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Identifying university students’ weaknesses results in better learning and can function as an early warning system to enable students to improve. However, the satisfaction level of existing systems is not promising. New and dynamic hybrid systems are needed to imitate this mechanism. A hybrid system (a modified Recurrent Neural Network with an adapted Grey Wolf Optimizer) is used to forecast students’ outcomes. This proposed system would improve instruction by the faculty and enhance the students’ learning experiences. The results show that a modified recurrent neural network with an adapted Grey Wolf Optimizer has the best accuracy when compared with other models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In an intensive care units, experts in mechanical ventilation are not continuously at patient’s bedside to adjust ventilation settings and to analyze the impact of these adjustments on gas exchange. The development of clinical decision support systems analyzing patients’ data in real time offers an opportunity to fill this gap. Objective: The objective of this study was to determine whether a machine learning predictive model could be trained on a set of clinical data and used to predict transcutaneous hemoglobin oxygen saturation 5 min (5min SpO2) after a ventilator setting change. Data sources: Data of mechanically ventilated children admitted between May 2015 and April 2017 were included and extracted from a high-resolution research database. More than 776,727 data rows were obtained from 610 patients, discretized into 3 class labels (< 84%, 85% to 91% and c92% to 100%). Performance metrics of predictive models: Due to data imbalance, four different data balancing processes were applied. Then, two machine learning models (artificial neural network and Bootstrap aggregation of complex decision trees) were trained and tested on these four different balanced datasets. The best model predicted SpO2 with area under the curves < 0.75. Conclusion: This single center pilot study using machine learning predictive model resulted in an algorithm with poor accuracy. The comparison of machine learning models showed that bagged complex trees was a promising approach. However, there is a need to improve these models before incorporating them into a clinical decision support systems. One potentially solution for improving predictive model, would be to increase the amount of data available to limit over-fitting that is potentially one of the cause for poor classification performances for 2 of the three class labels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In general, the stock prices of the same industry have a similar trend, but those of different industries do not. When investing in stocks of different industries, one should select the optimal model from lots of trading models for each industry because any model may not be suitable for capturing the stock trends of all industries. However, the study has not been carried out at present. In this paper, firstly we select 424 S&P 500 index component stocks (SPICS) and 185 CSI 300 index component stocks (CSICS) as the research objects from 2010 to 2017, divide them into 9 industries such as finance and energy respectively. Secondly, we apply 12 widely used machine learning algorithms to generate stock trading signals in different industries and execute the back-testing based on the trading signals. Thirdly, we use a non-parametric statistical test to evaluate whether there are significant differences among the trading performance evaluation indicators (PEI) of different models in the same industry. Finally, we propose a series of rules to select the optimal models for stock investment of every industry. The analytical results on SPICS and CSICS show that we can find the optimal trading models for each industry based on the statistical tests and the rules. Most importantly, the PEI of the best algorithms can be significantly better than that of the benchmark index and “Buy and Hold” strategy. Therefore, the algorithms can be used for making profits from industry stock trading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proteomic analysis of cancers' stages has provided new opportunities for the development of novel, highly sensitive diagnostic tools which helps early detection of cancer. This paper introduces a new feature ranking approach called FRMT. FRMT is based on the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution method (TOPSIS) which select the most discriminative proteins from proteomics data for cancer staging. In this approach, outcomes of 10 feature selection techniques were combined by TOPSIS method, to select the final discriminative proteins from seven different proteomic databases of protein expression profiles. In the proposed workflow, feature selection methods and protein expressions have been considered as criteria and alternatives in TOPSIS, respectively. The proposed method is tested on seven various classifier models in a 10-fold cross validation procedure that repeated 30 times on the seven cancer datasets. The obtained results proved the higher stability and superior classification performance of method in comparison with other methods, and it is less sensitive to the applied classifier. Moreover, the final introduced proteins are informative and have the potential for application in the real medical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study applies unsupervised machine learning techniques for classification and clustering to a collection of descriptive variables from 10,442 lung cancer patient records in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program database. The goal is to automatically classify lung cancer patients into groups based on clinically