Prediction of Grade, Gender, and Academic Performance of Children and Teenagers from Handwriting Using the Sigma-Lognormal Model

Digital handwriting acquisition enables the capture of detailed temporal and kinematic signals reflecting the motor processes underlying writing behavior. While handwriting analysis has been extensively explored in clinical or adult populations, its potential for studying developmental and educational characteristics in children remains less investigated. In this work, we examine whether handwriting dynamics encode information related to student characteristics using a large-scale online dataset collected from Japanese students from elementary school to junior high school. We systematically compare three families of handwriting-derived features: basic statistical descriptors of kinematic signals, entropy-based measures of variability, and parameters obtained from the sigma-lognormal model. Although the dataset contains dense stroke-level recordings, features are aggregated at the student level to enable a controlled comparison between representations. These features are evaluated across three prediction tasks: grade prediction, gender classification, and academic performance classification, using Linear or Logistic Regression and Random Forest models under consistent experimental settings. The results show that handwriting dynamics contain measurable signals related to developmental stage and individual differences, especially for the grade prediction task. These findings highlight the potential of kinematic handwriting analysis and confirm that through their development, children's handwriting evolves toward a lognormal motor organization.

Multilingual Financial Fraud Detection Using Machine Learning and Transformer Models: A Bangla-English Study

Financial fraud detection has emerged as a critical research challenge amid the rapid expansion of digital financial platforms. Although machine learning approaches have demonstrated strong performance in identifying fraudulent activities, most existing research focuses exclusively on English-language data, limiting applicability to multilingual contexts. Bangla (Bengali), despite being spoken by over 250 million people, remains largely unexplored in this domain. In this work, we investigate financial fraud detection in a multilingual Bangla-English setting using a dataset comprising legitimate and fraudulent financial messages. We evaluate classical machine learning models (Logistic Regression, Linear SVM, and Ensemble classifiers) using TF-IDF features alongside transformer-based architectures. Experimental results using 5-fold stratified cross-validation demonstrate that Linear SVM achieves the best performance with 91.59 percent accuracy and 91.30 percent F1 score, outperforming the transformer model (89.49 percent accuracy, 88.88 percent F1) by approximately 2 percentage points. The transformer exhibits higher fraud recall (94.19 percent) but suffers from elevated false positive rates. Exploratory analysis reveals distinctive patterns: scam messages are longer, contain urgency-inducing terms, and frequently include URLs (32 percent) and phone numbers (97 percent), while legitimate messages feature transactional confirmations and specific currency references. Our findings highlight that classical machine learning with well-crafted features remains competitive for multilingual fraud detection, while also underscoring the challenges posed by linguistic diversity, code-mixing, and low-resource language constraints.

Brenier Isotonic Regression

Isotonic regression (IR) is shape-constrained regression to maintain a univariate fitting curve non-decreasing, which has numerous applications including single-index models and probability calibration. When it comes to multi-output regression, the classical IR is no longer applicable because the monotonicity is not readily extendable. We consider a novel multi-output regression problem where a regression function is \emph{cyclically monotone}. Roughly speaking, a cyclically monotone function is the gradient of some convex potential. Whereas enforcing cyclic monotonicity is apparently challenging, we leverage the fact that Kantorovich's optimal transport (OT) always yields a cyclically monotone coupling as an optimal solution. This perspective naturally allows us to interpret a regression function and the convex potential as a link function in generalized linear models and Brenier's potential in OT, respectively, and hence we call this IR extension \emph{Brenier isotonic regression}. We demonstrate experiments with probability calibration and generalized linear models. In particular, IR outperforms many famous baselines in probability calibration robustly.

What do near-optimal learning rate schedules look like?

