pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Survival modeling using deep learning, machine learning and statistical methods: A comparative analysis for predicting mortality after hospital admission
Authors: Ziwen Wang, Jin Wee Lee, Tanujit Chakraborty, Yilin Ning, Mingxuan Liu, Feng Xie, Marcus Eng Hock Ong, Nan Liu
Date: 2024-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Survival Analysis

Survival analysis is essential for studying time-to-event outcomes and providing a dynamic understanding of the probability of an event occurring over time. Various survival analysis techniques, from traditional statistical models to state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, support healthcare intervention and policy decisions. However, there remains ongoing discussion about their comparative performance. We conducted a comparative study of several survival analysis methods, including Cox proportional hazards (CoxPH), stepwise CoxPH, elastic net penalized Cox model, Random Survival Forests (RSF), Gradient Boosting machine (GBM) learning, AutoScore-Survival, DeepSurv, time-dependent Cox model based on neural network (CoxTime), and DeepHit survival neural network. We applied the concordance index (C-index) for model goodness-of-fit, and integral Brier scores (IBS) for calibration, and considered the model interpretability. As a case study, we performed a retrospective analysis of patients admitted through the emergency department of a tertiary hospital from 2017 to 2019, predicting 90-day all-cause mortality based on patient demographics, clinicopathological features, and historical data. The results of the C-index indicate that deep learning achieved comparable performance, with DeepSurv producing the best discrimination (DeepSurv: 0.893; CoxTime: 0.892; DeepHit: 0.891). The calibration of DeepSurv (IBS: 0.041) performed the best, followed by RSF (IBS: 0.042) and GBM (IBS: 0.0421), all using the full variables. Moreover, AutoScore-Survival, using a minimal variable subset, is easy to interpret, and can achieve good discrimination and calibration (C-index: 0.867; IBS: 0.044). While all models were satisfactory, DeepSurv exhibited the best discrimination and calibration. In addition, AutoScore-Survival offers a more parsimonious model and excellent interpretability.
Cultural Bias in Explainable AI Research: A Systematic Analysis
Authors: Uwe Peters, Mary Carman
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00

For synergistic interactions between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) systems, AI outputs often need to be explainable to people. Explainable AI (XAI) systems are commonly tested in human user studies. However, whether XAI researchers consider potential cultural differences in human explanatory needs remains unexplored. We highlight psychological research that found significant differences in human explanations between many people from Western, commonly individualist countries and people from non-Western, often collectivist countries. We argue that XAI research currently overlooks these variations and that many popular XAI designs implicitly and problematically assume that Western explanatory needs are shared cross-culturally. Additionally, we systematically reviewed over 200 XAI user studies and found that most studies did not consider relevant cultural variations, sampled only Western populations, but drew conclusions about human-XAI interactions more generally. We also analyzed over 30 literature reviews of XAI studies. Most reviews did not mention cultural differences in explanatory needs or flag overly broad cross-cultural extrapolations of XAI user study results. Combined, our analyses provide evidence of a cultural bias toward Western populations in XAI research, highlighting an important knowledge gap regarding how culturally diverse users may respond to widely used XAI systems that future work can and should address.
Beyond Predictive Algorithms in Child Welfare
Authors: Erina Seh-Young Moon, Devansh Saxena, Tegan Maharaj, Shion Guha
Date: 2024-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Caseworkers in the child welfare (CW) sector use predictive decision-making algorithms built on risk assessment (RA) data to guide and support CW decisions. Researchers have highlighted that RAs can contain biased signals which flatten CW case complexities and that the algorithms may benefit from incorporating contextually rich case narratives, i.e. - casenotes written by caseworkers. To investigate this hypothesized improvement, we quantitatively deconstructed two commonly used RAs from a United States CW agency. We trained classifier models to compare the predictive validity of RAs with and without casenote narratives and applied computational text analysis on casenotes to highlight topics uncovered in the casenotes. Our study finds that common risk metrics used to assess families and build CWS predictive risk models (PRMs) are unable to predict discharge outcomes for children who are not reunified with their birth parent(s). We also find that although casenotes cannot predict discharge outcomes, they contain contextual case signals. Given the lack of predictive validity of RA scores and casenotes, we propose moving beyond quantitative risk assessments for public sector algorithms and towards using contextual sources of information such as narratives to study public sociotechnical systems.
SDXL Finetuned with LoRA for Coloring Therapy: Generating Graphic Templates Inspired by United Arab Emirates Culture
Authors: Abdulla Alfalasi, Esrat Khan, Mohamed Alhashmi, Raed Aldweik, Davor Svetinovic
Date: 2024-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Specificity

