Mental disorders including depression, anxiety, and other neurological disorders pose a significant global challenge, particularly among individuals exhibiting social avoidance tendencies. This study proposes a hybrid approach by leveraging smartphone sensor data measuring daily physical activities and analyzing their social media (Twitter) interactions for evaluating an individual's depression level. Using CNN-based deep learning models and Naive Bayes classification, we identify human physical activities accurately and also classify the user sentiments. A total of 33 participants were recruited for data acquisition, and nine relevant features were extracted from the physical activities and analyzed with their weekly depression scores, evaluated using the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) questionnaire. Of the nine features, six are derived from physical activities, achieving an activity recognition accuracy of 95%, while three features stem from sentiment analysis of Twitter activities, yielding a sentiment analysis accuracy of 95.6%. Notably, several physical activity features exhibited significant correlations with the severity of depression symptoms. For classifying the depression severity, a support vector machine (SVM)-based algorithm is employed that demonstrated a very high accuracy of 94%, outperforming alternative models, e.g., the multilayer perceptron (MLP) and k-nearest neighbor. It is a simple approach yet highly effective in the long run for monitoring depression without breaching personal privacy.

A conformal classifier produces a set of predicted classes and provides a probabilistic guarantee that the set includes the true class. Unfortunately, it is often the case that conformal classifiers produce uninformatively large sets. In this work, we show that test-time augmentation (TTA)--a technique that introduces inductive biases during inference--reduces the size of the sets produced by conformal classifiers. Our approach is flexible, computationally efficient, and effective. It can be combined with any conformal score, requires no model retraining, and reduces prediction set sizes by 10%-14% on average. We conduct an evaluation of the approach spanning three datasets, three models, two established conformal scoring methods, different guarantee strengths, and several distribution shifts to show when and why test-time augmentation is a useful addition to the conformal pipeline.

We present the Star-Based Automated Single-locus and Epistasis analysis tool - Genetic Programming (StarBASE-GP), an automated framework for discovering meaningful genetic variants associated with phenotypic variation in large-scale genomic datasets. StarBASE-GP uses a genetic programming-based multi-objective optimization strategy to evolve machine learning pipelines that simultaneously maximize explanatory power (r2) and minimize pipeline complexity. Biological domain knowledge is integrated at multiple stages, including the use of nine inheritance encoding strategies to model deviations from additivity, a custom linkage disequilibrium pruning node that minimizes redundancy among features, and a dynamic variant recommendation system that prioritizes informative candidates for pipeline inclusion. We evaluate StarBASE-GP on a cohort of Rattus norvegicus (brown rat) to identify variants associated with body mass index, benchmarking its performance against a random baseline and a biologically naive version of the tool. StarBASE-GP consistently evolves Pareto fronts with superior performance, yielding higher accuracy in identifying both ground truth and novel quantitative trait loci, highlighting relevant targets for future validation. By incorporating evolutionary search and relevant biological theory into a flexible automated machine learning framework, StarBASE-GP demonstrates robust potential for advancing variant discovery in complex traits.

In the past decade gradient-based deep learning has revolutionized several applications. However, this rapid advancement has highlighted the need for a deeper theoretical understanding of its limitations. Research has shown that, in many practical learning tasks, the information contained in the gradient is so minimal that gradient-based methods require an exceedingly large number of iterations to achieve success. The informativeness of the gradient is typically measured by its variance with respect to the random selection of a target function from a hypothesis class. We use this framework and give a general bound on the variance in terms of a parameter related to the pairwise independence of the target function class and the collision entropy of the input distribution. Our bound scales as $ \tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\varepsilon+e^{-\frac{1}{2}\mathcal{E}_c}) $, where $ \tilde{\mathcal{O}} $ hides factors related to the regularity of the learning model and the loss function, $ \varepsilon $ measures the pairwise independence of the target function class and $\mathcal{E}_c$ is the collision entropy of the input distribution. To demonstrate the practical utility of our bound, we apply it to the class of Learning with Errors (LWE) mappings and high-frequency functions. In addition to the theoretical analysis, we present experiments to understand better the nature of recent deep learning-based attacks on LWE.

--Bioacoustic sound event detection (BioSED) is crucial for biodiversity conservation but faces practical challenges during model development and training: limited amounts of annotated data, sparse events, species diversity, and class imbalance. T o address these challenges efficiently with a limited labeling budget, we apply the mismatch-first farthest-traversal (MFFT), an active learning method integrating committee voting disagreement and diversity analysis. We also refine an existing BioSED dataset specifically for evaluating active learning algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that MFFT achieves a mAP of 68% when cold-starting and 71% when warm-starting (which is close to the fully-supervised mAP of 75%) while using only 2.3% of the annotations. Notably, MFFT excels in cold-start scenarios and with rare species, which are critical for monitoring endangered species, demonstrating its practical value.

In this paper, a Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) model for Baxter permutations (BPs), termed BP process (BPP) is proposed and applied to relational data analysis. The BPs are a well-studied class of permutations, and it has been demonstrated that there is one-to-one correspondence between BPs and several interesting objects including floorplan partitioning (FP), which constitutes a subset of rectangular partitioning (RP). Accordingly, the BPP can be used as an FP model. We combine the BPP with a multi-dimensional extension of the stick-breaking process called the block-breaking process to fill the gap between FP and RP, and obtain a stochastic process on arbitrary RPs. Compared with conventional BNP models for arbitrary RPs, the proposed model is simpler and has a high affinity with Bayesian inference.

A.1 PAC Bayesian Bound In this part, we provide a detailed PAC-Bound based on the continual learning scenario. Given a "prior" distribution P (a common assumption is zero mean, σ We now consider the bound in the continual learning scenario. Based on Eq. (6), the expected error of f Note that we only consider one gradient update to v in the second equation for simplicity, but using multiple gradient updates is a straightforward extension. The importance of each basis is constrained to be between 0 and 1, where 0 indicates that the basis is not important to old tasks and can completely release for learning new tasks. Similar to [34], we calculate the bases of these subspaces for each layer by analyzing network representations after learning each task with Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), and then use it to update v and w by layer.

Most of the recent successful applications of neural networks have been based on training with gradient descent updates. However, for some small networks, other mirror descent updates learn provably more efficiently when the target is sparse. We present a general framework for casting a mirror descent update as a gradient descent update on a different set of parameters. In some cases, the mirror descent reparameterization can be described as training a modified network with standard backpropagation. The reparameterization framework is versatile and covers a wide range of mirror descent updates, even cases where the domain is constrained.