皮肤病变的准确诊断是大型皮肤图像中的关键任务。在本研究中，我们形成了一种新型的图像特征，称为混合特征，其具有比单个方法特征更强的辨别能力。本研究涉及一种新技术，在训练过程期间，我们将手工特征或特征传递到完全连接的卷积神经网络（CNN）模型中。根据我们的文献回顾，直到现在，在培训过程中将手工特征注入CNN模型中，没有研究或调查对分类绩效的影响。此外，我们还调查了分割面膜的影响及其对整体分类性能的影响。我们的模型实现了92.3％的平衡式多条准确度，比典型的单一方法为深度学习的单一方法分类器架构优于6.8％。

乳腺癌是世界上最常见的癌症以及全球女性中最普遍的死亡原因。然而，如果早期检测到，它也是最具可治疗的恶性肿瘤之一。本文提出了一种深度卷积神经网络的算法，以帮助准确地识别超声图像的乳腺癌。在该算法中，若干神经网络在并行架构中融合以执行分类过程，并且在每个神经网络的输出代表单投票的候选对象类之间的最终分类决定中应用投票标准。在乳房超声数据集上进行了几个实验，由537良性，360恶性和133个正常图像组成。这些实验表明了乐观的结果和提出模型的能力，以优于多种措施的最先进的算法。使用k折交叉验证和装袋分类器集合，我们实现了99.5％的准确性，灵敏度为99.6％。

Designing experiments often requires balancing between learning about the true treatment effects and earning from allocating more samples to the superior treatment. While optimal algorithms for the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem (MABP) provide allocation policies that optimally balance learning and earning, they tend to be computationally expensive. The Gittins Index (GI) is a solution to the MABP that can simultaneously attain optimality and computationally efficiency goals, and it has been recently used in experiments with Bernoulli and Gaussian rewards. For the first time, we present a modification of the GI rule that can be used in experiments with exponentially-distributed rewards. We report its performance in simulated 2- armed and 3-armed experiments. Compared to traditional non-adaptive designs, our novel GI modified design shows operating characteristics comparable in learning (e.g. statistical power) but substantially better in earning (e.g. direct benefits). This illustrates the potential that designs using a GI approach to allocate participants have to improve participant benefits, increase efficiencies, and reduce experimental costs in adaptive multi-armed experiments with exponential rewards.

Modelling and forecasting real-life human behaviour using online social media is an active endeavour of interest in politics, government, academia, and industry. Since its creation in 2006, Twitter has been proposed as a potential laboratory that could be used to gauge and predict social behaviour. During the last decade, the user base of Twitter has been growing and becoming more representative of the general population. Here we analyse this user base in the context of the 2021 Mexican Legislative Election. To do so, we use a dataset of 15 million election-related tweets in the six months preceding election day. We explore different election models that assign political preference to either the ruling parties or the opposition. We find that models using data with geographical attributes determine the results of the election with better precision and accuracy than conventional polling methods. These results demonstrate that analysis of public online data can outperform conventional polling methods, and that political analysis and general forecasting would likely benefit from incorporating such data in the immediate future. Moreover, the same Twitter dataset with geographical attributes is positively correlated with results from official census data on population and internet usage in Mexico. These findings suggest that we have reached a period in time when online activity, appropriately curated, can provide an accurate representation of offline behaviour.

Existing federated classification algorithms typically assume the local annotations at every client cover the same set of classes. In this paper, we aim to lift such an assumption and focus on a more general yet practical non-IID setting where every client can work on non-identical and even disjoint sets of classes (i.e., client-exclusive classes), and the clients have a common goal which is to build a global classification model to identify the union of these classes. Such heterogeneity in client class sets poses a new challenge: how to ensure different clients are operating in the same latent space so as to avoid the drift after aggregation? We observe that the classes can be described in natural languages (i.e., class names) and these names are typically safe to share with all parties. Thus, we formulate the classification problem as a matching process between data representations and class representations and break the classification model into a data encoder and a label encoder. We leverage the natural-language class names as the common ground to anchor the class representations in the label encoder. In each iteration, the label encoder updates the class representations and regulates the data representations through matching. We further use the updated class representations at each round to annotate data samples for locally-unaware classes according to similarity and distill knowledge to local models. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show that the proposed method can outperform various classical and state-of-the-art federated learning methods designed for learning with non-IID data.

