Statistical Learning
AI driven health recommender
Vignesh, K., Pranavi, B., Sreenidhi, Ch.
As AI emerged as highest valued technology, We used that to create a web application that makes a patient work easier .It detects the disease name based on the symptoms given by the patient and recommends medication for respective disease, precautions to take, diet to follow and workouts to do, so the disease can be minimized. The web application is made with clean and Realtime data by using Machine learning as root. We used flask to create a user-friendly platform.
Enhancing Federated Learning Convergence with Dynamic Data Queue and Data Entropy-driven Participant Selection
Herath, Charuka, Liu, Xiaolan, Lambotharan, Sangarapillai, Rahulamathavan, Yogachandran
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized approach for collaborative model training on edge devices. This distributed method of model training offers advantages in privacy, security, regulatory compliance, and cost-efficiency. Our emphasis in this research lies in addressing statistical complexity in FL, especially when the data stored locally across devices is not identically and independently distributed (non-IID). We have observed an accuracy reduction of up to approximately 10\% to 30\%, particularly in skewed scenarios where each edge device trains with only 1 class of data. This reduction is attributed to weight divergence, quantified using the Euclidean distance between device-level class distributions and the population distribution, resulting in a bias term (\(\delta_k\)). As a solution, we present a method to improve convergence in FL by creating a global subset of data on the server and dynamically distributing it across devices using a Dynamic Data queue-driven Federated Learning (DDFL). Next, we leverage Data Entropy metrics to observe the process during each training round and enable reasonable device selection for aggregation. Furthermore, we provide a convergence analysis of our proposed DDFL to justify their viability in practical FL scenarios, aiming for better device selection, a non-sub-optimal global model, and faster convergence. We observe that our approach results in a substantial accuracy boost of approximately 5\% for the MNIST dataset, around 18\% for CIFAR-10, and 20\% for CIFAR-100 with a 10\% global subset of data, outperforming the state-of-the-art (SOTA) aggregation algorithms.
Assessment of Developmental Dysgraphia Utilising a Display Tablet
Mekyska, Jiri, Galaz, Zoltan, Safarova, Katarina, Zvoncak, Vojtech, Cunek, Lukas, Urbanek, Tomas, Havigerova, Jana Marie, Bednarova, Jirina, Mucha, Jan, Gavenciak, Michal, Smekal, Zdenek, Faundez-Zanuy, Marcos
Even though the computerised assessment of developmental dysgraphia (DD) based on online handwriting processing has increasing popularity, most of the solutions are based on a setup, where a child writes on a paper fixed to a digitizing tablet that is connected to a computer. Although this approach enables the standard way of writing using an inking pen, it is difficult to be administered by children themselves. The main goal of this study is thus to explore, whether the quantitative analysis of online handwriting recorded via a display/screen tablet could sufficiently support the assessment of DD as well. For the purpose of this study, we enrolled 144 children (attending the 3rd and 4th class of a primary school), whose handwriting proficiency was assessed by a special education counsellor, and who assessed themselves by the Handwriting Proficiency Screening Questionnaires for Children (HPSQ-C). Using machine learning models based on a gradient-boosting algorithm, we were able to support the DD diagnosis with up to 83.6 % accuracy. The HPSQ-C total score was estimated with a minimum error equal to 10.34 %. Children with DD spent significantly higher time in-air, they had a higher number of pen elevations, a bigger height of on-surface strokes, a lower in-air tempo, and a higher variation in the angular velocity. Although this study shows a promising impact of DD assessment via display tablets, it also accents the fact that modelling of subjective scores is challenging and a complex and data-driven quantification of DD manifestations is needed. This study was supported by a project of the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic no.
Robust and Explainable Depression Identification from Speech Using Vowel-Based Ensemble Learning Approaches
Feng, Kexin, Chaspari, Theodora
This study investigates explainable machine learning algorithms for identifying depression from speech. Grounded in evidence from speech production that depression affects motor control and vowel generation, pre-trained vowel-based embeddings, that integrate semantically meaningful linguistic units, are used. Following that, an ensemble learning approach decomposes the problem into constituent parts characterized by specific depression symptoms and severity levels. Two methods are explored: a "bottom-up" approach with 8 models predicting individual Patient Health Questionnaire-8 (PHQ-8) item scores, and a "top-down" approach using a Mixture of Experts (MoE) with a router module for assessing depression severity. Both methods depict performance comparable to state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating robustness and reduced susceptibility to dataset mean/median values. System explainability benefits are discussed highlighting their potential to assist clinicians in depression diagnosis and screening.
metasnf: Meta Clustering with Similarity Network Fusion in R
Velayudhan, Prashanth S, Xu, Xiaoqiao, Kallurkar, Prajkta, Balbon, Ana Patricia, Secara, Maria T, Taback, Adam, Sabac, Denise, Chan, Nicholas, Ma, Shihao, Wang, Bo, Felsky, Daniel, Ameis, Stephanie H, Cox, Brian, Hawco, Colin, Erdman, Lauren, Wheeler, Anne L
metasnf is an R package that enables users to apply meta clustering, a method for efficiently searching a broad space of cluster solutions by clustering the solutions themselves, to clustering workflows based on similarity network fusion (SNF). SNF is a multi-modal data integration algorithm commonly used for biomedical subtype discovery. The package also contains functions to assist with cluster visualization, characterization, and validation. This package can help researchers identify SNF-derived cluster solutions that are guided by context-specific utility over context-agnostic measures of quality.
