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This study outlines a comprehensive strategy for designing and implementing robust controllers tailored for intelligent structures. This study presents a robust control-based structural identification technique that uses the input/output data of the system to construct a state-space mode and frequency domain. To reduce vibrations, a robust controller is created using the control Simulink model. The identification and robust control of smart structures using Simulink involve a combination of system identification techniques and control design within the MATLAB Simulink environment. The key challenge is dealing with uncertainties and variations in system dynamics. Robust control methods have been employed to suppress the vibrations during dynamic disturbances. These methods are important for mechanical systems operating under stochastic loading conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has been extensively researched in various fields, including the field of malware detection. AI models must be trustworthy to introduce AI systems into critical decisionmaking and resource protection roles. The problem of robustness to adversarial attacks is a significant barrier to trustworthy AI. Although various adversarial attack and defense methods are actively being studied, there is a lack of research on robustness evaluation metrics that serve as standards for determining whether AI models are safe and reliable against adversarial attacks. An AI model's robustness level cannot be evaluated by traditional evaluation indicators such as accuracy and recall. Additional evaluation indicators are necessary to evaluate the robustness of AI models against adversarial attacks. In this paper, a Sophisticated Adversarial Robustness Score (SARS) is proposed for AI model robustness evaluation. SARS uses various factors in addition to the ratio of perturbated features and the size of perturbation to evaluate robustness accurately in the evaluation process. This evaluation indicator reflects aspects that are difficult to evaluate using traditional evaluation indicators. Moreover, the level of robustness can be evaluated by considering the difficulty of generating adversarial samples through adversarial attacks. This paper proposed using SARS, calculated based on adversarial attacks, to identify data groups with robustness vulnerability and improve robustness through adversarial training. Through SARS, it is possible to evaluate the level of robustness, which can help developers identify areas for improvement. To validate the proposed method, experiments were conducted using a malware dataset. Through adversarial training, it was confirmed that SARS increased by 70.59%, and the recall reduction rate improved by 64.96%. Through SARS, it is possible to evaluate whether an AI model is vulnerable to adversarial attacks and to identify vulnerable data types. In addition, it is expected that improved models can be achieved by improving resistance to adversarial attacks via methods such as adversarial training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of published metagenome assemblies is rapidly growing due to advances in sequencing technologies. However, sequencing errors, variable coverage, repetitive genomic regions, and other factors can produce misassemblies, which are challenging to detect for taxonomically novel genomic data. Assembly errors can affect all downstream analyses of the assemblies. Accuracy for the state of the art in reference-free misassembly prediction does not exceed an AUPRC of 0.57, and it is not clear how well these models generalize to real-world data. Here, we present the Residual neural network for Misassembled Contig identification (ResMiCo), a deep learning approach for reference-free identification of misassembled contigs. To develop ResMiCo, we first generated a training dataset of unprecedented size and complexity that can be used for further benchmarking and developments in the field. Through rigorous validation, we show that ResMiCo is substantially more accurate than the state of the art, and the model is robust to novel taxonomic diversity and varying assembly methods. ResMiCo estimated 7% misassembled contigs per metagenome across multiple real-world datasets. We demonstrate how ResMiCo can be used to optimize metagenome assembly hyperparameters to improve accuracy, instead of optimizing solely for contiguity. The accuracy, robustness, and ease-of-use of ResMiCo make the tool suitable for general quality control of metagenome assemblies and assembly methodology optimization. Author summary: Metagenome assembly quality is fundamental to all downstream analyses of such data. The number of metagenome assemblies, especially metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs), is rapidly increasing, but tools to assess the quality of these assemblies lack the accuracy needed for robust quality control. Moreover, existing models have been trained on datasets lacking complexity and realism, which may limit their generalization to novel data. Due to the limitations of existing models, most studies forgo such approaches and instead rely on CheckM to assess assembly quality, an approach that only utilizes a small portion of all genomic information and does not identify specific misassemblies. We harnessed existing large genomic datasets and high-performance computing to produce a training dataset of unprecedented size and complexity and thereby trained a deep learning model for predicting misassemblies that can robustly generalize to novel taxonomy and varying assembly methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DatalogMTL is an extension of Datalog with metric temporal operators that has recently found applications in stream reasoning and temporal ontology-based data access. In contrast to plain Datalog, where materialisation (a.k.a. forward chaining) naturally terminates in finitely many steps, reaching a fixpoint in DatalogMTL may require infinitely many rounds of rule applications. As a result, existing reasoning systems resort to other approaches, such as constructing large