Errors or failures in a high-volume manufacturing environment can have significant impact that can result in both the loss of time and money. Identifying such failures early has been a top priority for manufacturing industries and various rule-based algorithms have been developed over the years. However, catching these failures is time consuming and such algorithms cannot adapt well to changes in designs, and sometimes variations in everyday behavior. More importantly, the number of units to monitor in a high-volume manufacturing environment is too big for manual monitoring or for a simple program. Here we develop a novel program that combines both rule-based decisions and machine learning models that can not only learn and adapt to such day-to-day variations or long-term design changes, but also can be applied at scale to the high number of manufacturing units in use today. Using the current state-of-the-art technologies, we then deploy this program at-scale to handle the needs of ever-increasing demand from the manufacturing environment.

Data quality is a common source of concern for large-scale citizen science projects like eBird. In the case of eBird, a major cause of poor quality data is the misidentification of bird species by inexperienced contributors. A proactive approach for improving data quality is to discover commonly misidentified bird species and to teach inexperienced birders the differences between these species. To accomplish this goal, we develop a latent variable graphical model that can identify groups of bird species that are often confused for each other by eBird participants. Our model is a multi-species extension of the classic occupancy-detection model in the ecology literature. This multi-species extension requires a structure learning step as well as a computationally expensive parameter learning stage which we make efficient through a variational approximation. We show that our model can not only discover groups of misidentified species, but by including these misidentifications in the model, it can also achieve more accurate predictions of both species occupancy and detection.

Recent research has found that diagnostic performance with Bayesian belief networks is often surprisingly insensitive to imprecision in the numerical probabilities. For example, the authors have recently completed an extensive study in which they applied random noise to the numerical probabilities in a set of belief networks for medical diagnosis, subsets of the CPCS network, a subset of the QMR (Quick Medical Reference) focused on liver and bile diseases. The diagnostic performance in terms of the average probabilities assigned to the actual diseases showed small sensitivity even to large amounts of noise. In this paper, we summarize the findings of this study and discuss possible explanations of this low sensitivity. One reason is that the criterion for performance is average probability of the true hypotheses, rather than average error in probability, which is insensitive to symmetric noise distributions. But, we show that even asymmetric, logodds-normal noise has modest effects. A second reason is that the gold-standard posterior probabilities are often near zero or one, and are little disturbed by noise.