Time-series forecasting and analysis of COVID-19 outbreak in highly populated countries- A data-driven approach

A novel corona virus, COVID-19 is spreading across different countries in an alarming proportion and it has become a major threat to the existence of human community. With more than eight lakh death count within a very short span of seven months, this deadly virus has affected more than 24 million people across 213 countries and territories around the world. Time-series analysis, modeling and forecasting is an important research area that explores the hidden insights from larger set of time-bound data for arriving better decisions. In this work, data analysis on COVID-19 dataset is performed by comparing the top six populated countries in the world. The data used for the evaluation is taken for a time period from 22nd January 2020 to 23rd August 2020.A novel time-series forecasting approach based on Auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model is also proposed. The results will help the researchers from medical and scientific community to gauge the trend of the disease spread and improvise containment strategies accordingly.

Time-Series Forecasting and Analysis of COVID-19 Outbreak in Highly Populated Countries

A novel corona virus, COVID-19 is spreading across different countries in an alarming proportion and it has become a major threat to the existence of human community. With more than eight lakh death count within a very short span of seven months, this deadly virus has affected more than 24 million people across 213 countries and territories around the world. Time-series analysis, modeling and forecasting is an important research area that explores the hidden insights from larger set of time-bound data for arriving better decisions. In this work, data analysis on COVID-19 dataset is performed by comparing the top six populated countries in the world. The data used for the evaluation is taken for a time period from 22nd January 2020 to 23rd August 2020.A novel time-series forecasting approach based on Auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model is also proposed. The results will help the researchers from medical and scientific community to gauge the trend of the disease spread and improvise containment strategies accordingly.

A System Justification Theory of Entrepreneurial Attitudinal Change During a Crisis

Entrepreneurship resilience during a crisis is an important research area. However, prior research has not examined cognitive antecedents of entrepreneurial resilience. Using the 2014 oil price crisis in the Middle East as a natural experiment, we draw on system justification theory to understand why and how entrepreneurs differ in the extent of their attitudinal changes toward corruption. We find foreign entrepreneurs substantially increased their willingness to engage in corruption whereas local entrepreneurs did not. Among foreign entrepreneurs, corruption willingness increases more among those from countries where corruption is not the norm, than those from more corrupt home countries.

On Interval-Valued Fuzzy Soft Preordered Sets and Associated Applications in Decision-Making

Recently, using interval-valued fuzzy soft sets to rank alternatives has become an important research area in decision-making because it provides decision-makers with the best option in a vague and uncertain environment. The present study aims to give an extensive insight into decision-making processes relying on a preference relationship of interval-valued fuzzy soft sets. Firstly, interval-valued fuzzy soft preorderings and an interval-valued fuzzy soft equivalence are established based on the interval-valued fuzzy soft topology. Then, two crisp preordering sets, namely lower crisp and upper crisp preordering sets, are proposed. Next, a score function depending on comparison matrices is expressed in solving multi-group decision-making problems. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the validity and efficacy of the proposed method.

Hybrid Feature Based Classifier Performance Evaluation of Monophonic and Polyphonic Indian Classical Instruments Recognition

Instrument recognition in computer music is an important research area that deals with sound modelling. Musical sounds comprises of five prominent constituents which are Pitch, timber, loudness, duration, and spatialization. The tonal sound is function of all these components playing critical role in deciding quality. The first four parameters can be modified, but timbre remains a challenge [6]. Then, inevitably, timbre became the focus of this piece. It is a sound quality that distinguishes one musical instrument from another, regardless of pitch or volume, and it is critical. Monophonic and polyphonic recordings of musical instruments can be identified using this method. To evaluate the proposed approach, three Indian instruments were experimented to generate training data set. Flutes, harmoniums, and sitars are among the instruments used. Indian musical instruments classify sounds using statistical and spectral parameters. The hybrid features from different domains extracting important characteristics from musical sounds are extracted. An Indian Musical Instrument SVM and GMM classifier demonstrate their ability to classify accurately. Using monophonic sounds, SVM and Polyphonic produce an average accuracy of 89.88% and 91.10%, respectively. According to the results of the experiments, GMM outperforms SVM in monophonic recordings by a factor of 96.33 and polyphonic recordings by a factor of 93.33.

Violence Detection With Two-Stream Neural Network Based on C3D

In recent years, violence detection has gradually turned into an important research area in computer vision, and have proposed many models with high accuracy. However, the unsatisfactory generalization ability of these methods over different datasets. In this paper, the authors propose a violence detection method based on C3D two-stream network for spatiotemporal features. Firstly, the authors preprocess the video data of RGB stream and optical stream respectively. Secondly, the authors feed the data into two C3D networks to extract features from the RGB flow and the optical flow respectively. Third, the authors fuse the features extracted by the two networks to obtain a final prediction result. To testify the performance of the proposed model, four different datasets (two public datasets and two self-built datasets) are selected in this paper. The experimental results show that our model has good generalization ability compared to state-of-the-art methods, since it not only has good ability on large-scale datasets, but also performs well on small-scale datasets.

