This paper proposes a data and Machine Learning-based forecasting solution for the Telecommunications network-rollout planning problem. Milestone completion-time estimation is crucial to network-rollout planning; accurate estimates enable better crew utilisation and optimised cost of materials and logistics. Using historical data of milestone completion times, a model needs to incorporate domain knowledge, handle noise and yet be interpretable to project managers. This paper proposes partition-based regression models that incorporate data-driven statistical models within each partition, as a solution to the problem. Benchmarking experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach obtains competitive to better performance, at a small fraction of the model complexity of the best alternative approach based on Gradient Boosting. Experiments also demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective for both short and long-range forecasts. The proposed idea is applicable in any context requiring time-series regression with noisy and attributed data.

Algorithms that involve both forecasting and optimization are at the core of solutions to many difficult real-world problems, such as in supply chains (inventory optimization), traffic, and in the transition towards carbon-free energy generation in battery/load/production scheduling in sustainable energy systems. Typically, in these scenarios we want to solve an optimization problem that depends on unknown future values, which therefore need to be forecast. As both forecasting and optimization are difficult problems in their own right, relatively few research has been done in this area. This paper presents the findings of the ``IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge on Predict+Optimize for Renewable Energy Scheduling," held in 2021. We present a comparison and evaluation of the seven highest-ranked solutions in the competition, to provide researchers with a benchmark problem and to establish the state of the art for this benchmark, with the aim to foster and facilitate research in this area. The competition used data from the Monash Microgrid, as well as weather data and energy market data. It then focused on two main challenges: forecasting renewable energy production and demand, and obtaining an optimal schedule for the activities (lectures) and on-site batteries that lead to the lowest cost of energy. The most accurate forecasts were obtained by gradient-boosted tree and random forest models, and optimization was mostly performed using mixed integer linear and quadratic programming. The winning method predicted different scenarios and optimized over all scenarios jointly using a sample average approximation method.

The cyber-physical convergence is opening up new business opportunities for industrial operators. The need for deep integration of the cyber and the physical worlds establishes a rich business agenda towards consolidating new system and network engineering approaches. This revolution would not be possible without the rich and heterogeneous sources of data, as well as the ability of their intelligent exploitation, mainly due to the fact that data will serve as a fundamental resource to promote Industry 4.0. One of the most fruitful research and practice areas emerging from this data-rich, cyber-physical, smart factory environment is the data-driven process monitoring field, which applies machine learning methodologies to enable predictive maintenance applications. In this paper, we examine popular time series forecasting techniques as well as supervised machine learning algorithms in the applied context of Industry 4.0, by transforming and preprocessing the historical industrial dataset of a packing machine's operational state recordings (real data coming from the production line of a manufacturing plant from the food and beverage domain). In our methodology, we use only a single signal concerning the machine's operational status to make our predictions, without considering other operational variables or fault and warning signals, hence its characterization as ``agnostic''. In this respect, the results demonstrate that the adopted methods achieve a quite promising performance on three targeted use cases.

旅行时间是交通的重要措施。准确的旅行时间预测也是操作和先进信息系统的基础。短期旅行时间预测等各种解决方案，例如利用实时GPS数据和优化方法来跟踪车辆的路径的解决方案。然而，可靠的长期预测仍然具有挑战性。我们在本文中展示了旅行时间的适用性和有用性即邮政服务的交货时间预测。我们调查了几种方法，如线性回归模型和基于树的集合，如随机森林，堆垛和升压，允许通过进行广泛的实验并考虑许多可用性方案来预测交货时间。结果表明，旅行时间预测可以帮助减轻邮政服务的高延误。我们表明，一些升压算法，例如轻梯度提升和CATBoost，在准确性和运行时效率方面具有比其他基线，如线性回归模型，装袋回归和随机林等其他基线具有更高的性能。

