MD-SPKM: A set pair k-modes clustering algorithm for incomplete categorical matrix data

In order to solve the clustering problem with incomplete and categorical matrix data sets, and considering the uncertain relationship between samples and clusters, a set pair k-modes clustering algorithm is proposed (MD-SPKM). Firstly, the correlation theory of set pair information granule is introduced into k-modes clustering. By improving the distance formula of traditional k-modes algorithm, a set pair distance measurement method between incomplete matrix samples is defined. Secondly, considering the uncertain relationship between the sample and the cluster, the definition of the intra-cluster average distance and the threshold calculation formula to determine whether the sample belongs to multiple clusters is given, and then the result of set pair clustering is formed, which includes positive region, boundary region and negative region. Finally, through the selected three data sets and four contrast algorithms for experimental evaluation, the experimental results show that the set pair k-modes clustering algorithm can effectively handle incomplete categorical matrix data sets, and has good clustering performance in Accuracy, Recall, ARI and NMI.

An improved OPTICS clustering algorithm for discovering clusters with uneven densities

Most density-based clustering algorithms have the problems of difficult parameter setting, high time complexity, poor noise recognition, and weak clustering for datasets with uneven density. To solve these problems, this paper proposes FOP-OPTICS algorithm (Finding of the Ordering Peaks Based on OPTICS), which is a substantial improvement of OPTICS (Ordering Points To Identify the Clustering Structure). The proposed algorithm finds the demarcation point (DP) from the Augmented Cluster-Ordering generated by OPTICS and uses the reachability-distance of DP as the radius of neighborhood eps of its corresponding cluster. It overcomes the weakness of most algorithms in clustering datasets with uneven densities. By computing the distance of the k-nearest neighbor of each point, it reduces the time complexity of OPTICS; by calculating density-mutation points within the clusters, it can efficiently recognize noise. The experimental results show that FOP-OPTICS has the lowest time complexity, and outperforms other algorithms in parameter setting and noise recognition.

An improved YOLOv3 model for detecting location information of ovarian cancer from CT images

Ovarian cancer is a malignant tumor that poses a serious threat to women’s lives. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems can classify the type of ovarian tumors, but few of them can provide exactly the location information of ovarian cancer cells. Recently, deep learning technology becomes hot for automatic detection of cancer cells, particularly for detecting their locations. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end network YOLO-OC (Ovarian cancer) model, which can extract the characteristics of ovarian cancer more efficiently. In our method, deformable convolution is used to enhance the model’s ability to learn geometric deformation in space. Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) module is proposed to automatically learn the importance of different channel features. Data experiments are conducted on datasets collected from The Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University Medical College, China. Experimental results show that our YOLO-OC model achieves 91.83%, 85.66% and 73.82% on mean average precision [email protected], [email protected] and mAP@[.5,.95], respectively, which performs better than Faster R-CNN, SSD and RetinaNet on both accuracy and efficiency.

Attention mechanism based LSTM in classification of stressed speech under workload

In order to improve the robustness of speech recognition systems, this study attempts to classify stressed speech caused by the psychological stress under multitasking workloads. Due to the transient nature and ambiguity of stressed speech, the stress characteristics is not represented in all the segments in stressed speech as labeled. In this paper, we propose a multi-feature fusion model based on the attention mechanism to measure the importance of segments for stress classification. Through the attention mechanism, each speech frame is weighted to reflect the different correlations to the actual stressed state, and the multi-channel fusion of features characterizing the stressed speech to classify the speech under stress. The proposed model further adopts SpecAugment in view of the feature spectrum for data augment to resolve small sample sizes problem among stressed speech. During the experiment, we compared the proposed model with traditional methods on CASIA Chinese emotion corpus and Fujitsu stressed speech corpus, and results show that the proposed model has better performance in speaker-independent stress classification. Transfer learning is also performed for speaker-dependent classification for stressed speech, and the performance is improved. The attention mechanism shows the advantage for continuous speech under stress in authentic context comparing with traditional methods.

Forecasting emergency department admissions

The emergency department of a hospital plays an extremely important role in the healthcare of patients. To maintain a high quality service, clinical professionals need information on how patient flow will evolve in the immediate future. With accurate emergency department forecasts it is possible to better manage available human resources by allocating clinical staff before peak periods, thus preventing service congestion, or releasing clinical staff at less busy times. This paper describes a solution developed for the presentation of hourly, four-hour, eight-hour and daily number of admissions to a hospital’s emergency department. A 10-year history (2009–2018) of the number of emergency admissions in a Portuguese hospital was used. To create the models several methods were tested, including exponential smoothing, SARIMA, autoregressive and recurrent neural network, XGBoost and ensemble learning. The models that generated the most accurate hourly time predictions were the recurrent neural network with one-layer (sMAPE = 23.26%) and with three layers (sMAPE = 23.12%) and XGBoost (sMAPE = 23.70%). In terms of efficiency, the XGBoost method has by far outperformed all others. The success of the recurrent neuronal network and XGBoost machine learning methods applied to the prediction of the number of emergency department admissions has been demonstrated here, with an accuracy that surpasses the models found in the literature.