Büchi automata, whose implementations turn out to be highly inefficient in practice. In this paper, we propose and study finitely materialisable DatalogMTL programs, for which forward chaining reasoning is guaranteed to terminate. We consider a data-dependent notion of finite materialisability of a program, where termination is guaranteed for a given dataset, as well as a data-independent notion, where termination is guaranteed regardless of the dataset. We show that, for bounded programs (a natural DatalogMTL fragment for which reasoning is as hard as in the full language), checking data-dependent finite materialisability is ExpSpace-complete in combined complexity and PSpace-complete in data complexity; furthermore, we propose a practical materialisation-based decision procedure that works in doubly exponential time. We show that checking data-independent finite materialisability for bounded progams is computationally easier, namely ExpTime-complete; moreover, we propose sufficient conditions for data-indenpendent finite materialisability that can be efficiently checked. We provide also the complexity landscape of fact entailment for different classes of finitely materialisable programs; surprisingly, we could identify a large class of finitely materialisable programs, called MTL-acyclic programs, for which fact entailment has exactly the same data and combined complexity as in plain Datalog, which makes this fragment especially well suited for big-scale applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paired outcomes are common in correlated clustered data where the main aim is to compare the distributions of the outcomes in a pair. In such clustered paired data, informative cluster sizes can occur when the number of pairs in a cluster (i.e., a cluster size) is correlated to the paired outcomes or the paired differences. There have been some attempts to develop robust rank-based tests for comparing paired outcomes in such complex clustered data. Most of these existing rank tests developed for paired outcomes in clustered data compare the marginal distributions in a pair and ignore any covariate effect on the outcomes. However, when potentially important covariate data is available in observational studies, ignoring these covariate effects on the outcomes can result in a flawed inference. In this article, using rank based weighted estimating equations, we propose a robust procedure for covariate effect adjusted comparison of paired outcomes in a clustered data that can also address the issue of informative cluster size. Through simulated scenarios and real-life neuroimaging data, we demonstrate the importance of considering covariate effects during paired testing and robust performances of our proposed method in covariate adjusted paired comparisons in complex clustered data settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a real-time system identification method for the monitoring or anomaly detection of control systems. Real-time system identification technique is an extension of ordinary one to on-line, which is usually performed off-line due to its computational load. An application of real-time system identification enables us to construct numerical models reflecting on the instantaneous properties or behavior of control objects by using hardware acceleration. First, we explain that the ARX model, which has the simplest representation in system identification models, is suitable for hardware design and its implementation on field programmable logic devices shortens the calculation time of parameter estimation comparable to the servo cycles of control systems. Then, we discuss some difficulties derived from closed-loop system identification and the consequent ill-conditions in its calculation. As real-time system identification is supposed to be used for actual machine operations, their reference signals for control are sometimes set to constant values which are understandably not sufficient for system identification. This problem can be addressed by a modified estimation procedure considering reference signal conditions and a model with partially fixed values. Finally, the effectiveness of these designs is investigated by numerical simulations and experiments. They show us that both of accuracy and stability of parameter estimation are obtained.

Clustering ensemble is a technique for improving clustering results’ robustness and accuracy. Basically, this technique generates base clusterings and then combines them into a consensus solution whose quality is determined by the diversity of the base clusterings and the consensus function’s performance. In order to improve the quality of consensus solutions, it is necessary to generate base clusterings with regard to quality and diversity. Novel techniques were employed in this study to generate diverse base clusterings for both low-dimensional and high-dimensional datasets, as well as new criteria to compute the diversity of base clusterings with respect to quality. The impacts of different levels of diversity on consensus functions were studied. The proposed methods generated diverse base clusterings, according to the findings of the experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy management and monitoring systems are significant difficulties in applying microgrids to smart homes. Thus, further research is required to address the modeling and operational parts of the system's future results for various applications. This paper proposes a new technique for energy management in a microgrid using a robust control approach and the development of a platform for real-time monitoring. The developed controller is based on a fuzzy logic method used in the energy Internet paradigm with connected distributed generators (DGs) in the microgrid. The developed method regulates the power flow of the microgrid, and frequency/voltage regulation improved the load-management performance and monitoring system using the ThingSpeak platform for real-time data analysis. The MATLAB. simulation results show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed strategy and the introduced approach in microgrid