Machine Learning Approaches to Explore Important Features behind Bird Flight Modes

An improved machine learning approach for predicting granular flows

Optimized machine learning approaches for identifying vertical temperature gradient on ballastless track in natural environments

Do Machine Learning Approaches Perform Better Than Regression Models in Mapping Studies? A Systematic Review.

Machine learning (ML) approaches have emerged as promising tools for improving seizure-onset zone (SOZ) prediction in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE). This systematic review aimed to evaluate the application and performance of ML approaches for SOZ prediction in patients with DRE. A comprehensive search was conducted across PubMed/MEDLINE, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and Epistemonikos databases for studies employing ML algorithms for SOZ prediction in patients with DRE. The Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies version 2 (QUADAS-2) tool was adopted to assess the methodological quality and risk of bias of included studies. Data on patient demographics, data acquisition methods, ML algorithms, and performance metrics were extracted and systematically synthesized. Out of a total of 38 studies, 15 studies met the inclusion criteria, encompassing 352 patients (mean age: 28 years, 34% female population). The studies employed various ML techniques, including traditional methods such as support vector machines and advanced deep learning architectures. Performance metrics varied widely across studies, with some approaches achieving accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity values above 90%. Deep learning models generally outperformed traditional methods, particularly in handling complex, multimodal data. Notably, personalized models demonstrated superior performance in reducing localization error and spatial dispersion. However, heterogeneity in data acquisition methods, patient populations, and reporting standards complicated direct comparisons between studies. This review highlighted the potential of ML approaches, particularly deep learning and personalized models, to enhance SOZ prediction accuracy in patients with DRE. However, several challenges were identified, including the need for standardized data collection protocols, larger prospective studies, and improved model interpretability. The findings underscore the importance of considering network-level changes in epilepsy when developing ML models for SOZ prediction. Although ML approaches show promise for improving surgical planning and outcomes in DRE, their clinical utility, particularly in complex epilepsy cases, requires further investigation. Addressing these challenges will be crucial in realizing the full potential of ML in enhancing epilepsy care.

<p>The advancement of big data and increased computational power have contributed to an increased use of Machine Learning (ML) approaches in hydrological modelling. These approaches are powerful tools for modeling non-linear systems. However, the applicability of ML in non-stationary conditions needs to be studied further. As climate change will change hydrological patterns, testing ML approaches for non-stationary conditions is essential. Here, we used the Differential Split-Sample Test (DSST) to test the climate transposability of ML approaches (e.g., calibrating in a wet period and validating in a dry one, and vice-versa).  We applied five ML approaches using daily precipitation and temperature as input for the prediction of the daily discharge in six snow-dominated Swiss catchments. Lower and upper benchmarks were used to evaluate performances through a relative performance measure. The lower benchmark is the average of the bucket-type HBV model runs from 1000 random parameter sets. The upper benchmark is the automatically calibrated HBV model. In comparison with the stationary condition, the models performed slightly poorer in the non-stationary condition. The performance of simple ML approaches was poor for non-stationary conditions with an underestimation of peak flows, as well as a poor representation of the snow-melting period. On the other hand, a more complex ML approach (deep learning), the Long Short -Term Memory (LSTM), showed a good performance when compared with the lower and upper benchmarks. This might be explained by the fact that the so-called memory cell allowed to simulate the storage effects. </p>

Background: This paper attempts to identify suitable Machine Learning (ML) approach for image denoising of radiology based medical application. The Identification of ML approach is based on (i) Review of ML approach for denoising (ii) Review of suitable Medical Denoising approach.Discussion: The review focuses on six application of radiology: Medical Ultrasound (US) for fetus development, US Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) and detection for breast, skin lesions, brain tumor MRI diagnosis, X-Ray for chest analysis, Breast cancer using MRI imaging. This survey identifies the ML approach with better accuracy for medical diagnosis by radiologists. The image denoising approaches further includes basic filtering techniques, wavelet medical denoising, curvelet and optimization techniques. In most of the applications, the machine learning performance is better than the conventional image denoising techniques. For fast and computational results the radiologists are using the machine learning methods on MRI, US, X-Ray and Skin lesion images. The characteristics and contributions of different ML approaches are considered in this paper.Conclusion: The problem faced by the researchers during image denoising techniques and machine learning applications for clinical settings have also been discussed.

