Alternative Data-driven Method Research Articles

Intercomparison and Assessment of Stand-Alone and Wavelet-Coupled Machine Learning Models for Simulating Rainfall-Runoff Process in Four Basins of Pothohar Region, Pakistan

The science of hydrological modeling has continuously evolved under the influence of rapid advancements in software and hardware technologies. Starting from simple rational formulae for estimating peak discharge and developing into sophisticated univariate predictive models, accurate conversion of rainfall into runoff and the assessment of inherent uncertainty has been a prime focus for researchers. Therefore, alternative data-driven methods have gained widespread attention in hydrology. Moreover, scientists often couple conventional machine learning models with data pre-processing techniques, i.e., wavelet transformation (WT), to enhance modelling accuracy. In this context, this research work attempts to explore the latent linkage between rainfall and runoff in Pothohar region of Pakistan by developing a novel linkage of five streamline techniques of machine learning, including single decision tree (SDT), decision tree forest (DTF), tree boost (TB), multilayer perceptron (MLP), and gene expression modeling (GEP), with a more sophisticated variant of WT, i.e., maximal overlap discrete wavelet transformation (MODWT), for boundary correction of the transformed components of timeseries data. This study also implements these machine learning models in a stand-alone mode for a more comprehensive comparative analysis of performances. Furthermore, the study uses a combined-basin approach that divides Pothohar region into two basins to compensate for the complex topographic division of the study area. The results indicate that MODWT-based DTF outperformed other stand-alone and hybrid models in terms of modeling accuracy. In the first scenario, considering the Bunha-Kahan River basin, MODWT-DTF yielded the highest NSE (0.86) and the lowest RMSE (220.45 mm) and R2 (0.92 at lag order 3 (Lo3)) when transformed with daubechies4 (db4) at level three. While in the Soan-Haro River basin, MODWT-DTF produced the highest accuracy modeling at lag order 4 (Lo4) (NSE = 0.88, RMSE = 21.72 m3/s, and R2 = 0.91). The highly accurate performance of 3- and 4-days lagged models reflects the temporal consistency in hydrological response of the study area. The comparison of simple and hybrid model performance indicates up to a 55% increase in modeling accuracy due to data pre-processing with wavelet transformation.

Application of Alarm Correlations in Root Cause Diagnosis of Plant-wide Oscillations*

Plant-wide oscillations are common types of disturbances in industrial processes, whose effects propagate to multiple process units through material and/or information flow paths. Such oscillations cause poor controller performance and thus can impact product quality and overall plant performance. Early detection of oscillations and root cause diagnosis is essential. Constructing an adjacency matrix is an efficient method to locate the root cause of oscillations and uses control loop digraphs to capture controller interactions from the process flowsheet. However, constructing an adjacency matrix is time-consuming and resource-intensive, especially when dealing with complex industrial facilities. This paper proposes an alternative data-driven method to construct an adjacency matrix using alarm correlations extracted from historical Alarm & Event (A&E) data. A component-level adjacency matrix is constructed by consolidating process unit information from alarm configuration attributes. Potential root causes of oscillations are shortlisted for further investigations using a process knowledge-based method. This preliminary diagnosis tool can reduce the computational complexity of the subsequent knowledge-driven stage. The applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method are demonstrated via a case study using a benchmark industrial dataset.

Scenario Generation for Market Risk Models Using Generative Neural Networks

In this research study, we show how existing approaches of using generative adversarial networks (GANs) as economic scenario generators (ESG) can be extended to an entire internal market risk model—with enough risk factors to model the full band-width of investments for an insurance company and for a time horizon of one year, as required in Solvency 2. We demonstrate that the results of a GAN-based internal model are similar to regulatory-approved internal models in Europe. Therefore, GAN-based models can be seen as an alternative data-driven method for market risk modeling.

