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One of the most important hydraulic structures that has been overlooked is culverts. Regular maintenance and inspections are required to ensure that these structures are used effectively and safely. Culvert inspection, on the other hand, takes a significant amount of time and resources, and agencies cannot afford to do it on a regular basis. To overcome physical inspection challenges, this study proposed employing machine learning algorithms to predict the condition of Utah's culverts based on historical data. This study assessed multiclass classification algorithms that had not been used before. The classification machine learning algorithms employed in this study are Random Forest, Decision Tree, Support Vector Machine, k-Nearest Neighbor, and Artificial Neural Network. Also, a combined dataset from four states was used to address Utah's limited culvert inventory data. The final dataset contained 2555 culvert records. Out of the developed prediction models, Random Forest had the highest accuracy of 82%. The findings demonstrated that Random Forests could be used to improve culvert network quality while reducing culvert maintenance expenses for UDOT. The proposed model may be applied to similarly existing culvert inventories located around the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image ordinal estimation is to predict the ordinal label of a given image, which can be categorized as an ordinal regression (OR) problem. Recent methods formulate an OR problem as a series of binary classification problems. Such methods cannot ensure that the global ordinal relationship is preserved since the relationships among different binary classifiers are neglected. We propose a novel OR approach, termed convolutional OR forest (CORF), for image ordinal estimation, which can integrate OR and differentiable decision trees with a convolutional neural network for obtaining precise and stable global ordinal relationships. The advantages of the proposed CORF are twofold. First, instead of learning a series of binary classifiers independently, the proposed method aims at learning an ordinal distribution for OR by optimizing those binary classifiers simultaneously. Second, the differentiable decision trees in the proposed CORF can be trained together with the ordinal distribution in an end-to-end manner. The effectiveness of the proposed CORF is verified on two image ordinal estimation tasks, i.e., facial age estimation and image esthetic assessment, showing significant improvements and better stability over the state-of-the-art OR methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mitigating label noise is a crucial problem in classification. Noise filtering is an effective method of dealing with label noise which does not need to estimate the noise rate or rely on any loss function. However, most filtering methods focus mainly on binary classification, leaving the more difficult counterpart problem of multiclass classification relatively unexplored. To remedy this deficit, we present a definition for label noise in a multiclass setting and propose a general framework for a novel label noise filtering learning method for multiclass classification. Two examples of noise filtering methods for multiclass classification, multiclass complete random forest (mCRF) and multiclass relative density, are derived from their binary counterparts using our proposed framework. In addition, to optimize the NI_threshold hyperparameter in mCRF, we propose two new optimization methods: a new voting cross-validation method and an adaptive method that employs a 2-means clustering algorithm. Furthermore, we incorporate SMOTE into our label noise filtering learning framework to handle the ubiquitous problem of imbalanced data in multiclass classification. We report experiments on both synthetic data sets and UCI benchmarks to demonstrate our proposed methods are highly robust to label noise in comparison with state-of-the-art baselines. All code and data results are available at https://github.com/syxiaa/Multiclass-Label-Noise-Filtering-Learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Adopt clustering to improve the performance of classification algorithms. • Propose a dynamic weighted probability combination strategy. • Apply an improved PSO to optimize multiple key sensitive parameters in CIEL. • Demonstrate CIEL's good performance experimentally on a large number of datasets. Classification is a vital task in machine learning. By learning patterns of samples of known categories, the model can develop the ability to distinguish the categories of samples of unknown categories. Noticing the advantages of the clustering method in cluster structure analysis, we combine the clustering and classification methods to develop the novel cluster-based intelligence ensemble learning (CIEL) method. We use the clustering method to analyze the inherent distribution of the data and divide all the samples into clusters according to the characteristics of the dataset. Then, for each specific cluster, we use different classification algorithms to establish the corresponding classification model. Finally, we integrate the prediction results of each base classifier to form the final prediction result. In view of the problem of parameter sensitivity, we use a swarm intelligence algorithm to optimize the key parameters involved in the clustering, classification, and ensemble stages in order to boost the classification performance. To assess the effectiveness of CIEL, we perform tenfold cross-validation experiments on the 24 benchmark datasets provided by UCI and KEEL. Designed to improve the performance of the classifiers, CIEL outperforms other popular machine learning methods such as naive Bayes, k -nearest neighbors, random forest, and support vector machine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prediction accuracy and model explainability are the two most important objectives when developing machine learning algorithms to solve real-world problems. Neural networks are known to possess good prediction performance but suffer from a lack of model interpretability. In this article, we propose to enhance the explainability of neural networks through the following architecture constraints: 1) sparse additive subnetworks; 2) projection pursuit with orthogonality constraint; and 3) smooth function approximation. It leads to an enhanced explainable neural network (ExNN) with a superior balance between prediction performance and model interpretability. We derive sufficient identifiability conditions for the proposed ExNN model. The multiple parameters are simultaneously estimated by a modified minibatch gradient descent method based on the backpropagation algorithm for calculating the derivatives and the Cayley transform for preserving the projection orthogonality. Through simulation study under six different scenarios, we compare the proposed method to several benchmarks, including least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, support vector machine, random forest, extreme learning machine, and multilayer perceptron. It is shown that the proposed ExNN model keeps the flexibility of pursuing high prediction accuracy while attaining improved interpretability. Finally, a real data example is employed as a showcase application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an approach aiming to determine head pose healthiness of computer users. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) Image Quality Assessment (IQA) based Stacked Autoencoder (referred to as IQASAE) which adjusts the value of learning rate based on the quality of images; 2) Head Pose Healthiness Prediction (HPHP) framework which leverages the proposed IQASAE algorithm in combination with image processing operations; 3) A set of features suitable for face analysis applications; 4) Ontology-driven semantic framework which enables further exploiting pose estimation results within applications in synergy with healthcare expert domain knowledge about pose healthiness. Our framework was evaluated on both offline (BIWI and AFLW) and online (our own, collected using Arduino) datasets. Furthermore, it was compared to several state-of-art methods, including Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), CART, Random Forest, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Temporal Deep Learning Model (TDLM), hybrid CNN with Support Vector Machine (SVM), Quatnet and Trinet. According to the achieved experimental results, it reaches accuracy up to 79.63% outperforming all of them, except Quatnet and Trinet. However, the main advantages of IQASAE compared to state-of-art methods are: 1) it does not require selection of features, so the processing time is reduced, 2) utilizing angle between chin and mouth reduces training time for SAE, 3) leveraging vector-based feature set to create training data resulted in a significant improvement, especially in offline facial images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the intrinsic characteristics of speech modulations are estimated to propose the instant modulation spectral features for efficient emotion recognition. This feature representation is based on single frequency filtering (SFF) technique and higher order nonlinear energy operator. The speech signal is decomposed into frequency sub-bands using SFF, and associated nonlinear energies are estimated with higher order nonlinear energy operator. Then, the feature vector is realized using cepstral analysis. The high-resolution property of SFF technique is exploited to extract the amplitude envelope of the speech signal at a selected frequency with good time-frequency resolution. The fourth order nonlinear energy operator provides noise robustness in estimating the modulation components. The proposed feature set is tested for the emotion recognition task using the i-vector model with the probabilistic linear discriminant scoring scheme, support vector machine and random forest classifiers. The results demonstrate that the performance of this feature representation is better than the widely used spectral and prosody features, achieving detection accuracy of 85.75% , 59.88% , and 65.78% on three emotional databases, EMODB, FAU-AIBO, and IEMOCAP, respectively. Further, the proposed features are found to be robust in the presence of additive white Gaussian and vehicular noises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]