Recently, global climate change discussions have become more prominent, and forests are considered as the ecosystems most at risk by the consequences of climate change. Wildfires are among one of the main drivers leading to losses in forested areas. The increasing availability of free remotely sensed data has enabled the precise locations of wildfires to be reliably monitored. A wildfire data inventory was created by integrating global positioning system (GPS) polygons with data collected from the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) thermal anomalies product between 2012 and 2017 for Amol County, northern Iran. The GPS polygon dataset from the state wildlife organization was gathered through extensive field surveys. The integrated inventory dataset, along with sixteen conditioning factors (topographic, meteorological, vegetation, anthropological, and hydrological factors), was used to evaluate the potential of different machine learning (ML) approaches for the spatial prediction of wildfire susceptibility. The applied ML approaches included an artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machines (SVM), and random forest (RF). All ML approaches were trained using 75% of the wildfire inventory dataset and tested using the remaining 25% of the dataset in the four-fold cross-validation (CV) procedure. The CV method is used for dealing with the randomness effects of the training and testing dataset selection on the performance of applied ML approaches. To validate the resulting wildfire susceptibility maps based on three different ML approaches and four different folds of inventory datasets, the true positive and false positive rates were calculated. In the following, the accuracy of each of the twelve resulting maps was assessed through the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve. The resulting CV accuracies were 74%, 79% and 88% for the ANN, SVM and RF, respectively.

A comprehensive comparison of machine learning approaches with hyper-parameter tuning for smartphone sensor-based human activity recognition

As pharmaceutical development moves from early-stage in vitro experimentation to later in vivo and subsequent clinical trials, data and knowledge are acquired across multiple time and length scales, from the subcellular to whole patient cohort scale. Realizing the potential of this data for informing decision making in pharmaceutical development requires the individual and combined application of machine learning (ML) and mechanistic multiscale mathematical modeling approaches. Here we outline how these two approaches, both individually and in tandem, can be applied at different stages of the drug discovery and development pipeline to inform decision making compound development. The importance of discerning between knowledge and data are highlighted in informing the initial use of ML or mechanistic quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) models. We discuss the application of sensitivity and structural identifiability analyses of QSP models in informing future experimental studies to which ML may be applied, as well as how ML approaches can be used to inform mechanistic model development. Relevant literature studies are highlighted and we close by discussing caveats regarding the application of each approach in an age of constant data acquisition. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: We consider when best to apply machine learning (ML) and mechanistic quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) approaches in the context of the drug discovery and development pipeline. We discuss the importance of prior knowledge and data available for the system of interest and how this informs the individual and combined application of ML and QSP approaches at each stage of the pipeline.

Plants meet machines: Prospects in machine learning for plant biology

Measures of signal complexity, such as the Hurst exponent, the fractal dimension, and the Spectrum of Lyapunov exponents, are used in time series analysis to give estimates on persistency, anti-persistency, fluctuations and predictability of the data under study. They have proven beneficial when doing time series prediction using machine and deep learning and tell what features may be relevant for predicting time-series and establishing complexity features. Further, the performance of machine learning approaches can be improved, taking into account the complexity of the data under study, e.g., adapting the employed algorithm to the inherent long-term memory of the data. In this article, we provide a review of complexity and entropy measures in combination with machine learning approaches. We give a comprehensive review of relevant publications, suggesting the use of fractal or complexity-measure concepts to improve existing machine or deep learning approaches. Additionally, we evaluate applications of these concepts and examine if they can be helpful in predicting and analyzing time series using machine and deep learning. Finally, we give a list of a total of six ways to combine machine learning and measures of signal complexity as found in the literature.

Purpose:The purpose of this article is to orient both clinicians and researchers to machine learning (ML) approaches as applied to the field of speech-language pathology. We first introduce key ML concepts and terminology and proceed to feature exemplar papers of recent work utilizing ML techniques in speech-language pathology. We also discuss the limitations, cautions, and challenges to the implementation of ML and related techniques in speech-language pathology.Conclusions:Readers are introduced to broad ML concepts, including common ML tasks (e.g., classification, regression), and specific types of ML models (e.g., linear/logistic regression, random forest, support vector machines, neural networks). Key considerations for developing, evaluating, validating, and interpreting ML models are discussed. An application section reviews six exemplar published papers in the aphasiology literature that have utilized ML approaches. Lastly, limitations to the implementation of ML approaches are discussed, including issues of reliability, validity, bias, and explainability. We highlight emergent solutions and next steps to facilitate responsible and clinically meaningful use of ML approaches in speech-language pathology moving forward.