DeepVisInterests : Deep data analysis for topics of interests prediction

Deep data analysis for latent information prediction has been an important research area. Many of the existing solutions have used the textual data and have obtained an accurate results for predicting users' interests and other latent attributes. However, little attention has been paid to visual data that is becoming increasingly popular in recent times. In this paper, we addresses the problem of discovering the attributed interest and of analyzing the performance of the automatic prediction using a comparison with the self assessed topics of interest (topics of interest provided by the user in a proposed questionnaire) based on data analysis techniques applied on the users visual data. We analyze the content of each user's images to aggregate the image-level users' interests distribution in order to obtain the user-level users' interest distribution. To do this, we employ the pretrained ImageNet convolutional neural networks architectures for the feature extraction step and to construct the ontology, as the users' interests model, in order to learn the semantic representation for the popular topics of interests defined by social networks (e.g., Facebook). Our experimental studies show that this analysis, on the most relevant features, enhances the performance of the prediction framework. In order to improve our framework's robustness and generalization with unknown users' profiles, we propose a novel database evaluation. Our proposed framework provided promising results which are competitive to state-of-the-art techniques with an accuracy of 0.80.

DeepVisInterests : Deep data analysis for topics of interests prediction

Deep data analysis for latent information prediction has been an important research area. Many of the existing solutions have used the textual data and have obtained an accurate results for predicting users' interests and other latent attributes. However, little attention has been paid to visual data that is becoming increasingly popular in recent times. In this paper, we addresses the problem of discovering the attributed interest and of analyzing the performance of the automatic prediction using a comparison with the self assessed topics of interest (topics of interest provided by the user in a proposed questionnaire) based on data analysis techniques applied on the users visual data. We analyze the content of each user's images to aggregate the image-level users' interests distribution in order to obtain the user-level users' interest distribution. To do this, we employ the pretrained ImageNet convolutional neural networks architectures for the feature extraction step and to construct the ontology, as the users' interests model, in order to learn the semantic representation for the popular topics of interests defined by social networks (e.g., Facebook). Our experimental studies show that this analysis, on the most relevant features, enhances the performance of the prediction framework. In order to improve our framework's robustness and generalization with unknown users' profiles, we propose a novel database evaluation. Our proposed framework provided promising results which are competitive to state-of-the-art techniques with an accuracy of 0.80.

Decoding the coupling between the brain and skin reactions in auditory stimulation by information-based analysis of EEG and GSR signals

BACKGROUND: The analysis of brain activity in different conditions is an important research area in neuroscience. OBJECTIVE: This paper analyzed the correlation between the brain and skin activities in rest and stimulations by information-based analysis of electroencephalogram (EEG) and galvanic skin resistance (GSR) signals. METHODS: We recorded EEG and GSR signals of eleven subjects during rest and auditory stimulations using three pieces of music that were differentiated based on their complexity. Then, we calculated the Shannon entropy of these signals to quantify their information contents. RESULTS: The results showed that music with greater complexity has a more significant effect on altering the information contents of EEG and GSR signals. We also found a strong correlation (r= 0.9682) among the variations of the information contents of EEG and GSR signals. Therefore, the activities of the skin and brain are correlated in different conditions. CONCLUSION: This analysis technique can be utilized to evaluate the correlation among the activities of various organs versus brain activity in different conditions.

INVESTIGATION OF THE EFFECT OF WALKING SPEED ON LEG MUSCLE REACTION BY COMPLEXITY-BASED ANALYSIS OF ELECTROMYOGRAM (EMG) SIGNALS

An important research area in physiological and sport sciences is the analysis of the variations of the muscle reaction due to changes in walking speed. In this paper, we investigated the effect of walking speed variations on leg muscle reaction by the analysis of Electromyogram (EMG) signals at different walking inclines. For this purpose, we benefited from fractal theory and sample entropy to analyze how the complexity of EMG signals changes at different walking speeds. According to the results, although fractal theory could not show a clear trend between the variations of the complexity of EMG signals and the variations of the walking speed, however, based on the results, increasing the speed of walking in the case of different inclines is mapped on to the decrement of the sample entropy of EMG signals. Therefore, sample entropy could decode the effect of walking speed on the reaction of leg muscle. This analysis method could be applied to analyze the variations of other physiological signals of humans durin walking.