A transformative approach to mental health therapy lies at the crossroads of cultural heritage and advanced technology. This paper introduces an innovative method that fuses machine learning techniques with traditional Emirati motifs, focusing on the United Arab Emirates (UAE). We utilize the Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) model, enhanced with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), to create culturally significant coloring templates featuring Al-Sadu weaving patterns. This novel approach leverages coloring therapy for its recognized stress-relieving benefits and embeds deep cultural resonance, making it a potent tool for therapeutic intervention and cultural preservation. Specifically targeting Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), our method demonstrates significant potential in reducing associated symptoms. Additionally, the paper delves into the broader implications of color and music therapy, emphasizing the importance of culturally tailored content. The technical aspects of the SDXL model and its LoRA fine-tuning showcase its capability to generate high-quality, culturally specific images. This research stands at the forefront of integrating mental wellness practices with cultural heritage, providing a groundbreaking perspective on the synergy between technology, culture, and healthcare. In future work, we aim to employ biosignals to assess the level of engagement and effectiveness of color therapy. A key focus will be to examine the impact of the Emirati heritage Al Sadu art on Emirati individuals and compare their responses with those of other nationalities. This will provide deeper insights into the cultural specificity of therapeutic interventions and further the understanding of the unique interplay between cultural identity and mental health therapy.
Detecting a Proxy for Potential Comorbid ADHD in People Reporting Anxiety Symptoms from Social Media Data
Authors: Claire S. Lee, Noelle Lim, Michael Guerzhoy
Date: 2024-02-17 00:00:00

We present a novel task that can elucidate the connection between anxiety and ADHD; use Transformers to make progress toward solving a task that is not solvable by keyword-based classifiers; and discuss a method for visualization of our classifier illuminating the connection between anxiety and ADHD presentations. Up to approximately 50% of adults with ADHD may also have an anxiety disorder and approximately 30\% of adults with anxiety may also have ADHD. Patients presenting with anxiety may be treated for anxiety without ADHD ever being considered, possibly affecting treatment. We show how data that bears on ADHD that is comorbid with anxiety can be obtained from social media data, and show that Transformers can be used to detect a proxy for possible comorbid ADHD in people with anxiety symptoms. We collected data from anxiety and ADHD online forums (subreddits). We identified posters who first started posting in the Anxiety subreddit and later started posting in the ADHD subreddit as well. We use this subset of the posters as a proxy for people who presented with anxiety symptoms and then became aware that they might have ADHD. We fine-tune a Transformer architecture-based classifier to classify people who started posting in the Anxiety subreddit and then started posting in the ADHD subreddit vs. people who posted in the Anxiety subreddit without later posting in the ADHD subreddit. We show that a Transformer architecture is capable of achieving reasonable results (76% correct for RoBERTa vs. under 60% correct for the best keyword-based model, both with 50% base rate).
Exploring Heterogeneity and Uncertainty for Graph-based Cognitive Diagnosis Models in Intelligent Education
Authors: Pengyang Shao, Yonghui Yang, Chen Gao, Lei Chen, Kun Zhang, Chenyi Zhuang, Le Wu, Yong Li, Meng Wang
Date: 2024-02-15 00:00:00
Tasks: cognitive diagnosis, Graph Neural Network

Graph-based Cognitive Diagnosis (CD) has attracted much research interest due to its strong ability on inferring students' proficiency levels on knowledge concepts. While graph-based CD models have demonstrated remarkable performance, we contend that they still cannot achieve optimal performance due to the neglect of edge heterogeneity and uncertainty. Edges involve both correct and incorrect response logs, indicating heterogeneity. Meanwhile, a response log can have uncertain semantic meanings, e.g., a correct log can indicate true mastery or fortunate guessing, and a wrong log can indicate a lack of understanding or a careless mistake. In this paper, we propose an Informative Semantic-aware Graph-based Cognitive Diagnosis model (ISG-CD), which focuses on how to utilize the heterogeneous graph in CD and minimize effects of uncertain edges. Specifically, to explore heterogeneity, we propose a semantic-aware graph neural networks based CD model. To minimize effects of edge uncertainty, we propose an Informative Edge Differentiation layer from an information bottleneck perspective, which suggests keeping a minimal yet sufficient reliable graph for CD in an unsupervised way. We formulate this process as maximizing mutual information between the reliable graph and response logs, while minimizing mutual information between the reliable graph and the original graph. After that, we prove that mutual information maximization can be theoretically converted to the classic binary cross entropy loss function, while minimizing mutual information can be realized by the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion. Finally, we adopt an alternating training strategy for optimizing learnable parameters of both the semantic-aware graph neural networks based CD model and the edge differentiation layer. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of ISG-CD.
Modeling and predicting students' engagement behaviors using mixture Markov models
Authors: R. Maqsood, P. Ceravolo, C. Romero, S. Ventura
Date: 2024-02-10 00:00:00

