Gradient-based optimization for variational empirical Bayes multiple regression

Variational empirical Bayes (VEB) methods provide a practically attractive approach to fitting large, sparse, multiple regression models. These methods usually use coordinate ascent to optimize the variational objective function, an approach known as coordinate ascent variational inference (CAVI). Here we propose alternative optimization approaches based on gradient-based (quasi-Newton) methods, which we call gradient-based variational inference (GradVI). GradVI exploits a recent result from Kim et. al. [arXiv:2208.10910] which writes the VEB regression objective function as a penalized regression. Unfortunately the penalty function is not available in closed form, and we present and compare two approaches to dealing with this problem. In simple situations where CAVI performs well, we show that GradVI produces similar predictive performance, and GradVI converges in fewer iterations when the predictors are highly correlated. Furthermore, unlike CAVI, the key computations in GradVI are simple matrix-vector products, and so GradVI is much faster than CAVI in settings where the design matrix admits fast matrix-vector products (e.g., as we show here, trendfiltering applications) and lends itself to parallelized implementations in ways that CAVI does not. GradVI is also very flexible, and could exploit automatic differentiation to easily implement different prior families. Our methods are implemented in an open-source Python software, GradVI (available from https://github.com/stephenslab/gradvi ).

COVID-19 Spreading Prediction and Impact Analysis by Using Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Global Health Assessment

The COVID-19 pandemic is considered as the most alarming global health calamity of this century. COVID-19 has been confirmed to be mutated from coronavirus family. As stated by the records of The World Health Organization (WHO at April 18 2020), the present epidemic of COVID-19, has influenced more than 2,164,111 persons and killed more than 146,198 folks in over 200 countries across the globe and billions had confronted impacts in lifestyle because of this virus outbreak. The ongoing overall outbreak of the COVID-19 opened up new difficulties to the research sectors. Artificial intelligence (AI) driven strategies can be valuable to predict the parameters, hazards, and impacts of such an epidemic in a cost-efficient manner. The fundamental difficulties of AI in this situation is the limited availability of information and the uncertain nature of the disease. Here in this article, we have tried to integrate AI to predict the infection outbreak and along with this, we have also tried to test whether AI with help deep learning can recognize COVID-19 infected chest X-Rays or not. The global outbreak of the virus posed enormous economic, ecological and societal challenges into the human population and with help of this paper, we have tried to give a message that AI can help us to identify certain features of the disease outbreak that could prove to be essential to protect the humanity from this deadly disease.

Automatized marine vessel monitoring from sentinel-1 data using convolution neural network

The advancement of multi-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system is considered as an upgraded technology for surveillance activities. SAR sensors onboard provide data for coastal ocean surveillance and a view of the oceanic surface features. Vessel monitoring has earlier been performed using Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) algorithm which is not a smart technique as it lacks decision-making capabilities, therefore we introduce wavelet transformation-based Convolution Neural Network approach to recognize objects from SAR images during the heavy naval traffic, which corresponds to the numerous object detection. The utilized information comprises Sentinel-1 SAR-C dual-polarization data acquisitions over the western coastal zones of India and with help of the proposed technique we have obtained 95.46% detection accuracy. Utilizing this model can automatize the monitoring of naval objects and recognition of foreign maritime intruders.

Dependence of Physiochemical Features on Marine Chlorophyll Analysis with Learning Techniques

Marine chlorophyll which is present within phytoplankton are the basis of photosynthesis and they have a high significance in sustaining ecological balance as they highly contribute toward global primary productivity and comes under the food chain of many marine organisms. Imbalance in the concentrations of phytoplankton can disrupt the ecological balance. The growth of phytoplankton depends upon the optimum concentrations of physiochemical constituents like iron, nitrates, phosphates, pH level, salinity, etc. and deviations from an ideal concentration can affect the growth of phytoplankton which can ultimately disrupt the ecosystem at a large scale. Thus the analysis of such constituents has high significance to estimate the probable growth of marine phytoplankton. The advancements of remote sensing technologies have improved the scope to remotely study the physiochemical constituents on a global scale. The machine learning techniques have made it possible to predict the marine chlorophyll levels based on physiochemical properties and deep learning helped to do the same but in a more advanced manner simulating the working principle of a human brain. In this study, we have used machine learning and deep learning for the Bay of Bengal to establish a regression model of chlorophyll levels based on physiochemical features and discussed its reliability and performance for different regression models. This could help to estimate the amount of chlorophyll present in water bodies based on physiochemical features so we can plan early in case there arises a possibility of disruption in the ecosystem due to imbalance in marine phytoplankton.