weak learners and relies on aggregation to offset individual biases and domain unfamiliarity.

Visual Analytics (VA) tools and techniques have been instrumental in supporting users to build better classification models, interpret models' overall logic, and audit results. In a different direction, VA has recently been applied to transform classification models into descriptive mechanisms instead of predictive. The idea is to use such models as surrogates for data patterns, visualizing the model to understand the phenomenon represented by the data. Although very useful and inspiring, the few proposed approaches have opted to use low complex classification models to promote straightforward interpretation, presenting limitations to capture intricate data patterns. In this paper, we present VAX (multiVariate dAta eXplanation), a new VA method to support the identification and visual interpretation of patterns in multivariate datasets. Unlike the existing similar approaches, VAX uses the concept of Jumping Emerging Patterns to identify and aggregate several diversified patterns, producing explanations through logic combinations of data variables. The potential of VAX to interpret complex multivariate datasets is demonstrated through use cases employing two real-world datasets covering different scenarios.

Data dimension reduction (DDR) is all about mapping data from high dimensions to low dimensions, various techniques of DDR are being used for image dimension reduction like Random Projections, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the Variance approach, LSA-Transform, the Combined and Direct approaches, and the New Random Approach. Auto-encoders (AE) are used to learn end-to-end mapping. In this paper, we demonstrate that pre-processing not only speeds up the algorithms but also improves accuracy in both supervised and unsupervised learning. In pre-processing of DDR, first PCA based DDR is used for supervised learning, then we explore AE based DDR for unsupervised learning. In PCA based DDR, we first compare supervised learning algorithms accuracy and time before and after applying PCA. Similarly, in AE based DDR, we compare unsupervised learning algorithm accuracy and time before and after AE representation learning. Supervised learning algorithms including support-vector machines (SVM), Decision Tree with GINI index, Decision Tree with entropy and Stochastic Gradient Descent classifier (SGDC) and unsupervised learning algorithm including K-means clustering, are used for classification purpose. We used two datasets MNIST and FashionMNIST Our experiment shows that there is massive improvement in accuracy and time reduction after pre-processing in both supervised and unsupervised learning.

Chronic pain is a multi-dimensional experience, and pain intensity plays an important part, impacting the patients emotional balance, psychology, and behaviour. Standard self-reporting tools, such as the Visual Analogue Scale for pain, fail to capture this burden. Moreover, this type of tools is susceptible to a degree of subjectivity, dependent on the patients clear understanding of how to use it, social biases, and their ability to translate a complex experience to a scale. To overcome these and other self-reporting challenges, pain intensity estimation has been previously studied based on facial expressions, electroencephalograms, brain imaging, and autonomic features. However, to the best of our knowledge, it has never been attempted to base this estimation on the patient narratives of the personal experience of chronic pain, which is what we propose in this work. Indeed, in the clinical assessment and management of chronic pain, verbal communication is essential to convey information to physicians that would otherwise not be easily accessible through standard reporting tools, since language, sociocultural, and psychosocial variables are intertwined. We show that language features from patient narratives indeed convey information relevant for pain intensity estimation, and that our computational models can take advantage of that. Specifically, our results show that patients with mild pain focus more on the use of verbs, whilst moderate and severe pain patients focus on adverbs, and nouns and adjectives, respectively, and that these differences allow for the distinction between these three pain classes.

We propose a decoding-based approach to detect context effects on neural codes in longitudinal neural recording data. The approach is agnostic to how information is encoded in neural activity, and can control for a variety of possible confounding factors present in the data. We demonstrate our approach by determining whether it is possible to decode location encoding from prefrontal cortex in the mouse and, further, testing whether the encoding changes due to task engagement.