Limited academic attention has been paid to the applicability of Machine Learning (ML) approaches for analyzing worker-reported near-miss safety reports, as opposed to injury reports, at construction sites. Although resource-efficient analysis through ML of large volumes of such data at construction sites can help guide practitioners in decision-making to prevent injuries. The current study addresses this research gap by evaluating the relevance of ML approaches through quantitative and qualitative methods for scaling efficient near-miss reporting programs at construction sites. The study uses an extensive experimentation strategy consisting of input data processing, n-gram modeling, and sensitivity analysis. It first tests the proposition that, despite the data-quality challenges, the high performance of different ML algorithms can be achieved in automatically classifying the textual near-miss observations. The study relies on worker-reported near-miss data collected from a real construction site in Kuwait. The classification performance of various ML approaches is evaluated using F1 scores for three academically novel but commonly used category labels at the sites - "Unsafe Act (UA)," "Unsafe Condition (UC)," and "Good Observation (GO)." In addition, the practitioner's input was utilized to assess the practical applicability of ML classifiers for construction sites. The conventional Logistic Regression (LR) classifiers have a comparatively high F1 score of 0.79. However, ML classifiers faced challenges in distinguishing between UA and UC. Further, the analysis reveals that optimal ML classifiers may lose on being acceptable to human decision-makers. Overall, despite the promising performance of ML tools for the near-miss data, the sites with low maturity of reporting systems may find themselves unable to leverage ML to scale their reporting systems. A simplified experimentation strategy like the current study could help practitioners identify the data-specific optimal ML approaches in future applications.

Performance optimization of wireless networks is typically complicated because of high computational complexity and dynamic channel conditions. Considering a specific case, the recent introduction of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) can reshape the wireless channels by controlling the scattering elements' phase shifts, namely, passive beamforming. However, due to the large size of scattering elements, the IRS's beamforming optimization becomes intractable. In this article, we focus on machine learning (ML) approaches for complex optimization problems in wireless networks. ML approaches can provide flexibility and robustness against uncertain and dynamic systems. However, practical challenges still remain due to slow convergence in offline training or online learning. This motivated us to design a novel optimization-driven ML framework that exploits the efficiency of model-based optimization and the robustness of model-free ML approaches. Splitting the control variables into two parts allows one part to be updated by the outer loop ML approach while the other part is solved by the inner loop optimization. The case study in IRS-assisted wireless networks confirms that the optimization-driven ML framework can improve learning efficiency and the reward performance significantly compared to conventional model-free ML approaches.

BackgroundHere, we outline a method of applying existing machine learning (ML) approaches to aid citation screening in an on-going broad and shallow systematic review of preclinical animal studies. The aim is to achieve a high-performing algorithm comparable to human screening that can reduce human resources required for carrying out this step of a systematic review.MethodsWe applied ML approaches to a broad systematic review of animal models of depression at the citation screening stage. We tested two independently developed ML approaches which used different classification models and feature sets. We recorded the performance of the ML approaches on an unseen validation set of papers using sensitivity, specificity and accuracy. We aimed to achieve 95% sensitivity and to maximise specificity. The classification model providing the most accurate predictions was applied to the remaining unseen records in the dataset and will be used in the next stage of the preclinical biomedical sciences systematic review. We used a cross-validation technique to assign ML inclusion likelihood scores to the human screened records, to identify potential errors made during the human screening process (error analysis).ResultsML approaches reached 98.7% sensitivity based on learning from a training set of 5749 records, with an inclusion prevalence of 13.2%. The highest level of specificity reached was 86%. Performance was assessed on an independent validation dataset. Human errors in the training and validation sets were successfully identified using the assigned inclusion likelihood from the ML model to highlight discrepancies. Training the ML algorithm on the corrected dataset improved the specificity of the algorithm without compromising sensitivity. Error analysis correction leads to a 3% improvement in sensitivity and specificity, which increases precision and accuracy of the ML algorithm.ConclusionsThis work has confirmed the performance and application of ML algorithms for screening in systematic reviews of preclinical animal studies. It has highlighted the novel use of ML algorithms to identify human error. This needs to be confirmed in other reviews with different inclusion prevalence levels, but represents a promising approach to integrating human decisions and automation in systematic review methodology.