A basic unanswered question in neural network training is: what is the best learning rate schedule shape for a given workload? The choice of learning rate schedule is a key factor in the success or failure of the training process, but beyond having some kind of warmup and decay, there is no consensus on what makes a good schedule shape. To answer this question, we designed a search procedure to find the best shapes within a parameterized schedule family. Our approach factors out the schedule shape from the base learning rate, which otherwise would dominate cross-schedule comparisons. We applied our search procedure to a variety of schedule families on three workloads: linear regression, image classification on CIFAR-10, and small-scale language modeling on Wikitext103. We showed that our search procedure indeed generally found near-optimal schedules. We found that warmup and decay are robust features of good schedules, and that commonly used schedule families are not optimal on these workloads. Finally, we explored how the outputs of our shape search depend on other optimization hyperparameters, and found that weight decay can have a strong effect on the optimal schedule shape. To the best of our knowledge, our results represent the most comprehensive results on near-optimal schedule shapes for deep neural network training, to date.

Partition-Based Functional Ridge Regression for High-Dimensional Data

This paper proposes a partition-based functional ridge regression framework to address multicollinearity, overfitting, and interpretability in high-dimensional functional linear models. The coefficient function vector \( \boldsymbolβ(s) \) is decomposed into two components, \( \boldsymbolβ_1(s) \) and \( \boldsymbolβ_2(s) \), representing dominant and weaker functional effects. This partition enables differential ridge penalization across functional blocks, so that important signals are preserved while less informative components are more strongly shrunk. The resulting approach improves numerical stability and enhances interpretability without relying on explicit variable selection. We develop three estimators: the Functional Ridge Estimator (FRE), the Functional Ridge Full Model (FRFM), and the Functional Ridge Sub-Model (FRSM). Under standard regularity conditions, we establish consistency and asymptotic normality for all estimators. Simulation results reveal a clear bias--variance trade-off where FRSM performs best in small samples through strong variance reduction, whereas FRFM achieves superior accuracy in moderate to large samples by retaining informative functional structure through adaptive penalization. An empirical application to Canadian weather data further demonstrates improved predictive performance, reduced variance inflation, and clearer identification of influential functional effects. Overall, partition-based ridge regularization provides a practical and theoretically grounded method for high-dimensional functional regression.

Adaptive Activation Cancellation for Hallucination Mitigation in Large Language Models

Large Language Models frequently generate fluent but factually incorrect text. We propose Adaptive Activation Cancellation (AAC), a real-time inference-time framework that treats hallucination-associated neural activations as structured interference within the transformer residual stream, drawing an explicit analogy to classical adaptive noise cancellation from signal processing. The framework identifies Hallucination Nodes (H-Nodes) via layer-wise linear probing and suppresses them using a confidence-weighted forward hook during auto-regressive generation -- requiring no external knowledge, no fine-tuning, and no additional inference passes. Evaluated across OPT-125M, Phi-3-mini, and LLaMA 3-8B on TruthfulQA and HaluEval, the real-time hook is the only intervention that consistently improves downstream accuracy on all three scales. Critically, the method is strictly surgical: WikiText-103 perplexity and MMLU reasoning accuracy are preserved at exactly 0.0% degradation across all three model scales, a property that distinguishes AAC from interventions that trade fluency or general capability for factual improvement. On the LLaMA 3-8B scale, the hook additionally yields positive generation-level gains (MC1 +0.04; MC2 +0.003; Token-F1 +0.003) while achieving probe-space selectivity 5.94x - 3.5x higher than the ITI baseline -- demonstrating that targeted neuron-level suppression can simultaneously improve factual accuracy and preserve model capability.

A Multi-Objective Optimization Approach for Sustainable AI-Driven Entrepreneurship in Resilient Economies

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies presents both unprecedented opportunities and significant challenges for sustainable economic development. While AI offers transformative potential for addressing environmental challenges and enhancing economic resilience, its deployment often involves substantial energy consumption and environmental costs. This research introduces the EcoAI-Resilience framework, a multi-objective optimization approach designed to maximize the sustainability benefits of AI deployment while minimizing environmental costs and enhancing economic resilience. The framework addresses three critical objectives through mathematical optimization: sustainability impact maximization, economic resilience enhancement, and environmental cost minimization. The methodology integrates diverse data sources, including energy consumption metrics, sustainability indicators, economic performance data, and entrepreneurship outcomes across 53 countries and 14 sectors from 2015-2024. Our experimental validation demonstrates exceptional performance with R scores exceeding 0.99 across all model components, significantly outperforming baseline methods, including Linear Regression (R = 0.943), Random Forest (R = 0.957), and Gradient Boosting (R = 0.989). The framework successfully identifies optimal AI deployment strategies featuring 100\% renewable energy integration, 80% efficiency improvement targets, and optimal investment levels of $202.48 per capita. Key findings reveal strong correlations between economic complexity and resilience (r = 0.82), renewable energy adoption and sustainability outcomes (r = 0.71), and demonstrate significant temporal improvements in AI readiness (+1.12 points/year) and renewable energy adoption (+0.67 year) globally.

