Human cognition operates on a "Global-first" cognitive mechanism, prioritizing information processing based on coarse-grained details. This mechanism inherently possesses an adaptive multi-granularity description capacity, resulting in computational traits such as efficiency, robustness, and interpretability. The analysis pattern reliance on the finest granularity and single-granularity makes most existing computational methods less efficient, robust, and interpretable, which is an important reason for the current lack of interpretability in neural networks. Multi-granularity granular-ball computing employs granular-balls of varying sizes to daptively represent and envelop the sample space, facilitating learning based on these granular-balls. Given that the number of coarse-grained "granular-balls" is fewer than sample points, granular-ball computing proves more efficient. Moreover, the inherent coarse-grained nature of granular-balls reduces susceptibility to fine-grained sample disturbances, enhancing robustness. The multi-granularity construct of granular-balls generates topological structures and coarse-grained descriptions, naturally augmenting interpretability. Granular-ball computing has successfully ventured into diverse AI domains, fostering the development of innovative theoretical methods, including granular-ball classifiers, clustering techniques, neural networks, rough sets, and evolutionary computing. This has notably ameliorated the efficiency, noise robustness, and interpretability of traditional methods. Overall, granular-ball computing is a rare and innovative theoretical approach in AI that can adaptively and simultaneously enhance efficiency, robustness, and interpretability. This article delves into the main application landscapes for granular-ball computing, aiming to equip future researchers with references and insights to refine and expand this promising theory.

Predictive maintenance is a well studied collection of techniques that aims to prolong the life of a mechanical system by using artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict the optimal time to perform maintenance. The methods allow maintainers of systems and hardware to reduce financial and time costs of upkeep. As these methods are adopted for more serious and potentially life-threatening applications, the human operators need trust the predictive system. This attracts the field of Explainable AI (XAI) to introduce explainability and interpretability into the predictive system. XAI brings methods to the field of predictive maintenance that can amplify trust in the users while maintaining well-performing systems. This survey on explainable predictive maintenance (XPM) discusses and presents the current methods of XAI as applied to predictive maintenance while following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 guidelines. We categorize the different XPM methods into groups that follow the XAI literature. Additionally, we include current challenges and a discussion on future research directions in XPM.

We study the problem of experiment planning with function approximation in contextual bandit problems. In settings where there is a significant overhead to deploying adaptive algorithms--for example, when the execution of the data collection policies is required to be distributed, or a human in the loop is needed to implement these policies--producing in advance a set of policies for data collection is paramount. We study the setting where a large dataset of contexts but not rewards is available and may be used by the learner to design an effective data collection strategy. Although when rewards are linear this problem has been well studied [53], results are still missing for more complex reward models. In this work we propose two experiment planning strategies compatible with function approximation. The first is an eluder planning and sampling procedure that can recover optimality guarantees depending on the eluder dimension [42] of the reward function class. For the second, we show that a uniform sampler achieves competitive optimality rates in the setting where the number of actions is small. We finalize our results introducing a statistical gap fleshing out the fundamental differences between planning and adaptive learning and provide results for planning with model selection.

Many researchers around the world are researching to get control solutions that enhance robots' ability to navigate in dynamic environments autonomously. However, until these days robots have limited capability and many navigation tasks on Earth and other planets have been difficult so far. This paperwork presents the development of a control system for a differential drive-wheeled mobile robot that autonomously controls its position, heading, and speed based on destination information given and surrounding data gathered through mounted proximity and GPS sensors. The intelligence of this control system is implemented by using a fuzzy logic algorithm which is a very powerful tool to handle un-modeled systems like the dynamically changing environment dealt with in this research. The fuzzy controller is used to address the problems associated with navigation in an obstacle-strewn environment. Such issues include position estimation, path planning, and obstacle avoidance. In this study modeling, design, and simulation of the system have been done. The simulation result shows that the developed mobile robot travels successfully from any location to the destination location without colliding with obstacles.

Federated learning is an emerging distributed machine learning framework in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). In IoV, millions of vehicles are willing to train the model to share their knowledge. Maintaining an active state means the participants must update their state to the FL server in a fixed interval and participate to next round. However, the cost by maintaining an active state is very large when there are a huge number of participating vehicles. In this paper, we proposed a distributed client selection scheme to reduce the cost of maintaining the active state for all participants. The clients with the highest evaluation are elected among the neighbours. In the evaluator, four variables are considered including sample quantity, throughput available, computational capability and the quality of the local dataset. We adopted fuzzy logic as the evaluator since the closed-form solution over four variables does not exist. Extensive simulation results show our proposal approximates the centralized client selection in terms of accuracy and can significantly reduce the communication overhead.

