We investigate experiments that are designed to select a treatment arm for population deployment. Multi-armed bandit algorithms can enhance efficiency by dynamically allocating measurement effort towards higher performing arms based on observed feedback. However, such dynamics can result in brittle behavior in the face of nonstationary exogenous factors influencing arms' performance during the experiment. To counter this, we propose deconfounded Thompson sampling (DTS), a more robust variant of the prominent Thompson sampling algorithm. As observations accumulate, DTS projects the population-level performance of an arm while controlling for the context within which observed treatment decisions were made. Contexts here might capture a comprehensible source of variation, such as the country of a treated individual, or simply record the time of treatment. We provide bounds on both within-experiment and post-experiment regret of DTS, illustrating its resilience to exogenous variation and the delicate balance it strikes between exploration and exploitation. Our proofs leverage inverse propensity weights to analyze the evolution of the posterior distribution, a departure from established methods in the literature. Hinting that new understanding is indeed necessary, we show that a deconfounded variant of the popular upper confidence bound algorithm can fail completely.

There has been a growing interest in creating intelligent diagnostic systems to assist medical professionals in analyzing and processing big data for the treatment of incurable diseases. One of the key challenges in this field is detecting thyroid cancer, where advancements have been made using machine learning (ML) and big data analytics to evaluate thyroid cancer prognosis and determine a patient's risk of malignancy. This review paper summarizes a large collection of articles related to artificial intelligence (AI)-based techniques used in the diagnosis of thyroid cancer. Accordingly, a new classification was introduced to classify these techniques based on the AI algorithms used, the purpose of the framework, and the computing platforms used. Additionally, this study compares existing thyroid cancer datasets based on their features. The focus of this study is on how AI-based tools can support the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid cancer, through supervised, unsupervised, or hybrid techniques. It also highlights the progress made and the unresolved challenges in this field. Finally, the future trends and areas of focus in this field are discussed.

Risky drivers account for 70% of fatal accidents in the United States. With recent advances in sensors and intelligent vehicular systems, there has been significant research on assessing driver behavior to improve driving experiences and road safety. This paper examines the various techniques used to analyze driver behavior using visual and vehicular data, providing an overview of the latest research in this field. The paper also discusses the challenges and open problems in the field and offers potential recommendations for future research. The survey concludes that integrating vision and vehicular information can significantly enhance the accuracy and effectiveness of driver behavior analysis, leading to improved safety measures and reduced traffic accidents.

Assessment is a crucial part of education. Traditional marking is a source of inconsistencies and unconscious bias, placing a high cognitive load on the assessors. An approach to address these issues is comparative judgement (CJ). In CJ, the assessor is presented with a pair of items and is asked to select the better one. Following a series of comparisons, a rank is derived using a ranking model, for example, the BTM, based on the results. While CJ is considered a reliable method for marking, there are concerns around transparency, and the ideal number of pairwise comparisons to generate a reliable estimation of the rank order is not known. Additionally, there have been attempts to generate a method of selecting pairs that should be compared next in an informative manner, but some existing methods are known to have created their own bias within results inflating the reliability metric used. As a result, a random selection approach is usually deployed. We propose a novel Bayesian approach to CJ (BCJ) for determining the ranks of compared items alongside a new way to select the pairs to present to the marker(s) using active learning (AL), addressing the key shortcomings of traditional CJ. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the entire approach may provide transparency by providing the user insights into how it is making its decisions and, at the same time, being more efficient. Results from our experiments confirm that the proposed BCJ combined with entropy-driven AL pair-selection method is superior to other alternatives. We also find that the more comparisons done, the more accurate BCJ becomes, which solves the issue the current method has of the model deteriorating if too many comparisons are performed. As our approach can generate the complete predicted rank distribution for an item, we also show how this can be utilised in devising a predicted grade, guided by the assessor.

Physics informed neural network (PINN) approach in Bayesian formulation is presented. We adopt the Bayesian neural network framework formulated by MacKay (Neural Computation 4 (3) (1992) 448). The posterior densities are obtained from Laplace approximation. For each model (fit), the so-called evidence is computed. It is a measure that classifies the hypothesis. The most optimal solution has the maximal value of the evidence. The Bayesian framework allows us to control the impact of the boundary contribution to the total loss. Indeed, the relative weights of loss components are fine-tuned by the Bayesian algorithm. We solve heat, wave, and Burger's equations. The obtained results are in good agreement with the exact solutions. All solutions are provided with the uncertainties computed within the Bayesian framework.