天然气管道中的泄漏检测是石油和天然气行业的一个重要且持续的问题。这尤其重要，因为管道是运输天然气的最常见方法。这项研究旨在研究数据驱动的智能模型使用基本操作参数检测天然气管道的小泄漏的能力，然后使用现有的性能指标比较智能模型。该项目应用观察者设计技术，使用回归分类层次模型来检测天然气管道中的泄漏，其中智能模型充当回归器，并且修改后的逻辑回归模型充当分类器。该项目使用四个星期的管道数据流研究了五个智能模型（梯度提升，决策树，随机森林，支持向量机和人工神经网络）。结果表明，虽然支持向量机和人工神经网络比其他网络更好，但由于其内部复杂性和所使用的数据量，它们并未提供最佳的泄漏检测结果。随机森林和决策树模型是最敏感的，因为它们可以在大约2小时内检测到标称流量的0.1％的泄漏。所有智能模型在测试阶段中具有高可靠性，错误警报率为零。将所有智能模型泄漏检测的平均时间与文献中的实时短暂模型进行了比较。结果表明，智能模型在泄漏检测问题中的表现相对较好。该结果表明，可以与实时瞬态模型一起使用智能模型，以显着改善泄漏检测结果。

预测流感病毒引起的住院治疗对于公共卫生计划至关重要，因此医院可以为大量患者做好准备。在流感季节中实时使用了许多预测方法，并提交给疾病预防控制中心进行公共交流。预测模型范围从机械模型和自动回归模型到机器学习模型。我们假设我们可以通过使用多个机械模型生成潜在的轨迹并使用机器学习来学习如何将这些轨迹结合到改进的预测中，从而改善预测。我们提出了一种树木合奏模型设计，该设计利用基线模型Sikjalpha的各个预测指标来提高其性能。每个预测因子都是通过更改一组超参数来生成的。我们将为Flusight Challenge（2022）部署的前瞻性预测与所有其他提交的方法进行了比较。我们的方法是完全自动化的，不需要任何手动调整。我们证明，基于森林的随机方法能够根据平均绝对误差，覆盖范围和加权间隔得分来改善单个预测因子的预测。我们的方法根据平均绝对误差和基于当前季节所有每周提交的平均值（2022）的平均值来优于所有其他模型。随机森林（通过对树木的分析）的解释能力使我们能够深入了解其如何改善单个预测因子。

提出了一种使用天气数据实时太阳生成预测的新方法，同时提出了既有空间结构依赖性的依赖。随着时间的推移，观察到的网络被预测到较低维度的表示，在该表示的情况下，在推理阶段使用天气预报时，使用各种天气测量来训练结构化回归模型。从国家太阳辐射数据库获得的德克萨斯州圣安东尼奥地区的288个地点进行了实验。该模型预测具有良好精度的太阳辐照度（夏季R2 0.91，冬季为0.85，全球模型为0.89）。随机森林回归者获得了最佳准确性。进行了多个实验来表征缺失数据的影响和不同的时间范围的影响，这些范围提供了证据表明，新算法不仅在随机的情况下，而且在机制是空间和时间上都丢失的数据是可靠的。

A well-performing prediction model is vital for a recommendation system suggesting actions for energy-efficient consumer behavior. However, reliable and accurate predictions depend on informative features and a suitable model design to perform well and robustly across different households and appliances. Moreover, customers' unjustifiably high expectations of accurate predictions may discourage them from using the system in the long term. In this paper, we design a three-step forecasting framework to assess predictability, engineering features, and deep learning architectures to forecast 24 hourly load values. First, our predictability analysis provides a tool for expectation management to cushion customers' anticipations. Second, we design several new weather-, time- and appliance-related parameters for the modeling procedure and test their contribution to the model's prediction performance. Third, we examine six deep learning techniques and compare them to tree- and support vector regression benchmarks. We develop a robust and accurate model for the appliance-level load prediction based on four datasets from four different regions (US, UK, Austria, and Canada) with an equal set of appliances. The empirical results show that cyclical encoding of time features and weather indicators alongside a long-short term memory (LSTM) model offer the optimal performance.