Enhancing Feature-Specific Data Protection via Bayesian Coordinate Differential Privacy
Aliakbarpour, Maryam, Chaudhuri, Syomantak, Courtade, Thomas A., Fallah, Alireza, Jordan, Michael I.
Local Differential Privacy (LDP) offers strong privacy guarantees without requiring users to trust external parties. However, LDP applies uniform protection to all data features, including less sensitive ones, which degrades performance of downstream tasks. To overcome this limitation, we propose a Bayesian framework, Bayesian Coordinate Differential Privacy (BCDP), that enables feature-specific privacy quantification. This more nuanced approach complements LDP by adjusting privacy protection according to the sensitivity of each feature, enabling improved performance of downstream tasks without compromising privacy. We characterize the properties of BCDP and articulate its connections with standard non-Bayesian privacy frameworks. We further apply our BCDP framework to the problems of private mean estimation and ordinary least-squares regression. The BCDP-based approach obtains improved accuracy compared to a purely LDP-based approach, without compromising on privacy.
Generalized Resubstitution for Regression Error Estimation
Marcondes, Diego, Braga-Neto, Ulisses
We propose generalized resubstitution error estimators for regression, a broad family of estimators, each corresponding to a choice of empirical probability measures and loss function. The usual sum of squares criterion is a special case corresponding to the standard empirical probability measure and the quadratic loss. Other choices of empirical probability measure lead to more general estimators with superior bias and variance properties. We prove that these error estimators are consistent under broad assumptions. In addition, procedures for choosing the empirical measure based on the method of moments and maximum pseudo-likelihood are proposed and investigated. Detailed experimental results using polynomial regression demonstrate empirically the superior finite-sample bias and variance properties of the proposed estimators. The R code for the experiments is provided.
Self-Supervised Learning for Time Series: A Review & Critique of FITS
Eefsen, Andreas Løvendahl, Larsen, Nicholas Erup, Hansen, Oliver Glozmann Bork, Avenstrup, Thor Højhus
Accurate time series forecasting is a highly valuable endeavour with applications across many industries. Despite recent deep learning advancements, increased model complexity, and larger model sizes, many state-of-the-art models often perform worse or on par with simpler models. One of those cases is a recently proposed model, FITS, claiming competitive performance with significantly reduced parameter counts. By training a one-layer neural network in the complex frequency domain, we are able to replicate these results. Our experiments on a wide range of real-world datasets further reveal that FITS especially excels at capturing periodic and seasonal patterns, but struggles with trending, non-periodic, or random-resembling behavior. With our two novel hybrid approaches, where we attempt to remedy the weaknesses of FITS by combining it with DLinear, we achieve the best results of any known open-source model on multivariate regression and promising results in multiple/linear regression on price datasets, on top of vastly improving upon what FITS achieves as a standalone model.
An Adaptive Framework for Generating Systematic Explanatory Answer in Online Q&A Platforms
Chen, Ziyang, Wang, Xiaobin, Jiang, Yong, Liao, Jinzhi, Xie, Pengjun, Huang, Fei, Zhao, Xiang
Question Answering (QA) systems face challenges in handling complex questions that require multi-domain knowledge synthesis. The naive RAG models, although effective in information retrieval, struggle with complex questions that require comprehensive and in-depth answers. The pioneering task is defined as explanatory answer generation, which entails handling identified challenges such as the requirement for comprehensive information and logical coherence within the generated context. To address these issues, we refer to systematic thinking theory and propose SynthRAG, an innovative framework designed to enhance QA performance. SynthRAG improves on conventional models by employing adaptive outlines for dynamic content structuring, generating systematic information to ensure detailed coverage, and producing customized answers tailored to specific user inquiries. This structured approach guarantees logical coherence and thorough integration of information, yielding responses that are both insightful and methodically organized. Empirical evaluations underscore SynthRAG's effectiveness, demonstrating its superiority in handling complex questions, overcoming the limitations of naive RAG models, and significantly improving answer quality and depth. Furthermore, an online deployment on the Zhihu platform revealed that SynthRAG's answers achieved notable user engagement, with each response averaging 5.73 upvotes and surpassing the performance of 79.8% of human contributors, highlighting the practical relevance and impact of the proposed framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/czy1999/SynthRAG .
Semi-Implicit Functional Gradient Flow
Zhang, Shiyue, Cheng, Ziheng, Zhang, Cheng
Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) use non-parametric variational families represented by particles to approximate the target distribution according to the kernelized Wasserstein gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Recent works introduce functional gradient flows to substitute the kernel for better flexibility. However, the deterministic updating mechanism may suffer from limited exploration and require expensive repetitive runs for new samples. In this paper, we propose Semi-Implicit Functional Gradient flow (SIFG), a functional gradient ParVI method that uses perturbed particles as the approximation family. The corresponding functional gradient flow, which can be estimated via denoising score matching, exhibits strong theoretical convergence guarantee. We also present an adaptive version of our method to automatically choose the suitable noise magnitude. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework on both simulated and real data problems.