Students' engagements reflect their level of involvement in an ongoing learning process which can be estimated through their interactions with a computer-based learning or assessment system. A pre-requirement for stimulating student engagement lies in the capability to have an approximate representation model for comprehending students' varied (dis)engagement behaviors. In this paper, we utilized model-based clustering for this purpose which generates K mixture Markov models to group students' traces containing their (dis)engagement behavioral patterns. To prevent the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm from getting stuck in a local maxima, we also introduced a K-means-based initialization method named as K-EM. We performed an experimental work on two real datasets using the three variants of the EM algorithm: the original EM, emEM, K-EM; and, non-mixture baseline models for both datasets. The proposed K-EM has shown very promising results and achieved significant performance difference in comparison with the other approaches particularly using the Dataset. Hence, we suggest to perform further experiments using large dataset(s) to validate our method. Additionally, visualization of the resultant clusters through first-order Markov chains reveals very useful insights about (dis)engagement behaviors depicted by the students. We conclude the paper with a discussion on the usefulness of our approach, limitations and potential extensions of this work.
Subgroup Discovery in MOOCs: A Big Data Application for Describing Different Types of Learners
Authors: J. M. Luna, H. M. Fardoun, F. Padillo, C. Romero, S. Ventura
Date: 2024-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Subgroup Discovery

The aim of this paper is to categorize and describe different types of learners in massive open online courses (MOOCs) by means of a subgroup discovery approach based on MapReduce. The final objective is to discover IF-THEN rules that appear in different MOOCs. The proposed subgroup discovery approach, which is an extension of the well-known FP-Growth algorithm, considers emerging parallel methodologies like MapReduce to be able to cope with extremely large datasets. As an additional feature, the proposal includes a threshold value to denote the number of courses that each discovered rule should satisfy. A post-processing step is also included so redundant subgroups can be removed. The experimental stage is carried out by considering de-identified data from the first year of 16 MITx and HarvardX courses on the edX platform. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MapReduce approach outperforms traditional sequential subgroup discovery approaches, achieving a runtime that is almost constant for different courses. Additionally, thanks to the final post-processing step, only interesting and not-redundant rules are discovered, hence reducing the number of subgroups in one or two orders of magnitude. Finally, the discovered subgroups are easily used by courses' instructors not only for descriptive purposes but also for additional tasks such as recommendation or personalization.
Improving prediction of students' performance in intelligent tutoring systems using attribute selection and ensembles of different multimodal data sources
Authors: W. Chango, R. Cerezo, M. Sanchez-Santillan, R. Azevedo, C. Romero
Date: 2024-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

The aim of this study was to predict university students' learning performance using different sources of data from an Intelligent Tutoring System. We collected and preprocessed data from 40 students from different multimodal sources: learning strategies from system logs, emotions from face recording videos, interaction zones from eye tracking, and test performance from final knowledge evaluation. Our objective was to test whether the prediction could be improved by using attribute selection and classification ensembles. We carried out three experiments by applying six classification algorithms to numerical and discretized preprocessed multimodal data. The results show that the best predictions were produced using ensembles and selecting the best attributes approach with numerical data.
Understanding the Progression of Educational Topics via Semantic Matching
Authors: Tamador Alkhidir, Edmond Awad, Aamena Alshamsi
Date: 2024-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

Education systems are dynamically changing to accommodate technological advances, industrial and societal needs, and to enhance students' learning journeys. Curriculum specialists and educators constantly revise taught subjects across educational grades to identify gaps, introduce new learning topics, and enhance the learning outcomes. This process is usually done within the same subjects (e.g. math) or across related subjects (e.g. math and physics) considering the same and different educational levels, leading to massive multi-layer comparisons. Having nuanced data about subjects, topics, and learning outcomes structured within a dataset, empowers us to leverage data science to better understand the progression of various learning topics. In this paper, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) topic modeling was used to extract topics from the curriculum, which were then used to identify relationships between subjects, track their progression, and identify conceptual gaps. We found that grouping learning outcomes by common topics helped specialists reduce redundancy and introduce new concepts in the curriculum. We built a dashboard to avail the methodology to curriculum specials. Finally, we tested the validity of the approach with subject matter experts.
Multi-source and multimodal data fusion for predicting academic performance in blended learning university courses
Authors: W. Chango, R. Cerezo, C. Romero
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00