Weather-Related Crash Risk Forecasting: A Deep Learning Approach for Heterogenous Spatiotemporal Data

This study introduces a deep learning-based framework for forecasting weather-related traffic crash risk using heterogeneous spatiotemporal data. Given the complex, non-linear relationship between crash occurrence and factors such as road characteristics, and traffic conditions, we propose an ensemble of Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM) models trained over overlapping spatial grids. This approach captures both spatial dependencies and temporal dynamics while addressing spatial heterogeneity in crash patterns. North Carolina was selected as the study area due to its diverse weather conditions, with historical crash, weather, and traffic data aggregated at 5-mi by 5-mi grid resolution. The framework was evaluated using Mean Squared Error (MSE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and spatial cross-K analysis. Results show that the ensembled ConvLSTM significantly outperforms baseline models, including linear regression, ARIMA, and standard ConvLSTM, particularly in high-risk zones. The ensemble approach effectively combines the strengths of multiple ConvLSTM models, resulting in lower MSE and RMSE values across all regions, particularly when data from different crash risk zones are aggregated. Notably, the model performs exceptionally well in volatile high-risk areas (Cluster 1), achieving the lowest MSE and RMSE, while in stable low-risk areas (Cluster 2), it still improves upon simpler models but with slightly higher errors due to challenges in capturing subtle variations.

Towards a data-scale independent regulariser for robust sparse identification of non-linear dynamics

Data normalisation, a common and often necessary preprocessing step in engineering and scientific applications, can severely distort the discovery of governing equations by magnitudebased sparse regression methods. This issue is particularly acute for the Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) framework, where the core assumption of sparsity is undermined by the interaction between data scaling and measurement noise. The resulting discovered models can be dense, uninterpretable, and physically incorrect. To address this critical vulnerability, we introduce the Sequential Thresholding of Coefficient of Variation (STCV), a novel, computationally efficient sparse regression algorithm that is inherently robust to data scaling. STCV replaces conventional magnitude-based thresholding with a dimensionless statistical metric, the Coefficient Presence (CP), which assesses the statistical validity and consistency of candidate terms in the model library. This shift from magnitude to statistical significance makes the discovery process invariant to arbitrary data scaling. Through comprehensive benchmarking on canonical dynamical systems and practical engineering problems, including a physical mass-spring-damper experiment, we demonstrate that STCV consistently and significantly outperforms standard Sequential Thresholding Least Squares (STLSQ) and Ensemble-SINDy (E-SINDy) on normalised, noisy datasets. The results show that STCV-based methods can successfully identify the correct, sparse physical laws even when other methods fail. By mitigating the distorting effects of normalisation, STCV makes sparse system identification a more reliable and automated tool for real-world applications, thereby enhancing model interpretability and trustworthiness.

Direct Bayesian Additive Regression Trees for Conditional Average Treatment Effects in Regression Discontinuity Designs

Regression discontinuity designs (RDD) are widely used for causal inference. In many empirical applications, treatment effects vary substantially with covariates, and ignoring such heterogeneity can lead to misleading conclusions, which motivates flexible modeling of heterogeneous treatment effects in RDD. To this end, we propose a Bayesian nonparametric approach to estimating heterogeneous treatment effects based on Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART). The key feature of our method lies in adopting a general Bayesian framework using a pseudo-model defined through a loss function for fitting local linear models around the cutoff, which gives direct modeling of heterogeneous treatment effects by BART. Optimal selection of the bandwidth parameter for the local model is implemented using the Hyvärinen score. Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed approach flexibly captures complicated structures of heterogeneous treatment effects as a function of covariates.