Flooding is one of the most disastrous natural hazards, responsible for substantial economic losses. A predictive model for flood-induced financial damages is useful for many applications such as climate change adaptation planning and insurance underwriting. This research assesses the predictive capability of regressors constructed on the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) dataset using neural networks (Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks), decision trees (Extreme Gradient Boosting), and kernel-based regressors (Gaussian Process). The assessment highlights the most informative predictors for regression. The distribution for claims amount inference is modeled with a Burr distribution permitting the introduction of a bias correction scheme and increasing the regressor's predictive capability. Aiming to study the interaction with physical variables, we incorporate Daymet rainfall estimation to NFIP as an additional predictor. A study on the coastal counties in the eight US South-West states resulted in an $R^2=0.807$. Further analysis of 11 counties with a significant number of claims in the NFIP dataset reveals that Extreme Gradient Boosting provides the best results, that bias correction significantly improves the similarity with the reference distribution, and that the rainfall predictor strengthens the regressor performance.

血浆定义为物质的第四个状态，在高电场下可以在大气压下产生非热血浆。现在众所周知，血浆激活液体（PAL）的强和广谱抗菌作用。机器学习（ML）在医疗领域的可靠适用性也鼓励其在等离子体医学领域的应用。因此，在PALS上的ML应用可以提出一种新的观点，以更好地了解各种参数对其抗菌作用的影响。在本文中，通过使用先前获得的数据来定性预测PAL的体外抗菌活性，从而介绍了比较监督的ML模型。进行了文献搜索，并从33个相关文章中收集了数据。在所需的预处理步骤之后，将两种监督的ML方法（即分类和回归）应用于数据以获得微生物灭活（MI）预测。对于分类，MI分为四类，对于回归，MI被用作连续变量。为分类和回归模型进行了两种不同的可靠交叉验证策略，以评估所提出的方法。重复分层的K折交叉验证和K折交叉验证。我们还研究了不同特征对模型的影响。结果表明，高参数优化的随机森林分类器（ORFC）和随机森林回归者（ORFR）分别比其他模型进行了分类和回归的模型更好。最后，获得ORFC的最佳测试精度为82.68％，ORFR的R2为0.75。 ML技术可能有助于更好地理解在所需的抗菌作用中具有主要作用的血浆参数。此外，此类发现可能有助于将来的血浆剂量定义。

机器学习渗透到许多行业，这为公司带来了新的利益来源。然而，在人寿保险行业中，机器学习在实践中并未被广泛使用，因为在过去几年中，统计模型表明了它们的风险评估效率。因此，保险公司可能面临评估人工智能价值的困难。随着时间的流逝，专注于人寿保险行业的修改突出了将机器学习用于保险公司的利益以及通过释放数据价值带来的利益。本文回顾了传统的生存建模方法论，并通过机器学习技术扩展了它们。它指出了与常规机器学习模型的差异，并强调了特定实现在与机器学习模型家族中面对审查数据的重要性。在本文的补充中，已经开发了Python库。已经调整了不同的开源机器学习算法，以适应人寿保险数据的特殊性，即检查和截断。此类模型可以轻松地从该SCOR库中应用，以准确地模拟人寿保险风险。

预测经济的短期动态 - 对经济代理商决策过程的重要意见 - 经常在线性模型中使用滞后指标。这通常在正常时期就足够了，但在危机期间可能不足。本文旨在证明，在非线性机器学习方法的帮助下，非传统和及时的数据（例如零售和批发付款）可以为决策者提供复杂的模型，以准确地估算几乎实时的关键宏观经济指标。此外，我们提供了一组计量经济学工具，以减轻机器学习模型中的过度拟合和解释性挑战，以提高其政策使用的有效性。我们的模型具有付款数据，非线性方法和量身定制的交叉验证方法，有助于提高宏观经济的启示准确性高达40 \％ - 在COVID-19期间的增长较高。我们观察到，付款数据对经济预测的贡献很小，在低和正常增长期间是线性的。但是，在强年或正增长期间，付款数据的贡献很大，不对称和非线性。

Building an accurate model of travel behaviour based on individuals' characteristics and built environment attributes is of importance for policy-making and transportation planning. Recent experiments with big data and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms toward a better travel behaviour analysis have mainly overlooked socially disadvantaged groups. Accordingly, in this study, we explore the travel behaviour responses of low-income individuals to transit investments in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, Canada, using statistical and ML models. We first investigate how the model choice affects the prediction of transit use by the low-income group. This step includes comparing the predictive performance of traditional and ML algorithms and then evaluating a transit investment policy by contrasting the predicted activities and the spatial distribution of transit trips generated by vulnerable households after improving accessibility. We also empirically investigate the proposed transit investment by each algorithm and compare it with the city of Brampton's future transportation plan. While, unsurprisingly, the ML algorithms outperform classical models, there are still doubts about using them due to interpretability concerns. Hence, we adopt recent local and global model-agnostic interpretation tools to interpret how the model arrives at its predictions. Our findings reveal the great potential of ML algorithms for enhanced travel behaviour predictions for low-income strata without considerably sacrificing interpretability.