Data-driven estimation of joint roughness coefficient

Joint roughness is one of the most important issues in the hydromechanical behavior of rock mass. Therefore, the joint roughness coefficient (JRC) estimation is of paramount importance in geomechanics engineering applications. Studies show that the application of statistical parameters alone may not produce a sufficiently reliable estimation of the JRC values. Therefore, alternative data-driven methods are proposed to assess the JRC values. In this study, Gaussian process (GP), K-star, random forest (RF), and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) models are employed, and their performance and accuracy are compared with those of benchmark regression formula (i.e. Z2, Rp, and SDi) for the JRC estimation. To analyze the models’ performance, 112 rock joint profile datasets having eight common statistical parameters (Rave, Rmax, SDh, iave, SDi, Z2, Rp, and SF) and one output variable (JRC) are utilized, of which 89 and 23 datasets are used for training and validation of models, respectively. The interpretability of the developed XGBoost model is presented in terms of feature importance ranking, partial dependence plots (PDPs), feature interaction, and local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) techniques. Analyses of results show that machine learning models demonstrate higher accuracy and precision for estimating JRC values compared with the benchmark empirical equations, indicating the generalization ability of the data-driven models in better estimation accuracy.

Non-negative data-driven mapping of structural connections with application to the neonatal brain

Mapping connections in the neonatal brain can provide insight into the crucial early stages of neurodevelopment that shape brain organisation and lay the foundations for cognition and behaviour. Diffusion MRI and tractography provide unique opportunities for such explorations, through estimation of white matter bundles and brain connectivity. Atlas-based tractography protocols, i.e. a priori defined sets of masks and logical operations in a template space, have been commonly used in the adult brain to drive such explorations. However, rapid growth and maturation of the brain during early development make it challenging to ensure correspondence and validity of such atlas-based tractography approaches in the developing brain. An alternative can be provided by data-driven methods, which do not depend on predefined regions of interest. Here, we develop a novel data-driven framework to extract white matter bundles and their associated grey matter networks from neonatal tractography data, based on non-negative matrix factorisation that is inherently suited to the non-negative nature of structural connectivity data. We also develop a non-negative dual regression framework to map group-level components to individual subjects. Using in-silico simulations, we evaluate the accuracy of our approach in extracting connectivity components and compare with an alternative data-driven method, independent component analysis. We apply non-negative matrix factorisation to whole-brain connectivity obtained from publicly available datasets from the Developing Human Connectome Project, yielding grey matter components and their corresponding white matter bundles. We assess the validity and interpretability of these components against traditional tractography results and grey matter networks obtained from resting-state fMRI in the same subjects. We subsequently use them to generate a parcellation of the neonatal cortex using data from 323 new-born babies and we assess the robustness and reproducibility of this connectivity-driven parcellation.

Data-Driven Detection and Classification of Regimes in Chaotic Systems Via Hidden Markov Modeling

AbstractChaotic dynamical systems are essentially nonlinear and are highly sensitive to variations in initial conditions and process parameters. Chaos may appear both in natural (e.g., heartbeat rhythms and weather fluctuations) and human-engineered (e.g., thermo-fluid, urban traffic, and stock market) systems. For prediction and control of such systems, it is often necessary to be able to distinguish between non-chaotic and chaotic behavior; several methods exist to detect the presence (or absence) of chaos, specially in noisy signals. A dynamical system may exhibit multiple chaotic regimes, and apparently, there exist no methods, reported in open literature, to classify these regimes individually. This paper demonstrates an application of standard hidden Markov modeling (HMM), which is a commonly used supervised method, as a technique to classify multiple regimes from a time series of dynamical systems, where classified regimes could be chaotic or non-chaotic. The proposed HMM-based method of regime classification has been tested using numerical data obtained from several well-known chaotic dynamical systems (e.g., Hénon, forced Duffing, Rössler, and Lorenz attractor). It is apparently well-suited to serve as a bench mark for the development of alternative data-driven methods to enhance the performance (e.g., accuracy and computational speed) of regime classification in chaotic dynamical systems.

Data-driven uncertainty quantification of structural systems via B-spline expansion

A data-driven uncertainty quantification scheme relying on B-spline functions is investigated in this study. Instead of predefining basis functions according to the statistics of the uncertain input, as in conventional polynomial chaos expansion (PCE)-based implementations, the method introduced herein takes advantage of the increased flexibility of B-splines materializing a basis function parametrization, which is adaptable to a given input–output data set. Parameter estimation is effectively dealt through a Separable Non-linear Least Squares (SNLS) procedure that allows for simultaneous estimation of both the B-splines’ free knots and the corresponding coefficients of projection. The induced constrained non-quadratic optimization problem is treated through the implementation of a hybrid optimization algorithm that interrelates the advantages of evolutionary and deterministic schemes, exhibiting accelerated convergence and robustness in the search for global optimum. The efficiency of the method is examined through both numerical and experimental case studies, while comparisons with the standard PCE, which relies on the Wiener–Askey scheme, as well as alternative data-driven methods, such as the arbitrary PC, indicate superior performance.

