Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) has been used as a metric to measure the negative impacts and enhance positive outcomes of companies in areas such as the environment, society, and governance. Recently, investors have increasingly recognized the significance of ESG criteria in their investment choices, leading businesses to integrate ESG principles into their operations and strategies. The Multi-Lingual ESG Issue Identification (ML-ESG) shared task encompasses the classification of news documents into 35 distinct ESG issue labels. In this study, we explored multiple strategies harnessing BERT language models to achieve accurate classification of news documents across these labels. Our analysis revealed that the RoBERTa classifier emerged as one of the most successful approaches, securing the second-place position for the English test dataset, and sharing the fifth-place position for the French test dataset. Furthermore, our SVM-based binary model tailored for the Chinese language exhibited exceptional performance, earning the second-place rank on the test dataset.

Classic machine learning algorithms have been reviewed and studied mathematically on its performance and properties in detail. This paper intends to review the empirical functioning of widely used classical supervised learning algorithms such as Decision Trees, Boosting, Support Vector Machines, k-nearest Neighbors and a shallow Artificial Neural Network. The paper evaluates these algorithms on a sparse tabular data for classification task and observes the effect on specific hyperparameters on these algorithms when the data is synthetically modified for higher noise. These perturbations were introduced to observe these algorithms on their efficiency in generalizing for sparse data and their utility of different parameters to improve classification accuracy. The paper intends to show that these classic algorithms are fair learners even for such limited data due to their inherent properties even for noisy and sparse datasets.

This paper presents a Multiple Kernel Learning (abbreviated as MKL) framework for the Support Vector Machine (SVM) with the $(0, 1)$ loss function. Some KKT-like first-order optimality conditions are provided and then exploited to develop a fast ADMM algorithm to solve the nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problem. Numerical experiments on real data sets show that the performance of our MKL-$L_{0/1}$-SVM is comparable with the one of the leading approaches called SimpleMKL developed by Rakotomamonjy, Bach, Canu, and Grandvalet [Journal of Machine Learning Research, vol. 9, pp. 2491-2521, 2008].

Several decades ago, Support Vector Machines (SVMs) were introduced for performing binary classification tasks, under a supervised framework. Nowadays, they often outperform other supervised methods and remain one of the most popular approaches in the machine learning arena. In this work, we investigate the training of SVMs through a smooth sparse-promoting-regularized squared hinge loss minimization. This choice paves the way to the application of quick training methods built on majorization-minimization approaches, benefiting from the Lipschitz differentiabililty of the loss function. Moreover, the proposed approach allows us to handle sparsity-preserving regularizers promoting the selection of the most significant features, so enhancing the performance. Numerical tests and comparisons conducted on three different datasets demonstrate the good performance of the proposed methodology in terms of qualitative metrics (accuracy, precision, recall, and F 1 score) as well as computational cost.

Radio map construction requires a large amount of radio measurement data with location labels, which imposes a high deployment cost. This paper develops a region-based radio map from received signal strength (RSS) measurements without location labels. The construction is based on a set of blindly collected RSS measurement data from a device that visits each region in an indoor area exactly once, where the footprints and timestamps are not recorded. The main challenge is to cluster the RSS data and match clusters with the physical regions. Classical clustering algorithms fail to work as the RSS data naturally appears as non-clustered due to multipaths and noise. In this paper, a signal subspace model with a sequential prior is constructed for the RSS data, and an integrated segmentation and clustering algorithm is developed, which is shown to find the globally optimal solution in a special case. Furthermore, the clustered data is matched with the physical regions using a graph-based approach. Based on real measurements from an office space, the proposed scheme reduces the region localization error by roughly 50% compared to a weighted centroid localization (WCL) baseline, and it even outperforms some supervised localization schemes, including k-nearest neighbor (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), and deep neural network (DNN), which require labeled data for training.

In this paper, we propose a new way of remembering by introducing a memory influence mechanism for the least squares support vector machine (LSSVM). Without changing the equation constraints of the original LSSVM, this mechanism, allows an accurate partitioning of the training set without overfitting. The maximum memory impact model (MIMM) and the weighted impact memory model (WIMM) are then proposed. It is demonstrated that these models can be degraded to the LSSVM. Furthermore, we propose some different memory impact functions for the MIMM and WIMM. The experimental results show that that our MIMM and WIMM have better generalization performance compared to the LSSVM and significant advantage in time cost compared to other memory models.