拖延是任务的非理性延迟，是在线学习中的普遍情况。潜在的负面后果包括更高的辍学风险，增加压力和情绪减少。由于学习管理系统和学习分析的增加，可以检测到这种行为的指标，从而预测未来的拖延和其他扩张行为。但是，关注此类预测的研究很少。此外，几乎不存在涉及不同类型的预测指标和预测性能之间的比较的研究。在这项研究中，我们旨在通过分析多个机器学习算法的性能来填补这些研究空白，以预测具有两类预测指标的高等教育环境中在线作业的延迟或及时提交：基于主观的，基于问卷的变量和目标，客观，客观，客观，目标，客观，客观，客观，客观，从学习管理系统中提取的基于日志数据的指标。结果表明，具有客观预测变量的模型始终优于主观预测指标的模型，并且两种变量类型的组合表现稍好一些。对于这三个选项中的每一个，一种不同的方法盛行（主观，贝叶斯多层次模型的梯度增强机器，共同预测指标的随机森林）。我们得出的结论是，在学习管理系统中实施此类模型之前，应仔细注意预测变量和算法。

PV power forecasting models are predominantly based on machine learning algorithms which do not provide any insight into or explanation about their predictions (black boxes). Therefore, their direct implementation in environments where transparency is required, and the trust associated with their predictions may be questioned. To this end, we propose a two stage probabilistic forecasting framework able to generate highly accurate, reliable, and sharp forecasts yet offering full transparency on both the point forecasts and the prediction intervals (PIs). In the first stage, we exploit natural gradient boosting (NGBoost) for yielding probabilistic forecasts, while in the second stage, we calculate the Shapley additive explanation (SHAP) values in order to fully comprehend why a prediction was made. To highlight the performance and the applicability of the proposed framework, real data from two PV parks located in Southern Germany are employed. Comparative results with two state-of-the-art algorithms, namely Gaussian process and lower upper bound estimation, manifest a significant increase in the point forecast accuracy and in the overall probabilistic performance. Most importantly, a detailed analysis of the model's complex nonlinear relationships and interaction effects between the various features is presented. This allows interpreting the model, identifying some learned physical properties, explaining individual predictions, reducing the computational requirements for the training without jeopardizing the model accuracy, detecting possible bugs, and gaining trust in the model. Finally, we conclude that the model was able to develop complex nonlinear relationships which follow known physical properties as well as human logic and intuition.

操作网络通常依靠机器学习模型来进行许多任务，包括检测异常，推断应用程序性能和预测需求。然而，不幸的是，模型精度会因概念漂移而降低，从而，由于从软件升级到季节性到用户行为的变化，功能和目标预测之间的关系会发生变化。因此，缓解概念漂移是操作机器学习模型的重要组成部分，尽管它很重要，但在网络或一般的回归模型的背景下，概念漂移并未得到广泛的探索。因此，对于当前依赖机器学习模型的许多常见网络管理任务，如何检测或减轻它并不是一件好事。不幸的是，正如我们所展示的那样，通过使用新可用的数据经常重新培训模型可以充分缓解概念漂移，甚至可以进一步降低模型的准确性。在本文中，我们表征了美国主要大都市地区的大型蜂窝网络中的概念漂移。我们发现，概念漂移发生在许多重要的关键性能指标（KPI）上，独立于模型，训练集大小和时间间隔，因此需要采用实用方法来检测，解释和减轻它。为此，我们开发了特征（叶）的局部误差近似。叶检测到漂移；解释最有助于漂移的功能和时间间隔；并使用遗忘和过度采样来减轻漂移。我们使用超过四年的蜂窝KPI数据来评估叶子与行业标准的缓解方法。在美国，我们对主要的细胞提供商进行的初步测试表明，LEAF在各种KPI和模型上都是有效的。叶子始终优于周期性，并触发重新培训，同时还要降低昂贵的重新经营操作。