Gradient-enhanced Kriging (GE-Kriging) is a well-established surrogate modelling technique for approximating expensive computational models. However, it tends to get impractical for high-dimensional problems due to the size of the inherent correlation matrix and the associated high-dimensional hyper-parameter tuning problem. To address these issues, a new method, called sliced GE-Kriging (SGE-Kriging), is developed in this paper for reducing both the size of the correlation matrix and the number of hyper-parameters. We first split the training sample set into multiple slices, and invoke Bayes' theorem to approximate the full likelihood function via a sliced likelihood function, in which multiple small correlation matrices are utilized to describe the correlation of the sample set rather than one large one. Then, we replace the original high-dimensional hyper-parameter tuning problem with a low-dimensional counterpart by learning the relationship between the hyper-parameters and the derivative-based global sensitivity indices. The performance of SGE-Kriging is finally validated by means of numerical experiments with several benchmarks and a high-dimensional aerodynamic modeling problem. The results show that the SGE-Kriging model features an accuracy and robustness that is comparable to the standard one but comes at much less training costs. The benefits are most evident for high-dimensional problems with tens of variables.

Potassium disorders are generally asymptomatic, potentially lethal, and common in patients with renal or cardiac disease. The morphology of the electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is very sensitive to the changes in potassium ions, so ECG has a high potential for detecting dyskalemias before laboratory results. In this regard, this paper introduces a new system for ECG-based potassium measurement. The proposed system consists of three main steps. First, cohort selection & data labeling were carried out by using a 5- minute interval between ECGs and potassium measurements and defining three labels: hypokalemia, normal, and hyperkalemia. After that, feature extraction & selection were performed. The extracted features are RR interval, PR interval, QRS duration, QT interval, QTc interval, P axis, QRS axis, T axis, and ACCI. Kruskal-Wallis technique was also used to assess the importance of the features and to select discriminative ones. Finally, an ANFIS model based on FCM clustering (FCM-ANFIS) was designed based on the selected features. The used database is ECG-ViEW II. Results showed that T axis compared with other features has a significant relationship with potassium levels (P<0.01, r=0.62). The absolute error of FCM-ANFIS is 0.4+-0.3 mM, its mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) is 9.99%, and its r-squared value is 0.74. Its classification accuracy is 85.71%. In detecting hypokalemia and hyperkalemia, the sensitivities are 60% and 80%, respectively, and the specificities are 100% and 97.3%, respectively. This research has shed light on the design of noninvasive instruments to measure potassium concentration and to detect dyskalemias, thereby reducing cardiac events.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have the potential to prevent accidents caused by drivers' error and reduce road traffic risks. Due to the nature of heavy vehicles, whose collisions cause more serious crashes, the weights of vehicles need to be considered when making driving strategies aimed at reducing the potential risks and their consequences in the context of autonomous driving. This study develops an autonomous driving strategy based on risk anticipation, considering the weights of surrounding vehicles and using hierarchical deep reinforcement learning. A risk indicator integrating surrounding vehicles' weights, based on the risk field theory, is proposed and incorporated into autonomous driving decisions. A hybrid action space is designed to allow for left lane changes, right lane changes and car-following, which enables AVs to act more freely and realistically whenever possible. To solve the above hybrid decision-making problem, a hierarchical proximal policy optimization (HPPO) algorithm is developed and an attention mechanism is incorporated, providing great advantages in maintaining stable performance. An indicator, potential collision energy in conflicts (PCEC), is newly proposed to evaluate the performance of the developed AV driving strategy from both the perspectives of the likelihood and the consequences of potential accidents. An application is carried out and the simulation results demonstrate that our model provides driving strategies that reduce both the likelihood and consequences of potential accidents, at the same time maintaining driving efficiency. The developed method is especially meaningful for AVs driving on highways, where heavy vehicles make up a high proportion of the traffic.

Rough set theory is a well-known mathematical framework that can deal with inconsistent data by providing lower and upper approximations of concepts. A prominent property of these approximations is their granular representation: that is, they can be written as unions of simple sets, called granules. The latter can be identified with "if. . . , then. . . " rules, which form the backbone of rough set rule induction. It has been shown previously that this property can be maintained for various fuzzy rough set models, including those based on ordered weighted average (OWA) operators. In this paper, we will focus on some instances of the general class of fuzzy quantifier-based fuzzy rough sets (FQFRS). In these models, the lower and upper approximations are evaluated using binary and unary fuzzy quantifiers, respectively. One of the main targets of this study is to examine the granular representation of different models of FQFRS. The main findings reveal that Choquet-based fuzzy rough sets can be represented granularly under the same conditions as OWA-based fuzzy rough sets, whereas Sugeno-based FRS can always be represented granularly. This observation highlights the potential of these models for resolving data inconsistencies and managing noise.

Making decisions is a great challenge in distributed autonomous environments due to enormous state spaces and uncertainty. Many online planning algorithms rely on statistical sampling to avoid searching the whole state space, while still being able to make acceptable decisions. However, planning often has to be performed under strict computational constraints making online planning in multi-agent systems highly limited, which could lead to poor system performance, especially in stochastic domains. In this paper, we propose Emergent Value function Approximation for Distributed Environments (EVADE), an approach to integrate global experience into multi-agent online planning in stochastic domains to consider global effects during local planning. For this purpose, a value function is approximated online based on the emergent system behaviour by using methods of reinforcement learning. We empirically evaluated EVADE with two statistical multi-agent online planning algorithms in a highly complex and stochastic smart factory environment, where multiple agents need to process various items at a shared set of machines. Our experiments show that EVADE can effectively improve the performance of multi-agent online planning while offering efficiency w.r.t. the breadth and depth of the planning process.