measurable disease-specific variables in order to estimate survival. Variables selected as inputs for machine learning include Number of Primaries, Age, Grade, Tumor Size, Stage, and TNM, which are numeric or can readily be converted to numeric type. Minimal up-front processing of the data enables exploring the out-of-the-box capabilities of established unsupervised learning techniques, with little human intervention through the entire process. The output of the techniques is used to predict survival time, with the efficacy of the prediction representing a proxy for the usefulness of the classification. A basic single variable linear regression against each unsupervised output is applied, and the associated Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) value is calculated as a metric to compare between the outputs. The results show that self-ordering maps exhibit the best performance, while k-Means performs the best of the simpler classification techniques. Predicting against the full data set, it is found that their respective RMSE values (15.591 for self-ordering maps and 16.193 for k-Means) are comparable to supervised regression techniques, such as Gradient Boosting Machine (RMSE of 15.048). We conclude that unsupervised data analysis techniques may be of use to classify patients by defining the classes as effective proxies for survival prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine learning is becoming a popular and important approach in the field of medical research. In this study, we investigate the relative performance of various machine learning methods such as Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, Logistic Model Tree and Random Forests for predicting incident diabetes using medical records of cardiorespiratory fitness. In addition, we apply different techniques to uncover potential predictors of diabetes. This FIT project study used data of 32,555 patients who are free of any known coronary artery disease or heart failure who underwent clinician-referred exercise treadmill stress testing at Henry Ford Health Systems between 1991 and 2009 and had a complete 5-year follow-up. At the completion of the fifth year, 5,099 of those patients have developed diabetes. The dataset contained 62 attributes classified into four categories: demographic characteristics, disease history, medication use history, and stress test vital signs. We developed an Ensembling-based predictive model using 13 attributes that were selected based on their clinical importance, Multiple Linear Regression, and Information Gain Ranking methods. The negative effect of the imbalance class of the constructed model was handled by Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE). The overall performance of the predictive model classifier was improved by the Ensemble machine learning approach using the Vote method with three Decision Trees (Naïve Bayes Tree, Random Forest, and Logistic Model Tree) and achieved high accuracy of prediction (AUC = 0.92). The study shows the potential of ensembling and SMOTE approaches for predicting incident diabetes using cardiorespiratory fitness data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study aimed to develop machine learning models that have strong prediction power and interpretability for diagnosis of glaucoma based on retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness and visual field (VF). We collected various candidate features from the examination of retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness and visual field (VF). We also developed synthesized features from original features. We then selected the best features proper for classification (diagnosis) through feature evaluation. We used 100 cases of data as a test dataset and 399 cases of data as a training and validation dataset. To develop the glaucoma prediction model, we considered four machine learning algorithms: C5.0, random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and k-nearest neighbor (KNN). We repeatedly composed a learning model using the training dataset and evaluated it by using the validation dataset. Finally, we got the best learning model that produces the highest validation accuracy. We analyzed quality of the models using several measures. The random forest model shows best performance and C5.0, SVM, and KNN models show similar accuracy. In the random forest model, the classification accuracy is 0.98, sensitivity is 0.983, specificity is 0.975, and AUC is 0.979. The developed prediction models show high accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and AUC in classifying among glaucoma and healthy eyes. It will be used for predicting glaucoma against unknown examination records. Clinicians may reference the prediction results and be able to make better decisions. We may combine multiple learning models to increase prediction accuracy. The C5.0 model includes decision rules for prediction. It can be used to explain the reasons for specific predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ecological effects of accidental or malicious radioactive contamination are insufficiently understood because of the hazards and difficulties associated with conducting studies in radioactively-polluted areas. Data sets from severely contaminated locations can therefore be small. Moreover, many potentially important factors, such as soil concentrations of toxic chemicals, pH, and temperature, can be correlated with radiation levels and with each other. In such situations, commonly-used statistical techniques like generalized linear models (GLMs) may not be able to provide useful information about how radiation and/or these other variables affect the outcome (e.g. abundance of the studied organisms). Ensemble machine learning methods such as random forests offer powerful