Maamar Ali Saud Al Tobi, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor and Deputy Head of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department at the National University of Science and Technology, Muscat, Oman. His teaching and research areas include machine condition monitoring, vibration analysis, artificial intelligence, genetic algorithm, and maintenance management and strategies. He is author of numerous papers in international journals on fault diagnosis in rotating machinery using AI systems. Geraint Bevan, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in Applied Instrumentation and Control at the School of Computing, Engineering and Built Environment at Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, Scotland. He is widely published on bond-graph modeling for control system design, design of automotive control systems, monitoring for nuclear safeguards, machine condition monitoring, and renewable energy.

Structural causal models (SCMs) provide a principled approach to identifying causation from observational and experimental data in disciplines ranging from economics to medicine. However, SCMs, which is typically represented as graphical models, cannot rely only on data, rather require support of domain knowledge. A key challenge in this context is the absence of a methodological framework for encoding priors (background knowledge) into causal models in a systematic manner. We propose an abstraction called causal knowledge hierarchy (CKH) for encoding priors into causal models. Our approach is based on the foundation of "levels of evidence" in medicine, with a focus on confidence in causal information. Using CKH, we present a methodological framework for encoding causal priors from various information sources and combining them to derive an SCM. We evaluate our approach on a simulated dataset and demonstrate overall performance compared to the ground truth causal model with sensitivity analysis.

We demonstrate an end-to-end framework to improve the resilience of man-made systems to unforeseen events. The framework is based on a physics-based digital twin model and three modules tasked with real-time fault diagnosis, prognostics and reconfiguration. The fault diagnosis module uses model-based diagnosis algorithms to detect and isolate faults and generates interventions in the system to disambiguate uncertain diagnosis solutions. We scale up the fault diagnosis algorithm to the required real-time performance through the use of parallelization and surrogate models of the physics-based digital twin. The prognostics module tracks the fault progressions and trains the online degradation models to compute remaining useful life of system components. In addition, we use the degradation models to assess the impact of the fault progression on the operational requirements. The reconfiguration module uses PDDL-based planning endowed with semantic attachments to adjust the system controls so that the fault impact on the system operation is minimized. We define a resilience metric and use the example of a fuel system model to demonstrate how the metric improves with our framework.

A number of recent works have employed decision trees for the construction of explainable partitions that aim to minimize the $k$-means cost function. These works, however, largely ignore metrics related to the depths of the leaves in the resulting tree, which is perhaps surprising considering how the explainability of a decision tree depends on these depths. To fill this gap in the literature, we propose an efficient algorithm that takes into account these metrics. In experiments on 16 datasets, our algorithm yields better results than decision-tree clustering algorithms such as the ones presented in \cite{dasgupta2020explainable}, \cite{frost2020exkmc}, \cite{laber2021price} and \cite{DBLP:conf/icml/MakarychevS21}, typically achieving lower or equivalent costs with considerably shallower trees. We also show, through a simple adaptation of existing techniques, that the problem of building explainable partitions induced by binary trees for the $k$-means cost function does not admit an $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation in polynomial time unless $P=NP$, which justifies the quest for approximation algorithms and/or heuristics.

A research team led by Prof. Gao Ge and Jiang Li from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has investigated the fault diagnosis of a pulse width modulation converter and proposed a neural network fault diagnosis algorithm to solve existing problems in this field. Results were published in IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics. Pulse width modulation has the advantages of high efficiency, high power density and high reliability. But due to the complexity of the drive systems and the diversity of fusion joint operation, pulse-width modulating voltage source converter systems are prone to suffer critical failures. Therefore, research on fault diagnostic technology is of deep concern, especially open-circuit fault diagnosis, which was what scientists have been focusing in this study.

