EFI: A Toolbox for Feature Importance Fusion and Interpretation in Python

This paper presents an open-source Python toolbox called Ensemble Feature Importance (EFI) to provide machine learning (ML) researchers, domain experts, and decision makers with robust and accurate feature importance quantification and more reliable mechanistic interpretation of feature importance for prediction problems using fuzzy sets. The toolkit was developed to address uncertainties in feature importance quantification and lack of trustworthy feature importance interpretation due to the diverse availability of machine learning algorithms, feature importance calculation methods, and dataset dependencies. EFI merges results from multiple machine learning models with different feature importance calculation approaches using data bootstrapping and decision fusion techniques, such as mean, majority voting and fuzzy logic. The main attributes of the EFI toolbox are: (i) automatic optimisation of ML algorithms, (ii) automatic computation of a set of feature importance coefficients from optimised ML algorithms and feature importance calculation techniques, (iii) automatic aggregation of importance coefficients using multiple decision fusion techniques, and (iv) fuzzy membership functions that show the importance of each feature to the prediction task. The key modules and functions of the toolbox are described, and a simple example of their application is presented using the popular Iris dataset.

MOSQUITO-NET: A deep learning based CADx system for malaria diagnosis along with model interpretation using GradCam and class activation maps

Malaria is considered one of the deadliest diseases in today world which causes thousands of deaths per year. The parasites responsible for malaria are scientifically known as Plasmodium which infects the red blood cells in human beings. The parasites are transmitted by a female class of mosquitos known as Anopheles. The diagnosis of malaria requires identification and manual counting of parasitized cells by medical practitioners in microscopic blood smears. Due to the unavailability of resources, its diagnostic accuracy is largely affected by large scale screening. State of the art Computer-aided diagnostic techniques based on deep learning algorithms such as CNNs, with end to end feature extraction and classification, have widely contributed to various image recognition tasks. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of custom made convnet Mosquito-Net, to classify the infected and uninfected cells for malaria diagnosis which could be deployed on the edge and mobile devices owing to its fewer parameters and less computation power. Therefore, it can be wildly preferred for diagnosis in remote and countryside areas where there is a lack of medical facilities.