Modern astronomy has generated an extensive taxonomy of celestial objects based on their physical characteristics and predicted future state. As theories of the development, expansion, history, and predicted future state of the universe rely on identifying and observing celestial bodies, it is essential to have quick and accurate classification of newly observed objects. Historically, classification was performed manually, but the rapid expansion of modern catalogues of celestial objects - such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which grows at a rate of thousands of entries daily [1] - makes this manual classification impractical. Supervised and semi-supervised machine learning represent the most promising candidates for the desired computational classification. Until recently, the data, hardware, and software required for large-scale training and deployment of these methods were unavailable to the general research community. However, improvements to parallel processing hardware have driven increased success and adoption, resulting in the invention of models capable of equaling or surpassing human-level intelligence in tasks formerly considered intractable to computers. Such improvements have been recognized in facial recognition [2] and combinatorial game theory [3], but despite their meteoric rise in popularity, there is a significant gap in astronomical literature on applying machine learning models to the problem of celestial object classification. In an effort to improve this state, we explore a number of machine learning based models for a simplified celestial object classification problem to assess the performance and potential of these models in the field of astronomy.

Current wildfire risk assessments rely on coarse hazard maps and opaque machine learning models that optimize regional accuracy while sacrificing interpretability at the decision scale. WildfireGenome addresses these gaps through three components: (1) fusion of seven federal wildfire indicators into a sign-aligned, PCA-based composite risk label at H3 Level-8 resolution; (2) Random Forest classification of local wildfire risk; and (3) SHAP and ICE/PDP analyses to expose county-specific nonlinear driver relationships. Across seven ecologically diverse U.S. counties, models achieve accuracies of 0.755-0.878 and Quadratic Weighted Kappa up to 0.951, with principal components explaining 87-94% of indicator variance. Transfer tests show reliable performance between ecologically similar regions but collapse across dissimilar contexts. Explanations consistently highlight needleleaf forest cover and elevation as dominant drivers, with risk rising sharply at 30-40% needleleaf coverage. WildfireGenome advances wildfire risk assessment from regional prediction to interpretable, decision-scale analytics that guide vegetation management, zoning, and infrastructure planning.

Identifying the determinants of academic success in basic education represents a central challenge for educational research and policymaking, particularly in a country with Brazil's vast dimensions and socioeconomic heterogeneity (Issah et al. 2023). A systemic approach is crucial, as student performance is influenced by a complex interplay of factors spanning individual, academic, socioeconomic, and institutional domains (Barrag an Moreno and Guzm an Rinc on 2025). The System of Assessment of Basic Education (SAEB), conducted by the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research An ısio Teixeira (INEP) (INEP 2025), provides a rich, multi-level dataset uniquely suited for such an analysis (Bonamino et al. 2010). The public availability of its anonymized microdata enables the research community to investigate the intricate relationships between student proficiency and a wide array of contextual factors, from socioeconomic backgrounds to school infrastructure and teacher profiles. Consequently, the SAEB microdata is an essential resource for data-driven research aimed at informing and evaluating educational policies in the country (Lundberg and Lee 2017b; Mazoni and Oliveira 2023). While traditional statistical methods are common, the Educational Data Mining (EDM) paradigm offers powerful tools for uncovering complex, non-linear patterns from such data (Romero and Ventura 2010). Furthermore, we demonstrate that by interpreting the model's classification results with XAI techniques, our method provides data-driven insights for educators and policymakers (Idrizi 2024). The primary objective of this research is thus to develop and evaluate a multi-level machine learning model to identify the key systemic factors associated with the academic performance of 9th-grade and high school students, using the SAEB microdata. Building upon this perspective, the study shifts its analytical focus from purely individual student interventions toward addressing the systemic determinants that shape educational outcomes in Brazilian basic education.

The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and its summary measure, the Area Under the Curve (AUC), are well-established tools for evaluating the efficacy of biomarkers in biomedical studies. Compared to the traditional ROC curve, the covariate-adjusted ROC curve allows for individual evaluation of the biomarker. However, the use of machine learning models has rarely been explored in this context, despite their potential to develop more powerful and sophisticated approaches for biomarker evaluation. The goal of this paper is to propose a framework for neural network-based covariate-adjusted ROC modeling that allows flexible and nonlinear evaluation of the effectiveness of a biomarker to discriminate between two reference populations. The finite-sample performance of our method is investigated through extensive simulation tests under varying dependency structures between biomarkers, covariates, and referenced populations. The methodology is further illustrated in a clinically case study that assesses daily physical activity - measured as total activity time (TAC), a proxy for daily step count-as a biomarker to predict mortality at three, five and eight years. Analyzes stratified by sex and adjusted for age and BMI reveal distinct covariate effects on mortality outcomes. These results underscore the importance of covariate-adjusted modeling in biomarker evaluation and highlight TAC's potential as a functional capacity biomarker based on specific individual characteristics.

