Data-carving methods perform selective inference by conditioning the distribution of data on the observed selection event. However, existing data-carving approaches typically require an analytically tractable characterization of the selection event. This paper introduces a new method that leverages tools from flow-based generative modeling to approximate a potentially complex conditional distribution, even when the underlying selection event lacks an analytical description -- take, for example, the data-adaptive tuning of model parameters. The key idea is to learn a transport map that pushes forward a simple reference distribution to the conditional distribution given selection. This map is efficiently learned via a normalizing flow, without imposing any further restrictions on the nature of the selection event. Through extensive numerical experiments on both simulated and real data, we demonstrate that this method enables flexible selective inference by providing: (i) valid p-values and confidence sets for adaptively selected hypotheses and parameters, (ii) a closed-form expression for the conditional density function, enabling likelihood-based and quantile-based inference, and (iii) adjustments for intractable selection steps that can be easily integrated with existing methods designed to account for the tractable steps in a selection procedure involving multiple steps.

Abstract--F ederated learning (FL) has attracted increasing attention to mitigate security and privacy challenges in traditional cloud-centric machine learning models specifically in healthcare ecosystems. FL methodologies enable the training of global models through localized policies, allowing independent operations at the edge clients' level. Conventional first-order FL approaches face several challenges in personalized model training due to heterogeneous non-independent and identically distributed (non-iid) data of each edge client. Recently, second-order FL approaches maintain the stability and consistency of non-iid datasets while improving personalized model training. This study proposes and develops a verifiable and auditable optimized second-order FL framework BFEL (blockchain enhanced federated edge learning) based on optimized FedCurv for personalized healthcare systems. FedCurv incorporates information about the importance of each parameter to each client's task (through Fisher Information Matrix) which helps to preserve client-specific knowledge and reduce model drift during aggregation. Moreover, it minimizes communication rounds required to achieve a target precision convergence for each edge client while effectively managing personalized training on non-iid and heterogeneous data. The incorporation of Ethereum-based model aggregation ensures trust, ver-ifiability, and auditability while public key encryption enhances privacy and security . Experimental results of federated CNNs and MLPs utilizing Mnist, Cifar-10, and PathMnist demonstrate the high efficiency and scalability of the proposed framework. I. Introduction Traditional machine learning (ML) methodologies necessitate training on data consolidated within a single data repository, which may be either centralized or distributed [1].

We provide an introduction to the topic of path signatures as means of feature extraction for machine learning from data streams. The article stresses the mathematical theory underlying the signature methodology, highlighting the conceptual character without plunging into the technical details of rigorous proofs. These notes are based on an introductory presentation given to students of the Research Experience for Undergraduates in Industrial Mathematics and Statistics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in June 2024.

This paper introduces a Machine Learning (ML) approach for scalability of UTXO-based blockchains, such as Bitcoin. Prior approaches to UTXO set sharding struggle with distributing UTXOs effectively across validators, creating substantial communication overhead due to child-parent transaction dependencies. This overhead, which arises from the need to locate parent UTXOs, significantly hampers transaction processing speeds. Our solution uses ML to optimize not only UTXO set sharding but also the routing of incoming transactions, ensuring that transactions are directed to shards containing their parent UTXOs. At the heart of our approach is a framework that combines contrastive and unsupervised learning to create an embedding space for transaction outputs. This embedding allows the model to group transaction outputs based on spending relationships, making it possible to route transactions efficiently to the correct validation microservices. Trained on historical transaction data with triplet loss and online semi-hard negative mining, the model embeds parent-child spending patterns directly into its parameters, thus eliminating the need for costly, real-time parent transaction lookups. This significantly reduces cross-shard communication overhead, boosting throughput and scalability.

Data imbalance persists as a pervasive challenge in regression tasks, introducing bias in model performance and undermining predictive reliability. This is particularly detrimental in applications aimed at predicting rare events that fall outside the domain of the bulk of the training data. In this study, we review the current state-of-the-art regarding sampling-based methods and cost-sensitive learning. Additionally, we propose novel approaches to mitigate model bias. To better asses the importance of data, we introduce the density-distance and density-ratio relevance functions, which effectively integrate empirical frequency of data with domain-specific preferences, offering enhanced interpretability for end-users. Furthermore, we present advanced mitigation techniques (cSMOGN and crbSMOGN), which build upon and improve existing sampling methods. In a comprehensive quantitative evaluation, we benchmark state-of-the-art methods on 10 synthetic and 42 real-world datasets, using neural networks, XGBoosting trees and Random Forest models. Our analysis reveals that while most strategies improve performance on rare samples, they often degrade it on frequent ones. We demonstrate that constructing an ensemble of models -- one trained with imbalance mitigation and another without -- can significantly reduce these negative effects. The key findings underscore the superior performance of our novel crbSMOGN sampling technique with the density-ratio relevance function for neural networks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