Analyzing mixed-type data by using word embedding for handling categorical features

Most of real-world datasets are of mixed type including both numeric and categorical attributes. Unlike numbers, operations on categorical values are limited, and the degree of similarity between distinct values cannot be measured directly. In order to properly analyze mixed-type data, dedicated methods to handle categorical values in the datasets are needed. The limitation of most existing methods is lack of appropriate numeric representations of categorical values. Consequently, some of analysis algorithms cannot be applied. In this paper, we address this deficiency by transforming categorical values to their numeric representation so as to facilitate various analyses of mixed-type data. In particular, the proposed transformation method preserves semantics of categorical values with respect to the other values in the dataset, resulting in better performance on data analyses including classification and clustering. The proposed method is verified and compared with other methods on extensive real-world datasets.

Multidimensional indexing technique for medical images retrieval

Retrieving required medical images from a huge amount of images is one of the most widely used features in medical information systems, including medical imaging search engines. For example, diagnostic decision making has traditionally been accompanied by patient data (image or non-image) and previous medical experiences from similar cases. Indexing as part of search engines (or retrieval system), increases the speed of a search. The goal of this study, is to provide an effective and efficient indexing technique for medical images search engines. In this paper, in order to archive this goal, a multidimensional indexing technique for medical images is designed using the normalization technique that is used to reduce redundancy in relational database design. Data structure of the proposed multidimensional index and also different required operations are designed to create and handle such a multidimensional index. Time complexity of each operation is analyzed and also average memory space required to store any medical image (along with its related metadata) is calculated as the space complexity analysis of the proposed indexing technique. The results show that the proposed indexing technique has a good performance in terms of memory usage, as well as execution time for the usual operations. Moreover, and may be more important, the proposed indexing techniques improves the precision and recall of the information retrieval system (i.e., search engine) which uses this technique for indexing medical images. Besides, a user of such search engine can retrieve medical images which s/he has specified its attributes is some different aspects (dimensions), e.g., tissue, image modality and format, sickness and trauma, etc. So, the proposed multidimensional indexing techniques can improve effectiveness of a medical image information retrieval system (in terms of precision and recall), while having a proper efficiency (in terms of execution time and memory usage), and can improve the information retrieval process for healthcare search engines.

Mutual information-based multi-output tree learning algorithm

A tree model with low time complexity can support the application of artificial intelligence to industrial systems. Variable selection based tree learning algorithms are more time efficient than existing Classification and Regression Tree (CART) algorithms. To our best knowledge, there is no attempt to deal with categorical input variable in variable selection based multi-output tree learning. Also, in the case of multi-output regression tree, a conventional variable selection based algorithm is not suitable to large datasets. We propose a mutual information-based multi-output tree learning algorithm that consists of variable selection and split optimization. The proposed method discretizes each variable based on k-means into 2–4 clusters and selects the variable for splitting based on the discretized variables using mutual information. This variable selection component has relatively low time complexity and can be applied regardless of output dimension and types. The proposed split optimization component is more efficient than an exhaustive search. The performance of the proposed tree learning algorithm is similar to or better than that of a multi-output version of CART algorithm on a specific dataset. In addition, with a large dataset, the time complexity of the proposed algorithm is significantly reduced compared to a CART algorithm.

MEGA: Predicting the best classifier combination using meta-learning and a genetic algorithm

Classifier combination through ensemble systems is one of the most effective approaches to improve the accuracy of classification systems. Ensemble systems are generally used to combine classifiers; However, selecting the best combination of individual classifiers is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose an efficient assembling method that employs both meta-learning and a genetic algorithm for the selection of the best classifiers. Our method is called MEGA, standing for using MEta-learning and a Genetic Algorithm for algorithm recommendation. MEGA has three main components: Training, Model Interpretation and Testing. The Training component extracts meta-features of each training dataset and uses a genetic algorithm to discover the best classifier combination. The Model Interpretation component interprets the relationships between meta-features and classifiers using a priori and multi-label decision tree algorithms. Finally, the Testing component uses a weighted k-nearest-neighbors algorithm to predict the best combination of classifiers for unseen datasets. We present extensive experimental results that demonstrate the performance of MEGA. MEGA achieves superior results in a comparison of three other methods and, most importantly, is able to find novel interpretable rules that can be used to select the best combination of classifiers for an unseen dataset.