In response to the prevalent concern of TCP SYN flood attacks within the context of Software-Defined Internet of Vehicles (SD-IoV), this study addresses the significant challenge of network security in rapidly evolving vehicular communication systems. This research focuses on optimizing a Random Forest Classifier model to achieve maximum accuracy and minimal detection time, thereby enhancing vehicular network security. The methodology involves preprocessing a dataset containing SYN attack instances, employing feature scaling and label encoding techniques, and applying Stratified K-Fold cross-validation to target key metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. This research achieved an average value of 0.999998 for all metrics with a SYN DoS attack detection time of 0.24 seconds. Results show that the fine-tuned Random Forest model, configured with 20 estimators and a depth of 10, effectively differentiates between normal and malicious traffic with high accuracy and minimal detection time, which is crucial for SD-IoV networks. This approach marks a significant advancement and introduces a state-of-the-art algorithm in detecting SYN flood attacks, combining high accuracy with minimal detection time. It contributes to vehicular network security by providing a robust solution against TCP SYN flood attacks while maintaining network efficiency and reliability.

Most Differentially Private (DP) approaches focus on limiting privacy leakage from learners based on the data that they are trained on, there are fewer approaches that consider leakage when procedures involve a calibration dataset which is common in uncertainty quantification methods such as Conformal Prediction (CP). Since there is a limited amount of approaches in this direction, in this work we deliver a general DP approach for CP that we call Private Conformity via Quantile Search (P-COQS). The proposed approach adapts an existing randomized binary search algorithm for computing DP quantiles in the calibration phase of CP thereby guaranteeing privacy of the consequent prediction sets. This however comes at a price of slightly under-covering with respect to the desired $(1 - α)$-level when using finite-sample calibration sets (although broad empirical results show that the P-COQS generally targets the required level in the considered cases). Confirming properties of the adapted algorithm and quantifying the approximate coverage guarantees of the consequent CP, we conduct extensive experiments to examine the effects of privacy noise, sample size and significance level on the performance of our approach compared to existing alternatives. In addition, we empirically evaluate our approach on several benchmark datasets, including CIFAR-10, ImageNet and CoronaHack. Our results suggest that the proposed method is robust to privacy noise and performs favorably with respect to the current DP alternative in terms of empirical coverage, efficiency, and informativeness. Specifically, the results indicate that P-COQS produces smaller conformal prediction sets while simultaneously targeting the desired coverage and privacy guarantees in all these experimental settings.

Cross-validation (CV) is a common method to tune machine learning methods and can be used for model selection in regression as well. Because of the structured nature of small, traditional experimental designs, the literature has warned against using CV in their analysis. The striking increase in the use of machine learning, and thus CV, in the analysis of experimental designs, has led us to empirically study the effectiveness of CV compared to other methods of selecting models in designed experiments, including the little bootstrap. We consider both response surface settings where prediction is of primary interest, as well as screening where factor selection is most important. Overall, we provide evidence that the use of leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) in the analysis of small, structured is often useful. More general $k$-fold CV may also be competitive but its performance is uneven.

Due to the rapid growth in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) networks, the cyber risk has increased exponentially, and therefore, we have to develop effective IDS that can work well with highly imbalanced datasets. A high rate of missed threats can be the result, as traditional machine learning models tend to struggle in identifying attacks when normal data volume is much higher than the volume of attacks. For example, the dataset used in this study reveals a strong class imbalance with 94,659 instances of the majority class and only 28 instances of the minority class, making it quite challenging to determine rare attacks accurately. The challenges presented in this research are addressed by hybrid sampling techniques designed to improve data imbalance detection accuracy in IoT domains. After applying these techniques, we evaluate the performance of several machine learning models such as Random Forest, Soft Voting, Support Vector Classifier (SVC), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), and Logistic Regression with respect to the classification of cyber-attacks. The obtained results indicate that the Random Forest model achieved the best performance with a Kappa score of 0.9903, test accuracy of 0.9961, and AUC of 0.9994. Strong performance is also shown by the Soft Voting model, with an accuracy of 0.9952 and AUC of 0.9997, indicating the benefits of combining model predictions. Overall, this work demonstrates the value of hybrid sampling combined with robust model and feature selection for significantly improving IoT security against cyber-attacks, especially in highly imbalanced data environments.

Accurate patient mortality prediction enables effective risk stratification, leading to personalized treatment plans and improved patient outcomes. However, predicting mortality in healthcare remains a significant challenge, with existing studies often focusing on specific diseases or limited predictor sets. This study evaluates machine learning models for all-cause in-hospital mortality prediction using the MIMIC-III database, employing a comprehensive feature engineering approach. Guided by clinical expertise and literature, we extracted key features such as vital signs (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure), laboratory results (e.g., creatinine, glucose), and demographic information. The Random Forest model achieved the highest performance with an AUC of 0.94, significantly outperforming other machine learning and deep learning approaches. This demonstrates Random Forest's robustness in handling high-dimensional, noisy clinical data and its potential for developing effective clinical decision support tools. Our findings highlight the importance of careful feature engineering for accurate mortality prediction. We conclude by discussing implications for clinical adoption and propose future directions, including enhancing model robustness and tailoring prediction models for specific diseases.