Television networks face high financial risk when making programming decisions, often relying on limited historical data to forecast episodic viewership. This study introduces a machine learning framework that integrates natural language processing (NLP) features from over 25000 television episodes with traditional viewership data to enhance predictive accuracy. By extracting emotional tone, cognitive complexity, and narrative structure from episode dialogue, we evaluate forecasting performance using SARIMAX, rolling XGBoost, and feature selection models. While prior viewership remains a strong baseline predictor, NLP features contribute meaningful improvements for some series. We also introduce a similarity scoring method based on Euclidean distance between aggregate dialogue vectors to compare shows by content. Tested across diverse genres, including Better Call Saul and Abbott Elementary, our framework reveals genre-specific performance and offers interpretable metrics for writers, executives, and marketers seeking data-driven insight into audience behavior.

This survey explores the integration of machine learning (ML) into EDA workflows for analog and RF circuits, addressing challenges unique to analog design, which include complex constraints, nonlinear design spaces, and high computational costs. State-of-the-art learning and optimization techniques are reviewed for circuit tasks such as constraint formulation, topology generation, device modeling, sizing, placement, and routing. The survey highlights the capability of ML to enhance automation, improve design quality, and reduce time-to-market while meeting the target specifications of an analog or RF circuit. Emerging trends and cross-cutting challenges, including robustness to variations and considerations of interconnect parasitics, are also discussed.

Speaker-dependent modelling can substantially improve performance in speech-based health monitoring applications. While mixed-effect models are commonly used for such speaker adaptation, they require computationally expensive retraining for each new observation, making them impractical in a production environment. We reformulate this task as a meta-learning problem and explore three approaches of increasing complexity: ensemble-based distance models, prototypical networks, and transformer-based sequence models. Using pre-trained speech embeddings, we evaluate these methods on a large longitudinal dataset of shift workers (N=1,185, 10,286 recordings), predicting time since sleep from speech as a function of fatigue, a symptom commonly associated with ill-health. Our results demonstrate that all meta-learning approaches tested outperformed both cross-sectional and conventional mixed-effects models, with a transformer-based method achieving the strongest performance.

Clustering is an important problem in data mining. It aims to split the data into groups such that data points in the same group are similar while points in different groups are different under a given similarity metric. Clustering has been successfully applied in many practical applications, such as data grouping in exploratory data analysis, search results categorization, market segmentation etc. Clustering results are often used for further analysis or interpretation. However, directly applying results obtained from usual clustering algorithms may suffer from fairness issues-some cluster may favor data points from one of the subpopulations, i.e., having disproportionally more points. One example of 1 Figure 1: Illustration of the fairness issue in clustering, Points of different color indicate different traits on a sensitive variable, e.g., gender where blue indicates male and red female. Cluster 1 is dominated by females while Cluster 2 by males. Points with an arrow indicate that we might switch its cluster membership assignment to make the clusters less dominated by one subpopulation.

The affinity and specificity of protein-molecule binding directly impact functional outcomes, uncovering the mechanisms underlying biological regulation and signal transduction. Most deep-learning-based prediction approaches focus on structures of atoms or fragments. However, quantum chemical properties, such as electronic structures, are the key to unveiling interaction patterns but remain largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose ECBind, a method for tokenizing electron cloud signals into quantized embeddings, enabling their integration into downstream tasks such as binding affinity prediction. By incorporating electron densities, ECBind helps uncover binding modes that cannot be fully represented by atom-level models. Specifically, to remove the redundancy inherent in electron cloud signals, a structure-aware transformer and hierarchical codebooks encode 3D binding sites enriched with electron structures into tokens. These tokenized codes are then used for specific tasks with labels. To extend its applicability to a wider range of scenarios, we utilize knowledge distillation to develop an electron-cloud-agnostic prediction model. Experimentally, ECBind demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across multiple tasks, achieving improvements of 6.42\% and 15.58\% in per-structure Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients, respectively.