RAINER: A Robust Ensemble Learning Grid Search-Tuned Framework for Rainfall Patterns Prediction

Rainfall prediction remains a persistent challenge due to the highly nonlinear and complex nature of meteorological data. Existing approaches lack systematic utilization of grid search for optimal hyperparameter tuning, relying instead on heuristic or manual selection, frequently resulting in sub-optimal results. Additionally, these methods rarely incorporate newly constructed meteorological features such as differences between temperature and humidity to capture critical weather dynamics. Furthermore, there is a lack of systematic evaluation of ensemble learning techniques and limited exploration of diverse advanced models introduced in the past one or two years. To address these limitations, we propose a robust ensemble learning grid search-tuned framework (RAINER) for rainfall prediction. RAINER incorporates a comprehensive feature engineering pipeline, including outlier removal, imputation of missing values, feature reconstruction, and dimensionality reduction via Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The framework integrates novel meteorological features to capture dynamic weather patterns and systematically evaluates non-learning mathematical-based methods and a variety of machine learning models, from weak classifiers to advanced neural networks such as Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN). By leveraging grid search for hyperparameter tuning and ensemble voting techniques, RAINER achieves promising results within real-world datasets.

CP2M: Clustered-Patch-Mixed Mosaic Augmentation for Aerial Image Segmentation

Remote sensing image segmentation is pivotal for earth observation, underpinning applications such as environmental monitoring and urban planning. Due to the limited annotation data available in remote sensing images, numerous studies have focused on data augmentation as a means to alleviate overfitting in deep learning networks. However, some existing data augmentation strategies rely on simple transformations that may not sufficiently enhance data diversity or model generalization capabilities. This paper proposes a novel augmentation strategy, Clustered-Patch-Mixed Mosaic (CP2M), designed to address these limitations. CP2M integrates a Mosaic augmentation phase with a clustered patch mix phase. The former stage constructs a new sample from four random samples, while the latter phase uses the connected component labeling algorithm to ensure the augmented data maintains spatial coherence and avoids introducing irrelevant semantics when pasting random patches. Our experiments on the ISPRS Potsdam dataset demonstrate that CP2M substantially mitigates overfitting, setting new benchmarks for segmentation accuracy and model robustness in remote sensing tasks.

DDUNet: Dual Dynamic U-Net for Highly-Efficient Cloud Segmentation

Cloud segmentation amounts to separating cloud pixels from non-cloud pixels in an image. Current deep learning methods for cloud segmentation suffer from three issues. (a) Constrain on their receptive field due to the fixed size of the convolution kernel. (b) Lack of robustness towards different scenarios. (c) Requirement of a large number of parameters and limitations for real-time implementation. To address these issues, we propose a Dual Dynamic U-Net (DDUNet) for supervised cloud segmentation. The DDUNet adheres to a U-Net architecture and integrates two crucial modules: the dynamic multi-scale convolution (DMSC), improving merging features under different reception fields, and the dynamic weights and bias generator (DWBG) in classification layers to enhance generalization ability. More importantly, owing to the use of depth-wise convolution, the DDUNet is a lightweight network that can achieve 95.3% accuracy on the SWINySEG dataset with only 0.33M parameters, and achieve superior performance over three different configurations of the SWINySEg dataset in both accuracy and efficiency.

CPDR: Towards Highly-Efficient Salient Object Detection via Crossed Post-decoder Refinement

Most of the current salient object detection approaches use deeper networks with large backbones to produce more accurate predictions, which results in a significant increase in computational complexity. A great number of network designs follow the pure UNet and Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) architecture which has limited feature extraction and aggregation ability which motivated us to design a lightweight post-decoder refinement module, the crossed post-decoder refinement (CPDR) to enhance the feature representation of a standard FPN or U-Net framework. Specifically, we introduce the Attention Down Sample Fusion (ADF), which employs channel attention mechanisms with attention maps generated by high-level representation to refine the low-level features, and Attention Up Sample Fusion (AUF), leveraging the low-level information to guide the high-level features through spatial attention. Additionally, we proposed the Dual Attention Cross Fusion (DACF) upon ADFs and AUFs, which reduces the number of parameters while maintaining the performance. Experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches.

UCloudNet: A Residual U-Net with Deep Supervision for Cloud Image Segmentation

Recent advancements in meteorology involve the use of ground-based sky cameras for cloud observation. Analyzing images from these cameras helps in calculating cloud coverage and understanding atmospheric phenomena. Traditionally, cloud image segmentation relied on conventional computer vision techniques. However, with the advent of deep learning, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are increasingly applied for this purpose. Despite their effectiveness, CNNs often require many epochs to converge, posing challenges for real-time processing in sky camera systems. In this paper, we introduce a residual U-Net with deep supervision for cloud segmentation which provides better accuracy than previous approaches, and with less training consumption. By utilizing residual connection in encoders of UCloudNet, the feature extraction ability is further improved.