This paper reports a reduced-order modeling framework of bladed disks on a rotating shaft to simulate the vibration signature of faults in different components aiming toward simulated data-driven machine learning. We have employed lumped and one-dimensional analytical models of the subcomponents for better insight into the complex dynamic response. The framework addresses some of the challenges encountered in analyzing and optimizing fault detection and identification schemes for health monitoring of aero-engines and other rotating machinery. We model the bladed disks and shafts by combining lumped elements and one-dimensional finite elements, leading to a coupled system. The simulation results are in good agreement with previously published data. We model and analyze the cracks in a blade with their effective reduced stiffness approximation. Different types of faults are modeled, including cracks in the blades of a single and a two-stage bladed disks, Fan Blade Off (FBO), and Foreign Object Damage (FOD). We have applied aero-engine operational load conditions to simulate realistic scenarios of online health monitoring. The proposed reduced-order simulation framework will have applications in probabilistic signal modeling, machine learning toward fault signature identification, and parameter estimation with measured vibration signals. Keywords: Reduced-order model, health monitoring, rotating system, engine, fault, crack, FBO, FOD 1. Introduction For decades, health monitoring system to detect faults in rotors has remained a significant area of interest, particularly to the aero-engine industry and turbine-based power plant operators. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system design typically deals with performance-related challenges involving sensors, interfaces, and software algorithms to efficiently function under harsh environmental conditions and detect faults from noisy and complex signals. Verification and validation of the overall system performance through modeling signals have great promises.

Classification is a two-step process, learning step and prediction step, in machine learning. In the learning step, the model is developed based on given training data. In the prediction step, the model is used to predict the response for given data. Decision Tree is one of the easiest and popular classification algorithms to understand and interpret. Decision Tree algorithm belongs to the family of supervised learning algorithms.

Addressing the need for explainable Machine Learning has emerged as one of the most important research directions in modern Artificial Intelligence (AI). While the current dominant paradigm in the field is based on black-box models, typically in the form of (deep) neural networks, these models lack direct interpretability for human users, i.e., their outcomes (and, even more so, their inner working) are opaque and hard to understand. This is hindering the adoption of AI in safety-critical applications, where high interests are at stake. In these applications, explainable by design models, such as decision trees, may be more suitable, as they provide interpretability. Recent works have proposed the hybridization of decision trees and Reinforcement Learning, to combine the advantages of the two approaches. So far, however, these works have focused on the optimization of those hybrid models. Here, we apply MAP-Elites for diversifying hybrid models over a feature space that captures both the model complexity and its behavioral variability. We apply our method on two well-known control problems from the OpenAI Gym library, on which we discuss the "illumination" patterns projected by MAP-Elites, comparing its results against existing similar approaches.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques are breaking into biomedical research and health care, which importantly includes cancer research and oncology, where the potential applications are vast. These include detection and diagnosis of cancer, subtype classification, optimization of cancer treatment and identification of new therapeutic targets in drug discovery. While big data used to train machine learning models may already exist, leveraging this opportunity to realize the full promise of artificial intelligence in both the cancer research space and the clinical space will first require significant obstacles to be surmounted. In this Viewpoint article, we asked four experts for their opinions on how we can begin to implement artificial intelligence while ensuring standards are maintained so as transform cancer diagnosis and the prognosis and treatment of patients with cancer and to drive biological discovery. In this Viewpoint article, we asked four experts to share their thoughts on the implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques into cancer research and care, and how to separate the hope from the hype to overcome the challenges ahead.

A common approach to aggregate classification estimates in an ensemble of decision trees is to either use voting or to average the probabilities for each class. The latter takes uncertainty into account, but not the reliability of the uncertainty estimates (so to say, the "uncertainty about the uncertainty"). More generally, much remains unknown about how to best combine probabilistic estimates from multiple sources. In this paper, we investigate a number of alternative prediction methods. Our methods are inspired by the theories of probability, belief functions and reliable classification, as well as a principle that we call evidence accumulation. Our experiments on a variety of data sets are based on random decision trees which guarantees a high diversity in the predictions to be combined. Somewhat unexpectedly, we found that taking the average over the probabilities is actually hard to beat. However, evidence accumulation showed consistently better results on all but very small leafs.