Platelet products are both expensive and have very short shelf lives. As usage rates for platelets are highly variable, the effective management of platelet demand and supply is very important yet challenging. The primary goal of this paper is to present an efficient forecasting model for platelet demand at Canadian Blood Services (CBS). To accomplish this goal, four different demand forecasting methods, ARIMA (Auto Regressive Moving Average), Prophet, lasso regression (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator) and LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) networks are utilized and evaluated. We use a large clinical dataset for a centralized blood distribution centre for four hospitals in Hamilton, Ontario, spanning from 2010 to 2018 and consisting of daily platelet transfusions along with information such as the product specifications, the recipients' characteristics, and the recipients' laboratory test results. This study is the first to utilize different methods from statistical time series models to data-driven regression and a machine learning technique for platelet transfusion using clinical predictors and with different amounts of data. We find that the multivariate approaches have the highest accuracy in general, however, if sufficient data are available, a simpler time series approach such as ARIMA appears to be sufficient. We also comment on the approach to choose clinical indicators (inputs) for the multivariate models.

近年来，随着传感器和智能设备的广泛传播，物联网（IoT）系统的数据生成速度已大大增加。在物联网系统中，必须经常处理，转换和分析大量数据，以实现各种物联网服务和功能。机器学习（ML）方法已显示出其物联网数据分析的能力。但是，将ML模型应用于物联网数据分析任务仍然面临许多困难和挑战，特别是有效的模型选择，设计/调整和更新，这给经验丰富的数据科学家带来了巨大的需求。此外，物联网数据的动态性质可能引入概念漂移问题，从而导致模型性能降解。为了减少人类的努力，自动化机器学习（AUTOML）已成为一个流行的领域，旨在自动选择，构建，调整和更新机器学习模型，以在指定任务上实现最佳性能。在本文中，我们对Automl区域中模型选择，调整和更新过程中的现有方法进行了审查，以识别和总结将ML算法应用于IoT数据分析的每个步骤的最佳解决方案。为了证明我们的发现并帮助工业用户和研究人员更好地实施汽车方法，在这项工作中提出了将汽车应用于IoT异常检测问题的案例研究。最后，我们讨论并分类了该领域的挑战和研究方向。

地下水位预测是一个应用时间序列预测任务，具有重要的社会影响，以优化水管理以及防止某些自然灾害：例如，洪水或严重的干旱。在文献中已经报告了机器学习方法以实现这项任务，但它们仅专注于单个位置的地下水水平的预测。一种全球预测方法旨在利用从各个位置的地下水级时序列序列，一次在一个地方或一次在几个地方产生预测。鉴于全球预测方法在著名的竞争中取得了成功，因此在地下水级别的预测上进行评估并查看它们与本地方法的比较是有意义的。在这项工作中，我们创建了一个1026地下水级时序列的数据集。每个时间序列都是由每日测量地下水水平和两个外源变量，降雨和蒸散量制成的。该数据集可向社区提供可重现性和进一步评估。为了确定最佳的配置，可以有效地预测完整的时间序列的地下水水平，我们比较了包括本地和全球时间序列预测方法在内的不同预测因子。我们评估了外源变量的影响。我们的结果分析表明，通过训练过去的地下水位和降雨数据的全球方法获得最佳预测。

近期不同尺度电力消耗的丰富数据开辟了新的挑战，并强调了新技术的需求，以利用更精细的尺度提供的信息，以便改善更广泛的尺度预测。在这项工作中，我们利用该分层预测问题与多尺度传输学习之间的相似性。我们分别开发了两种分层转移学习方法，分别基于广义添加剂模型和随机林的堆叠，以及专家聚合的使用。我们将这些方法应用于在第一种情况下使用智能仪表数据，以及第二种情况下的区域数据的智能仪表数据将这些方法应用于两种电力负荷预测。对于这两个useCases，我们将我们的方法的表现与基准算法的表演进行比较，我们使用可变重要性分析调查其行为。我们的结果表明了两种方法的兴趣，这导致预测的重大改善。