Recursive feature elimination for biomarker discovery in resting-state functional connectivity.

Biomarker discovery involves finding correlations between features and clinical symptoms to aid clinical decision. This task is especially difficult in resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data due to low SNR, high-dimensionality of images, inter-subject and intra-subject variability and small numbers of subjects compared to the number of derived features. Traditional univariate analysis suffers from the problem of multiple comparisons. Here, we adopt an alternative data-driven method for identifying population differences in functional connectivity. We propose a machine-learning approach to down-select functional connectivity features associated with symptom severity in mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). Using this approach, we identified functional regions with altered connectivity in mTBI. including the executive control, visual and precuneus networks. We compared functional connections at multiple resolutions to determine which scale would be more sensitive to changes related to patient recovery. These modular network-level features can be used as diagnostic tools for predicting disease severity and recovery profiles.

Inferring Biological Networks by Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics

Inferring the structure and dynamics of network models is critical to understanding the functionality and control of complex systems, such as metabolic and regulatory biological networks. The increasing quality and quantity of experimental data enable statistical approaches based on information theory for model selection and goodness-of-fit metrics. We propose an alternative data-driven method to infer networked nonlinear dynamical systems by using sparsity-promoting optimization to select a subset of nonlinear interactions representing dynamics on a network. In contrast to standard model selection methods-based upon information content for a finite number of heuristic models (order 10 or less), our model selection procedure discovers a parsimonious model from a combinatorially large set of models, without an exhaustive search. Our particular innovation is appropriate for many biological networks, where the governing dynamical systems have rational function nonlinearities with cross terms, thus requiring an implicit formulation and the equations to be identified in the null-space of a library of mixed nonlinearities, including the state and derivative terms. This method, implicit-SINDy, succeeds in inferring three canonical biological models: 1) Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics; 2) the regulatory network for competence in bacteria; and 3) the metabolic network for yeast glycolysis.

Broad phonetic class definition driven by phone confusions

Intermediate representations between the speech signal and phones may be used to improve discrimination among phones that are often confused. These representations are usually found according to broad phonetic classes, which are defined by a phonetician. This article proposes an alternative data-driven method to generate these classes. Phone confusion information from the analysis of the output of a phone recognition system is used to find clusters at high risk of mutual confusion. A metric is defined to compute the distance between phones. The results, using TIMIT data, show that the proposed confusion-driven phone clustering method is an attractive alternative to the approaches based on human knowledge. A hierarchical classification structure to improve phone recognition is also proposed using a discriminative weight training method. Experiments show improvements in phone recognition on the TIMIT database compared to a baseline system.

Discussion on “Alternative data-driven methods to estimate wind from waves by inverse modeling” by Mansi Daga, M. C. Deo [Natural Hazards (2008) NHAZ 524, Article 9299, DOI 10.1007/s11069-008-9299-2

The paper studied by Daga and Deo (2008) considers the feasibility of using genetic programming (GP) for estimating wind from waves by inverse modeling. The paper includes some problems about the fundamental aspects and use of the proposed GP approach for the aim of their study. In this discussion, some controversial points of the paper are given.

Alternative data-driven methods to estimate wind from waves by inverse modeling

An attempt is made to derive wind speed from wave measurements by carrying out an inverse modeling. This requirement arises out of difficulties occasionally encountered in collecting wave and wind data simultaneously. The wind speed at every 3-h interval is worked out from corresponding simultaneous measurements of significant wave height and average wave periods with the help of alternative data-driven methods such as program-based genetic programming, model trees, and locally weighted projection regression. Five different wave buoy locations in Arabian Sea, representing nearshore and offshore as well as shallow and deep water conditions, are considered. The duration of observations ranged from 15 months to 29 months for different sites. The testing performance of calibrated models has been evaluated with the help of eight alternative error statistics, and the best model for all locations is determined by averaging out the error measures into a single evaluation index. All the three methods satisfactorily estimated the wind speed from known wave parameters through inverse modeling. The genetic programming is found to be the most suitable tool in majority of the cases.