Multitask learning (MTL) leverages task-relatedness to enhance performance. With the emergence of multimodal data, tasks can now be referenced by multiple indices. In this paper, we employ high-order tensors, with each mode corresponding to a task index, to naturally represent tasks referenced by multiple indices and preserve their structural relations. Based on this representation, we propose a general framework of low-rank MTL methods with tensorized support vector machines (SVMs) and least square support vector machines (LSSVMs), where the CP factorization is deployed over the coefficient tensor. Our approach allows to model the task relation through a linear combination of shared factors weighted by task-specific factors and is generalized to both classification and regression problems. Through the alternating optimization scheme and the Lagrangian function, each subproblem is transformed into a convex problem, formulated as a quadratic programming or linear system in the dual form. In contrast to previous MTL frameworks, our decision function in the dual induces a weighted kernel function with a task-coupling term characterized by the similarities of the task-specific factors, better revealing the explicit relations across tasks in MTL. Experimental results validate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed methods compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches in MTL. The code of implementation will be available at https://github.com/liujiani0216/TSVM-MTL.

Cyclostationarity involves periodic statistical variations in signals and processes, commonly used in signal analysis and network security. In the context of attacks, cyclostationarity helps detect malicious behaviors within network traffic, such as traffic patterns in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks or hidden communication channels in malware. This approach enhances security by identifying abnormal patterns and informing Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs) to recognize potential attacks, enhancing protection against both known and novel threats. This research focuses on identifying cyclostationary malware behavior and its detection. The main goal is to pinpoint essential cyclostationary features used in NIDSs. These features are extracted using algorithms such as Boruta and Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and then categorized to find the most significant cyclostationary patterns. The aim of this article is to reveal periodically changing malware behaviors through cyclostationarity. The study highlights the importance of spotting cyclostationary malware in NIDSs by using established datasets like KDD99, NSL-KDD, and the UGRansome dataset. The UGRansome dataset is designed for anomaly detection research and includes both normal and abnormal network threat categories of zero-day attacks. A comparison is made using the Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms, while also evaluating the effectiveness of Boruta and PCA. The findings show that PCA is more promising than using Boruta alone for extracting cyclostationary network feature patterns. Additionally, the analysis identifies the internet protocol as the most noticeable cyclostationary feature pattern used by malware. Notably, the UGRansome dataset outperforms the KDD99 and NSL-KDD, achieving 99% accuracy in signature malware detection using the RF algorithm and 98% with the SVM.

While academic metrics such as transcripts and GPA are commonly used to evaluate students' knowledge acquisition, there is a lack of comprehensive metrics to measure their preparedness for the challenges of post-graduation life. This research paper explores the impact of various factors on university students' readiness for change and transition, with a focus on their preparedness for careers. The methodology employed in this study involves designing a survey based on Paul J. Mayer's "The Balance Wheel" to capture students' sentiments on various life aspects, including satisfaction with the educational process and expectations of salary. The collected data from a KBTU student survey (n=47) were processed through machine learning models: Linear Regression, Support Vector Regression (SVR), Random Forest Regression. Subsequently, an intelligent system was built using these models and fuzzy sets. The system is capable of evaluating graduates' readiness for their future careers and demonstrates a high predictive power. The findings of this research have practical implications for educational institutions. Such an intelligent system can serve as a valuable tool for universities to assess and enhance students' preparedness for post-graduation challenges. By recognizing the factors contributing to students' readiness for change, universities can refine curricula and processes to better prepare students for their career journeys.

The mobile cloud gaming industry has been rapidly growing over the last decade. When streaming gaming videos are transmitted to customers' client devices from cloud servers, algorithms that can monitor distorted video quality without having any reference video available are desirable tools. However, creating No-Reference Video Quality Assessment (NR VQA) models that can accurately predict the quality of streaming gaming videos rendered by computer graphics engines is a challenging problem, since gaming content generally differs statistically from naturalistic videos, often lacks detail, and contains many smooth regions. Until recently, the problem has been further complicated by the lack of adequate subjective quality databases of mobile gaming content. We have created a new gaming-specific NR VQA model called the Gaming Video Quality Evaluator (GAMIVAL), which combines and leverages the advantages of spatial and temporal gaming distorted scene statistics models, a neural noise model, and deep semantic features. Using a support vector regression (SVR) as a regressor, GAMIVAL achieves superior performance on the new LIVE-Meta Mobile Cloud Gaming (LIVE-Meta MCG) video quality database.