alternatives. We propose that analysis of small radioecological data sets by GLMs and/or machine learning can be made more informative by using the following techniques: (1) adding synthetic noise variables to provide benchmarks for distinguishing the performances of valuable predictors from irrelevant ones; (2) adding noise directly to the predictors and/or to the outcome to test the robustness of analysis results against random data fluctuations; (3) adding artificial effects to selected predictors to test the sensitivity of the analysis methods in detecting predictor effects; (4) running a selected machine learning method multiple times (with different random-number seeds) to test the robustness of the detected “signal”; (5) using several machine learning methods to test the “signal’s” sensitivity to differences in analysis techniques. Here, we applied these approaches to simulated data, and to two published examples of small radioecological data sets: (I) counts of fungal taxa in samples of soil contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear power plan accident (Ukraine), and (II) bacterial abundance in soil samples under a ruptured nuclear waste storage tank (USA). We show that the proposed techniques were advantageous compared with the methodology used in the original publications where the data sets were presented. Specifically, our approach identified a negative effect of radioactive contamination in data set I, and suggested that in data set II stable chromium could have been a stronger limiting factor for bacterial abundance than the radionuclides 137Cs and 99Tc. This new information, which was extracted from these data sets using the proposed techniques, can potentially enhance the design of radioactive waste bioremediation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Treatment of patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) has become increasingly difficult in recent years due to the variety of treatment options available and challenge deciding on the most appropriate treatment strategy for an individual patient. To facilitate the treatment strategy decision, disease assessment should involve molecular response to initial treatment for an individual patient. Patients predicted not to achieve major molecular response (MMR) at 24 months to frontline imatinib may be better treated with alternative frontline therapies, such as nilotinib or dasatinib. The aims of this study were to i) understand the clinical prediction ‘rules’ for predicting MMR at 24 months for CML patients treated with imatinib using clinical, molecular, and cell count observations (predictive factors collected at diagnosis and categorised based on available knowledge) and ii) develop a predictive model for CML treatment management. This predictive model was developed, based on CML patients undergoing imatinib therapy enrolled in the TIDEL II clinical trial with an experimentally identified achieving MMR group and non-achieving MMR group, by addressing the challenge as a machine learning problem. The recommended model was validated externally using an independent data set from King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre, Saudi Arabia. Principle Findings: The common prognostic scores yielded similar sensitivity performance in testing and validation datasets and are therefore good predictors of the positive group. The G-mean and F-score values in our models outperformed the common prognostic scores in testing and validation datasets and are therefore good predictors for both the positive and negative groups. Furthermore, a high PPV above 65% indicated that our models are appropriate for making decisions at diagnosis and pre-therapy. Study limitations include that prior knowledge may change based on varying expert opinions; hence, representing the category boundaries of each predictive factor could dramatically change performance of the models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the use of Bayesian Networks (BNs) for left ventricular assist device (LVAD) therapy; a treatment for end-stage heart failure that has been steadily growing in popularity over the past decade. Despite this growth, the number of LVAD implants performed annually remains a small fraction of the estimated population of patients who might benefit from this treatment. We believe that this demonstrates a need for an accurate stratification tool that can help identify LVAD candidates at the most appropriate point in the course of their disease. We derived BNs to predict mortality at five endpoints utilizing the Interagency Registry for Mechanically Assisted Circulatory Support (INTERMACS) database: containing over 12,000 total enrolled patients from 153 hospital sites, collected since 2006 to the present day, and consisting of approximately 230 pre-implant clinical variables. Synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) was employed to address the uneven proportion of patients with negative outcomes and to improve the performance of the models. The resulting accuracy and area under the ROC curve (%) for predicted mortality were 30 day: 94.9 and 92.5; 90 day: 84.2 and 73.9; 6 month: 78.2 and 70.6; 1 year: 73.1 and 70.6; and 2 years: 71.4 and 70.8. To foster the translation of these models to clinical practice, they have been incorporated into a web-based application, the Cardiac Health Risk Stratification System (CHRiSS). As clinical experience with LVAD therapy continues to grow, and additional data is collected, we aim to continually update these BN models to improve their accuracy and maintain their relevance. Ongoing work also aims to extend the BN models to predict the risk of adverse events post-LVAD implant as additional factors for consideration in decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]