Convolutional Networks have dominated the field of computer vision for the last ten years, exhibiting extremely powerful feature extraction capabilities and outstanding classification performance. The main strategy to prolong this trend relies on further upscaling networks in size. However, costs increase rapidly while performance improvements may be marginal. We hypothesise that adding heterogeneous sources of information may be more cost-effective to a CNN than building a bigger network. In this paper, an ensemble method is proposed for accurate image classification, fusing automatically detected features through Convolutional Neural Network architectures with a set of manually defined statistical indicators. Through a combination of the predictions of a CNN and a secondary classifier trained on statistical features, better classification performance can be cheaply achieved. We test multiple learning algorithms and CNN architectures on a diverse number of datasets to validate our proposal, making public all our code and data via GitHub. According to our results, the inclusion of additional indicators and an ensemble classification approach helps to increase the performance in 8 of 9 datasets, with a remarkable increase of more than 10% precision in two of them.

With deployments of online monitoring systems in distribution networks, massive amounts of data collected through them contain rich information on the operating status of distribution networks. By leveraging the data, based on bidirectional generative adversarial networks (BiGANs), we propose an unsupervised approach for online distribution reliability assessment. It is capable of discovering the latent structure and automatically learning the most representative features of the spatio-temporal data in distribution networks in an adversarial way and it does not rely on any assumptions of the input data. Based on the extracted features, a statistical magnitude for them is calculated to indicate the data behavior. Furthermore, distribution reliability states are divided into different levels and we combine them with the calculated confidence level $1-\alpha$, during which clear criteria is defined empirically. Case studies on both synthetic data and real-world online monitoring data show that our proposed approach is feasible for the assessment of distribution operation reliability and outperforms other existed techniques.