This is paper for the smooth function approximation by neural networks (NN). Mathematical or physical functions can be replaced by NN models through regression. In this study, we get NNs that generate highly accurate and highly smooth function, which only comprised of a few weight parameters, through discussing a few topics about regression. First, we reinterpret inside of NNs for regression; consequently, we propose a new activation function--integrated sigmoid linear unit (ISLU). Then special charateristics of metadata for regression, which is different from other data like image or sound, is discussed for improving the performance of neural networks. Finally, the one of a simple hierarchical NN that generate models substituting mathematical function is presented, and the new batch concept ``meta-batch" which improves the performance of NN several times more is introduced. The new activation function, meta-batch method, features of numerical data, meta-augmentation with metaparameters, and a structure of NN generating a compact multi-layer perceptron(MLP) are essential in this study.

The existing methods for video anomaly detection mostly utilize videos containing identifiable facial and appearance-based features. The use of videos with identifiable faces raises privacy concerns, especially when used in a hospital or community-based setting. Appearance-based features can also be sensitive to pixel-based noise, straining the anomaly detection methods to model the changes in the background and making it difficult to focus on the actions of humans in the foreground. Structural information in the form of skeletons describing the human motion in the videos is privacy-protecting and can overcome some of the problems posed by appearance-based features. In this paper, we present a survey of privacy-protecting deep learning anomaly detection methods using skeletons extracted from videos. We present a novel taxonomy of algorithms based on the various learning approaches. We conclude that skeleton-based approaches for anomaly detection can be a plausible privacy-protecting alternative for video anomaly detection. Lastly, we identify major open research questions and provide guidelines to address them.

The Government of Kerala had increased the frequency of supply of free food kits owing to the pandemic, however, these items were static and not indicative of the personal preferences of the consumers. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of various clustering techniques on a scaled-down version of a real-world dataset obtained through a conjoint analysis-based survey. Clustering carried out by centroid-based methods such as k means is analyzed and the results are plotted along with SVD, and finally, a conclusion is reached as to which among the two is better. Once the clusters have been formulated, commodities are also decided upon for each cluster. Also, clustering is further enhanced by reassignment, based on a specific cluster loss threshold. Thus, the most efficacious clustering technique for designing a food kit tailored to the needs of individuals is finally obtained.

Machine learning-based segmentation in medical imaging is widely used in clinical applications from diagnostics to radiotherapy treatment planning. Segmented medical images with ground truth are useful for investigating the properties of different segmentation performance metrics to inform metric selection. Regular geometrical shapes are often used to synthesize segmentation errors and illustrate properties of performance metrics, but they lack the complexity of anatomical variations in real images. In this study, we present a tool to emulate segmentations by adjusting the reference (truth) masks of anatomical objects extracted from real medical images. Our tool is designed to modify the defined truth contours and emulate different types of segmentation errors with a set of user-configurable parameters. We defined the ground truth objects from 230 patient images in the Glioma Image Segmentation for Radiotherapy (GLIS-RT) database. For each object, we used our segmentation synthesis tool to synthesize 10 versions of segmentation (i.e., 10 simulated segmentors or algorithms), where each version has a pre-defined combination of segmentation errors. We then applied 20 performance metrics to evaluate all synthetic segmentations. We demonstrated the properties of these metrics, including their ability to capture specific types of segmentation errors. By analyzing the intrinsic properties of these metrics and categorizing the segmentation errors, we are working toward the goal of developing a decision-tree tool for assisting in the selection of segmentation performance metrics.

This paper studies the quantization of heavy-tailed data in some fundamental statistical estimation problems, where the underlying distributions have bounded moments of some order. We propose to truncate and properly dither the data prior to a uniform quantization. Our major standpoint is that (near) minimax rates of estimation error are achievable merely from the quantized data produced by the proposed scheme. In particular, concrete results are worked out for covariance estimation, compressed sensing, and matrix completion, all agreeing that the quantization only slightly worsens the multiplicative factor. Besides, we study compressed sensing where both covariate (i.e., sensing vector) and response are quantized. Under covariate quantization, although our recovery program is non-convex because the covariance matrix estimator lacks positive semi-definiteness, all local minimizers are proved to enjoy near optimal error bound. Moreover, by the concentration inequality of product process and covering argument, we establish near minimax uniform recovery guarantee for quantized compressed sensing with heavy-tailed noise.