In this paper we applied data fusion approaches for predicting the final academic performance of university students using multiple-source, multimodal data from blended learning environments. We collected and preprocessed data about first-year university students from different sources: theory classes, practical sessions, on-line Moodle sessions, and a final exam. Our objective was to discover which data fusion approach produced the best results using our data. We carried out experiments by applying four different data fusion approaches and six classification algorithms. The results showed that the best predictions were produced using ensembles and selecting the best attributes approach with discretized data. The best prediction models showed us that the level of attention in theory classes, scores in Moodle quizzes, and the level of activity in Moodle forums were the best set of attributes for predicting students' final performance in our courses.
Teranga Go!: Carpooling Collaborative Consumption Community with multi-criteria hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set opinions to build confidence and trust
Authors: Rosana Montes, Ana M. Sanchez, Pedro Villar, Francisco Herrera
Date: 2024-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Classic Delphi and Fuzzy Delphi methods are used to test content validity of a data collection tools such as questionnaires. Fuzzy Delphi takes the opinion issued by judges from a linguistic perspective reducing ambiguity in opinions by using fuzzy numbers. We propose an extension named 2-Tuple Fuzzy Linguistic Delphi method to deal with scenarios in which judges show different expertise degrees by using fuzzy multigranular semantics of the linguistic terms and to obtain intermediate and final results expressed by 2-tuple linguistic values. The key idea of our proposal is to validate the full questionnaire by means of the evaluation of its parts, defining the validity of each item as a Decision Making problem. Taking the opinion of experts, we measure the degree of consensus, the degree of consistency, and the linguistic score of each item, in order to detect those items that affect, positively or negatively, the quality of the instrument. Considering the real need to evaluate a b-learning educational experience with a consensual questionnaire, we present a Decision Making model for questionnaire validation that solve it. Additionally, we contribute to this consensus reaching problem by developing an online tool under GPL v3 license. The software visualizes the collective valuations for each iteration and assists to determine which parts of the questionnaire should be modified to reach a consensual solution.
Characterizing Flow Complexity in Transportation Networks using Graph Homology
Authors: Shashank A Deshpande, Hamsa Balakrishnan
Date: 2024-03-09 00:00:00

Series-parallel network topologies generally exhibit simplified dynamical behavior and avoid high combinatorial complexity. A comprehensive analysis of how flow complexity emerges with a graph's deviation from series-parallel topology is therefore of fundamental interest. We introduce the notion of a robust $k$-path on a directed acycylic graph, with increasing values of the length $k$ reflecting increasing deviations. We propose a graph homology with robust $k$-paths as the bases of its chain spaces. In this framework, the topological simplicity of series-parallel graphs translates into a triviality of higher-order chain spaces. We discuss a correspondence between the space of order-three chains and sites within the network that are susceptible to the Braess paradox, a well-known phenomenon in transportation networks. In this manner, we illustrate the utility of the proposed graph homology in sytematically studying the complexity of flow networks.
Eternal Sunshine of the Mechanical Mind: The Irreconcilability of Machine Learning and the Right to be Forgotten
Authors: Meem Arafat Manab
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00

As we keep rapidly advancing toward an era where artificial intelligence is a constant and normative experience for most of us, we must also be aware of what this vision and this progress entail. By first approximating neural connections and activities in computer circuits and then creating more and more sophisticated versions of this crude approximation, we are now facing an age to come where modern deep learning-based artificial intelligence systems can rightly be called thinking machines, and they are sometimes even lauded for their emergent behavior and black-box approaches. But as we create more powerful electronic brains, with billions of neural connections and parameters, can we guarantee that these mammoths built of artificial neurons will be able to forget the data that we store in them? If they are at some level like a brain, can the right to be forgotten still be protected while dealing with these AIs? The essential gap between machine learning and the RTBF is explored in this article, with a premonition of far-reaching conclusions if the gap is not bridged or reconciled any time soon. The core argument is that deep learning models, due to their structure and size, cannot be expected to forget or delete a data as it would be expected from a tabular database, and they should be treated more like a mechanical brain, albeit still in development.
An Image-based Typology for Visualization
Authors: Jian Chen, Petra Isenberg, Robert S. Laramee, Tobias Isenberg, Michael Sedlmair, Torsten Moeller, Rui Li
Date: 2024-03-07 00:00:00

We present and discuss the results of a qualitative analysis of visualization images to derive an image-based typology of visualizations. For each image, we seek to identify its main focus or the essential stimuli. As a result, we derived 10 image-based visualization types. We describe coding decisions we made in the derivation process. The resulting image typology can serve a number of purposes: enabling researchers and practitioners to identify visual design styles, facilitating the categorization of visualization images for the purpose of research and teaching, enabling researchers to study the evolution of the community and its research output over time, and facilitating a discussion of standardization in visualization. In addition, the tool and dataset enable scholars to closely examine the images and how they are published and communicated in our community. osf.io/dxjwt presents a pre-registration and all supplemental materials.