AlignGroup: Learning and Aligning Group Consensus with Member Preferences for Group Recommendation

Group activities are important behaviors in human society, providing personalized recommendations for groups is referred to as the group recommendation task. Existing methods can usually be categorized into two strategies to infer group preferences: 1) determining group preferences by aggregating members' personalized preferences, and 2) inferring group consensus by capturing group members' coherent decisions after common compromises. However, the former would suffer from the lack of group-level considerations, and the latter overlooks the fine-grained preferences of individual users. To this end, we propose a novel group recommendation method AlignGroup, which focuses on both group consensus and individual preferences of group members to infer the group decision-making. Specifically, AlignGroup explores group consensus through a well-designed hypergraph neural network that efficiently learns intra- and inter-group relationships. Moreover, AlignGroup innovatively utilizes a self-supervised alignment task to capture fine-grained group decision-making by aligning the group consensus with members' common preferences. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets validate that our AlignGroup outperforms the state-of-the-art on both the group recommendation task and the user recommendation task, as well as outperforms the efficiency of most baselines.

MENTOR: Multi-level Self-supervised Learning for Multimodal Recommendation

With the increasing multimedia information, multimodal recommendation has received extensive attention. It utilizes multimodal information to alleviate the data sparsity problem in recommendation systems, thus improving recommendation accuracy. However, the reliance on labeled data severely limits the performance of multimodal recommendation models. Recently, self-supervised learning has been used in multimodal recommendations to mitigate the label sparsity problem. Nevertheless, the state-of-the-art methods cannot avoid the modality noise when aligning multimodal information due to the large differences in the distributions of different modalities. To this end, we propose a Multi-level sElf-supervised learNing for mulTimOdal Recommendation (MENTOR) method to address the label sparsity problem and the modality alignment problem. Specifically, MENTOR first enhances the specific features of each modality using the graph convolutional network (GCN) and fuses the visual and textual modalities. It then enhances the item representation via the item semantic graph for all modalities, including the fused modality. Then, it introduces two multilevel self-supervised tasks: the multilevel cross-modal alignment task and the general feature enhancement task. The multilevel cross-modal alignment task aligns each modality under the guidance of the ID embedding from multiple levels while maintaining the historical interaction information. The general feature enhancement task enhances the general feature from both the graph and feature perspectives to improve the robustness of our model. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Jinfeng-Xu/MENTOR.

DMCNet: Diversified Model Combination Network for Understanding Engagement from Video Screengrabs

Engagement is an essential indicator of the Quality-of-Learning Experience (QoLE) and plays a major role in developing intelligent educational interfaces. The number of people learning through Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other online resources has been increasing rapidly because they provide us with the flexibility to learn from anywhere at any time. This provides a good learning experience for the students. However, such learning interface requires the ability to recognize the level of engagement of the students for a holistic learning experience. This is useful for both students and educators alike. However, understanding engagement is a challenging task, because of its subjectivity and ability to collect data. In this paper, we propose a variety of models that have been trained on an open-source dataset of video screengrabs. Our non-deep learning models are based on the combination of popular algorithms such as Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF). The deep learning methods include Densely Connected Convolutional Networks (DenseNet-121), Residual Network (ResNet-18) and MobileNetV1. We show the performance of each models using a variety of metrics such as the Gini Index, Adjusted F-Measure (AGF), and Area Under receiver operating characteristic Curve (AUC). We use various dimensionality reduction techniques such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) to understand the distribution of data in the feature sub-space. Our work will thereby assist the educators and students in obtaining a fruitful and efficient online learning experience.

A predictive analytics approach for stroke prediction using machine learning and neural networks

The negative impact of stroke in society has led to concerted efforts to improve the management and diagnosis of stroke. With an increased synergy between technology and medical diagnosis, caregivers create opportunities for better patient management by systematically mining and archiving the patients' medical records. Therefore, it is vital to study the interdependency of these risk factors in patients' health records and understand their relative contribution to stroke prediction. This paper systematically analyzes the various factors in electronic health records for effective stroke prediction. Using various statistical techniques and principal component analysis, we identify the most important factors for stroke prediction. We conclude that age, heart disease, average glucose level, and hypertension are the most important factors for detecting stroke in patients. Furthermore, a perceptron neural network using these four attributes provides the highest accuracy rate and lowest miss rate compared to using all available input features and other benchmarking algorithms. As the dataset is highly imbalanced concerning the occurrence of stroke, we report our results on a balanced dataset created via sub-sampling techniques.

Stereo Matching Based on Visual Sensitive Information

The area of computer vision is one of the most discussed topics amongst many scholars, and stereo matching is its most important sub fields. After the parallax map is transformed into a depth map, it can be applied to many intelligent fields. In this paper, a stereo matching algorithm based on visual sensitive information is proposed by using standard images from Middlebury dataset. Aiming at the limitation of traditional stereo matching algorithms regarding the cost window, a cost aggregation algorithm based on the dynamic window is proposed, and the disparity image is optimized by using left and right consistency detection to further reduce the error matching rate. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively enhance the stereo matching effect of the image providing significant improvement in accuracy as compared with the classical census algorithm. The proposed model code, dataset, and experimental results are available at https://github.com/WangHewei16/Stereo-Matching.