Symbolic regression with polynomial neural networks and polynomial neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) are two recent and powerful approaches for equation recovery of many science and engineering problems. However, these methods provide point estimates for the model parameters and are currently unable to accommodate noisy data. We address this challenge by developing and validating the following Bayesian inference methods: the Laplace approximation, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling methods, and variational inference. We have found the Laplace approximation to be the best method for this class of problems. Our work can be easily extended to the broader class of symbolic neural networks to which the polynomial neural network belongs.

This paper introduces the Fusemate probabilistic logic programming system. Fusemate's inference engine comprises a grounding component and a variable elimination method for probabilistic inference. Fusemate differs from most other systems by grounding the program in a bottom-up way instead of the common top-down way. While bottom-up grounding is attractive for a number of reasons, e.g., for dynamically creating distributions of varying support sizes, it makes it harder to control the amount of ground clauses generated. We address this problem by interleaving grounding with a query-guided relevance test which prunes rules whose bodies are inconsistent with the query. We present our method in detail and demonstrate it with examples that involve "time", such as (hidden) Markov models. Our experiments demonstrate competitive or better performance compared to a state-of-the art probabilistic logic programming system, in particular for high branching problems.

This paper introduces a novel approach to probabilistic deep learning, kernel density matrices, which provide a simpler yet effective mechanism for representing joint probability distributions of both continuous and discrete random variables. In quantum mechanics, a density matrix is the most general way to describe the state of a quantum system. This work extends the concept of density matrices by allowing them to be defined in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. This abstraction allows the construction of differentiable models for density estimation, inference, and sampling, and enables their integration into end-to-end deep neural models. In doing so, we provide a versatile representation of marginal and joint probability distributions that allows us to develop a differentiable, compositional, and reversible inference procedure that covers a wide range of machine learning tasks, including density estimation, discriminative learning, and generative modeling. The broad applicability of the framework is illustrated by two examples: an image classification model that can be naturally transformed into a conditional generative model, and a model for learning with label proportions that demonstrates the framework's ability to deal with uncertainty in the training samples.

Passive acoustic monitoring can be an effective way of monitoring wildlife populations that are acoustically active but difficult to survey visually. Digital recorders allow surveyors to gather large volumes of data at low cost, but identifying target species vocalisations in these data is non-trivial. Machine learning (ML) methods are often used to do the identification. They can process large volumes of data quickly, but they do not detect all vocalisations and they do generate some false positives (vocalisations that are not from the target species). Existing wildlife abundance survey methods have been designed specifically to deal with the first of these mistakes, but current methods of dealing with false positives are not well-developed. They do not take account of features of individual vocalisations, some of which are more likely to be false positives than others. We propose three methods for acoustic spatial capture-recapture inference that integrate individual-level measures of confidence from ML vocalisation identification into the likelihood and hence integrate ML uncertainty into inference. The methods include a mixture model in which species identity is a latent variable. We test the methods by simulation and find that in a scenario based on acoustic data from Hainan gibbons, in which ignoring false positives results in 17% positive bias, our methods give negligible bias and coverage probabilities that are close to the nominal 95% level.

Some applications of deep learning require not only to provide accurate results but also to quantify the amount of confidence in their prediction. The management of an electric power grid is one of these cases: to avoid risky scenarios, decision-makers need both precise and reliable forecasts of, for example, power loads. For this reason, point forecasts are not enough hence it is necessary to adopt methods that provide an uncertainty quantification. This work focuses on reservoir computing as the core time series forecasting method, due to its computational efficiency and effectiveness in predicting time series. While the RC literature mostly focused on point forecasting, this work explores the compatibility of some popular uncertainty quantification methods with the reservoir setting. Both Bayesian and deterministic approaches to uncertainty assessment are evaluated and compared in terms of their prediction accuracy, computational resource efficiency and reliability of the estimated uncertainty, based on a set of carefully chosen performance metrics.