control under various operating conditions. Additionally, the results show that the proposed monitoring platform facilitates real-time data analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimation of urban seismic damage using numerical simulation needs an automatic modeling method of surface layers and residential buildings. This study focuses on modeling of surface layers and shows a method of constructing models by interpolating boring data. An important property of the modeling method is robustness, that means that the method works for boring data with inconsistent soil layers. To satisfy this, we developed the method using artificial layers. We applied the method to a test site and checked its robustness. This test also showed that the method gave realistic models. Finally, we applied the method to the estimation of urban seismic damage and discussed the usefulness by comparing the result with one obtained by a conventional method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three-level clustered data commonly occur in social and behavioral research and are prominently analyzed using multilevel modeling. The influence of the clustering on estimation results is assessed with the intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs), which indicate the fraction of variance in the outcome located at each higher level. However, ICCs are prone to bias due to high requirements regarding the overall sample size and the sample size at each data level. In Monte Carlo simulations, we investigate how these sample characteristics influence the bias of the ICCs and statistical power of the variance components using robust ML-estimation. Results reveal considerable underestimation on Level-3 and the importance of the Level-3 sample size in combination with the ICC sizes. Based on our results, we derive concise sampling recommendations and discuss limits to our inferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the literature on the a priori procedure, designed to help researchers determine the sample sizes they should use in their substantive research, is expanding rapidly, there are two important limitations. First, there is a need to expand to new popular distributions, log-normal and gamma distributions, and the present work provides those expansions. Second, there is a need to test the consequences of wrong distributional assumptions; for example, assuming a log-normal distribution when the population follows a gamma distribution, or the reverse. The present work addresses the limitations with respect to estimating population means, and it includes computer simulations, links to free and user-friendly programs that researchers can utilize for their own research, and two examples involving real data sets for illustrations of our main results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consider a one-way or two-way ANOVA design. Typically, groups are compared based on some measure of location. The paper suggests alternative methods where measures of location are replaced by a robust measure of effect size that is based in part on a robust measure of dispersion. The measure of effect size used here does not assume that the groups have a common measure of dispersion. That is, it deals with heteroscedasticity. It is fairly evident that no single method reveals everything of interest regarding how groups differ. Certainly, comparing measures of location provides useful information. But as illustrated, comparing measures of effect size can provide a deeper understanding of how groups compare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper showcases how a reflexive practice, that includes arts-based activities, deepened understandings experienced by a doctoral student of psychology while completing the data analysis section of a metasynthesis. The metasynthesis focused on qualitative studies, examining the mental and spiritual care of persons living with diabetic foot ulcers. Reflecting on the experience, this work argues for spaces where researchers stop and engage in reflexivity, making the work more robust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the relationship between board independence and the firm performance of Chinese firms listed in the Shanghai Stock Exchange, under the moderating role of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). A total of 860 firm-year observations over a period of ten years, that is from 2010 to 2019 was collected. The panel data regression technique was employed to analyze the data and determine the relationship between board independence and the firm performance of the Chinese firms under investigation. After a robustness check, the empirical results showed that the level of the CSR moderated (reduced) the positive relationship between board independence and firm performance. Therefore, the results seemed to imply that although the CSR has been seen as a useful business strategy, the level of the CSR in China still needed to be improved. In order to improve firm performance through practicing the CSR, the Chinese government and enterprises should be encouraged to continuously improve the level of the CSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fault detection and isolation have become increasingly important problems over time, due to the more complex and larger scale industrial systems. The last few decades have seen a rise in research focused on developing robust and sensitive fault detection methods. Approaches using mathematical models, qualitative logic or operation data driven solutions were developed and while they all performed well overall some lacked in robustness and others in flexibility or sensitivity. In this study a hybrid fault detection approach using both parity relation methods and a Fuzzy Expert System (FES) to analyse and detect process faults in a distillation unit is introduced. The combination of the two schemes was used to handle the detection and classification of additive and multiplicative faults. The effectiveness of the hybrid method in alleviating the shortcomings of the single techniques has been verified by simulation and experimental tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Source code plagiarism is a common occurrence in undergraduate computer science education. In order to identify such cases, many source code plagiarism detection tools have been proposed. A source code plagiarism detection tool evaluates pairs of assignment submissions to detect indications of plagiarism. However, a plagiarising student will commonly apply plagiarism-hiding modifications to source code in an attempt to evade detection. Subsequently, prior work has implied that currently available source code plagiarism detection tools are not robust to the application of pervasive plagiarism-hiding modifications. In this article, 11 source code plagiarism detection tools are evaluated for robustness against plagiarism-hiding modifications. The tools are evaluated with data sets of simulated undergraduate plagiarism, constructed with source code modifications representative of undergraduate students. The results of the performed evaluations indicate that currently available source code plagiarism detection tools are not robust against modifications which apply fine-grained transformations to the source code structure. Of the evaluated tools, JPlag and Plaggie demonstrates the greatest robustness to different types of plagiarism-hiding modifications. However, the results also indicate that graph-based tools, specifically those that compare programs as program dependence graphs, show potentially greater robustness to pervasive plagiarism-hiding modifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the relationship between religiosity and fertility intentions revealed substantial cross-national differences. In some countries, a strong and positive effect of religiosity on fertility intentions was found, while in others, the effect was weaker or not significant, and the reasons underlying these cross-national differences are still unclear. The aim of this article is to explain these macro-level differences from the perspective of the prevailing gender regime. We argue that in countries with more traditional regimes, a stronger effect of religiosity on fertility intentions could be expected than in countries with a more egalitarian view. We make use of the first wave of the Generations and Gender Survey and incorporate data from a total of 12 European countries in our analysis. We examine the influence of gender regime according to various macro-level indicators on gender attitudes and gender equality using meta-regression analyses. We also conduct robustness checks using other indicators such as the Gender Development Index. Our results reveal that the gender regime is only able to explain these differences in certain situations, specifically those relating to the long-term fertility intentions of men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constantly decreasing costs of high-throughput profiling on many molecular levels generate vast amounts of multi-omics data. Studying one biomedical question on two or more omic levels provides deeper insights into underlying molecular processes or disease pathophysiology. For the majority of multi-omics data projects, the data analysis is performed level-wise, followed by a combined interpretation of results. Hence the full potential of integrated data analysis is not leveraged yet, presumably due to the complexity of the data and the lacking toolsets. We propose a versatile approach, to perform a multi-level fully integrated analysis: The Knowledge guIded Multi-Omics Network inference approach, KiMONo (https://github.com/cellmapslab/kimono). KiMONo performs network inference by using statistical models for combining omics measurements coupled to a powerful knowledge-guided strategy exploiting prior information from existing biological sources. Within the resulting multimodal network, nodes represent features of all input types e.g. variants and genes while edges refer to knowledge-supported and statistically derived associations. In a comprehensive evaluation, we show that our method is robust to noise and exemplify the general applicability to the full spectrum of multi-omics data, demonstrating that KiMONo is a powerful approach towards leveraging the full potential of data sets for detecting biomarker candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The 'doorway effect', or 'location updating effect', claims that we tend to forget items of recent significance immediately after crossing a boundary. Previous research suggests that such a forgetting effect occurs both at physical boundaries (e.g., moving from one room to another via a door) and metaphysical boundaries (e.g., imagining traversing a doorway, or even when moving from one desktop window to another on a computer). Here, we aimed to conceptually replicate this effect using virtual and physical environments. Methods: Across four experiments, we measured participants' hit and false alarm rates to memory probes for items recently encountered either in the same or previous room. Experiments 1 and 2 used highly immersive virtual reality without and with working memory load (Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). Experiment 3 used passive video watching and Experiment 4 used active real-life movement. Data analysis was conducted using frequentist as well as Bayesian inference statistics. Results: Across this series of experiments, we observed no significant effect of doorways on forgetting. In Experiment 2, however, signal detection was impaired when participants responded to probes after moving through doorways, such that false alarm rates were increased for mismatched recognition probes. Thus, under working memory load, memory was more susceptible to interference after moving through doorways. Conclusions: This study presents evidence that is inconsistent with the location updating effect as it has previously been reported. Our findings call into question the generalisability and robustness of this effect to slight paradigm alterations and, indeed, what factors contributed to the effect observed in previous studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Inertial measurement units (IMUs) with high-resolution sensors such as accelerometers are now used extensively to study fine-scale behavior in a wide range of marine and terrestrial animals. Robust and practical methods are required for the computationally-demanding analysis of the resulting large datasets, particularly for automating classification routines that construct behavioral time series and time-activity budgets. Magnetometers are used increasingly to study behavior, but it is not clear how these sensors contribute to the accuracy of behavioral classification methods. Development of effective classification methodology is key to understanding energetic and life-history implications of foraging and other behaviors. Methods: We deployed accelerometers and magnetometers on four species of free-ranging albatrosses and evaluated the ability of unsupervised hidden Markov models (HMMs) to identify three major modalities in their behavior: 'flapping flight', 'soaring flight', and 'on-water'. The relative contribution of each sensor to classification accuracy was measured by comparing HMM-inferred states with expert classifications identified from stereotypic patterns observed in sensor data. Results: HMMs provided a flexible and easily interpretable means of classifying behavior from sensor data. Model accuracy was high overall (92%), but varied across behavioral states (87.6, 93.1 and 91.7% for 'flapping flight', 'soaring flight' and 'on-water', respectively). Models built on accelerometer data alone were as accurate as those that also included magnetometer data; however, the latter were useful for investigating slow and periodic behaviors such as dynamic soaring at a fine scale. Conclusions: The use of IMUs in behavioral studies produces large data sets, necessitating the development of computationally-efficient methods to automate behavioral classification in order to synthesize and interpret underlying patterns. HMMs provide an accessible and robust framework for analyzing complex IMU datasets and comparing behavioral variation among taxa across habitats, time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering looming fatality and economic recession, effective policy making based on ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is an urgent and standing issue. Numerous issues for controlling infection have arisen from public discussion led by medical professionals. Yet understanding of these factors has been necessarily qualitative and control measures to correct unfavorable trends specific to an infection area have been lacking. The logical implement for control is a large scale stochastic model with countless parameters lacking robustness and requiring enormous data. This paper presents a remedy for this vexing problem by proposing an alternative approach. Machine learning has come to play a widely circulated role in the study of complex data in recent times. We demonstrate that when machine learning is employed together with the mechanistic framework of a mathematical model, there can be a considerably enhanced understanding of complex systems. A mathematical model describing the viral infection dynamics reveals two transmissibility parameters influenced by the management strategies in the area for the control of the current pandemic. Both parameters readily yield the peak infection rate and means for flattening the curve, which is correlated to different management strategies by employing machine learning, enabling comparison of different strategies and suggesting timely alterations. Treatment of population data with the model shows that restricted non-essential business closure, school closing and strictures on mass gathering influence the spread of infection. While a rational strategy for initiation of an economic reboot would call for a wider perspective of the local economics, the model can speculate on its timing based on the status of the infection as reflected by its potential for an unacceptably renewed viral onslaught. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a publicly available library FarmTest in the R programming system. This library implements a factor-adjusted robust multiple testing principle proposed by Fan et al. (2019) for large-scale simultaneous inference on mean effects. We use a multi-factor model to explicitly capture the dependence among a large pool of variables. Three types of factors are considered: observable, latent, and a mixture of observable and latent factors. The non-factor case, which corresponds to standard multiple mean testing under weak dependence, is also included. The library implements a series of adaptive Huber methods integrated with fast data-driven tuning schemes to estimate model parameters and to construct test statistics that are robust against heavy-tailed and asymmetric error distributions. Extensions to two-sample multiple mean testing problems are also discussed. The results of some simulation experiments and a real data analysis are reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of cluster analysis, rough set-based extensions of hard C-means (HCM; k-means) including rough C-means (RCM), rough set C-means (RSCM), and rough membership C-means (RMCM) are promising approaches for dealing with the certainty, possibility, uncertainty of belonging of object to clusters. Since C-means-type methods are strongly affected by noise, noise clustering approaches have been proposed. In noise clustering approaches, noise objects, which are far from any cluster center, are rejected for robust estimation. In this paper, we introduce noise rejection approaches for rough set-based C-means based on probabilistic memberships and propose noise RCM with membership normalization (NRCM-MN), noise RSCM with membership normalization (NRSCM-MN), and noise RMCM (NRMCM). In addition, visualization demonstration of the cluster boundaries on the two-dimensional plane of the proposed methods is carried out to confirm the characteristics of each method. Furthermore, the clustering performance is verified by numerical experiments using real-world datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes fundamentals of controllable electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (cEIS), from circuit design to control and data analysis. In cEIS, a feedback system controls the process of injecting the excitation signal. We design a two degree-of-freedom robust control system, which guarantees tracking and stability of cEIS in the presence of model uncertainties. This article also addresses the concept of persistently exciting signals. cEIS using current driving mode (CDM) and voltage driving mode, and their differences are highlighted. An online cEIS device is designed and built based on the dc–dc buck converter for batteries online applications, where the excitation signal is superimposed on a dc level. The performance of the fabricated cEIS is evaluated through extensive experiments in CDM. The accuracy of the fabricated cEIS is tested, which results in 0.002 Ω root mean square error in the impedance spectra computation of a three-parameter Randles equivalent circuit model (ECM). The performance of the fabricated cEIS is practically verified on a battery cell at different C-rates. First-, second-, and fractional-order Randles ECMs are estimated by using system identification methods, and their impedance spectra are compared with those obtained through the fast Fourier transform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phenotypic plasticity, the ability of a living organism to respond to the environment, can lead to conclusions from experiments that are idiosyncratic to a particular environment. The level of environmental responsiveness can result in difficulties in reproducing studies from the same institute with the same standardised environment. Here we present a multi-batch approach to in-vivo studies to improve replicability of the results for a defined environment. These multi-batch experiments consist of small independent mini-experiments where the data are combined in an integrated data analysis to appropriately assess the treatment effect after accounting for the structure in the data. We demonstrate the method on two case studies with syngeneic tumour models which are challenging due to high variability both within and between studies. Through simulations and discussions, we explore several data analysis options and the optimum design that balances practical constraints of working with animals versus sensitivity and replicability. Through the increased confidence from the multi-batch design, we reduce the need to replicate the experiment, which can reduce the total number of animals used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new evaluation scheme for double exposure three-dimensional particle-tracking velocimetry is proposed. Its main feature, a robust multi-pass matching algorithm, is presented and validated by investigating its performance when applied to a synthetic data set. To evaluate real measurement data, the approach is supplemented by an iterative triangulation scheme, in which the resulting particle positions are validated through the matching algorithm. The comparison with tomographic particle-image velocimetry data shows good agreement. The proposed algorithm allows this approach to be applied to volumetric measurements with seeding densities exceeding standard particle-tracking applications. Therefore, it can serve as a drop-in replacement for tomographic particle-image velocimetry at significantly reduced computational cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine learning methods have gained increased popularity in biomedical research during the recent years. However, very few of them support the analysis of longitudinal data, where several samples are collected from an individual over time. Additionally, most of the available longitudinal machine learning methods assume that the measurements are aligned in time, which is often not the case in real data. Here, we introduce a robust longitudinal machine learning method, named likelihood contrasts (LC), which supports study designs with unaligned time points. Our LC method is a binary classifier, which uses linear mixed models for modelling and log-likelihood for decision making. To demonstrate the benefits of our approach, we compared it with existing methods in four simulated and three real data sets. In each simulated data set, LC was the most accurate method, while the real data sets further supported the robust performance of the method. LC is also computationally efficient and easy to use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variance-ratio tests are routinely employed to assess the variation in return volatility over time and across markets. However, such tests are not statistically robust and can be seriously misleading within a high-frequency context. We develop improved inference procedures using a Fourier Flexible Form regression framework. The practical significance is illustrated through tests for changes in the FX intraday volatility pattern following the removal of trading restrictions in Tokyo. Contrary to earlier evidence, we find no discernible changes outside of the Tokyo lunch period. We ascribe the difference to the fragile finite-sample inference of conventional variance-ratio procedures and a single outlier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A two year long experimental dataset in which authors of Radin, et al., 2016 claim to find evidence of mind-matter interaction is independently re-analyzed. In this experiment, participants are asked to periodically shift their attention towards or away from a double-slit optical apparatus. Shifts in fringe visibility of the interference pattern are monitored and tested against the common sense null hypothesis that such shifts should not correlate with the participant’s attention state. We propose a deeper analysis of the dataset, identifying all the necessary arbitrary pre-analysis choices one needs to make, and carefully assessing the results’ robustness regarding these choices. Results are twofold. Firstly, even with a conservative correction for the multiple statistical tests the analysis calls for, we confirm the existence of significant although small anomalies in the direction predicted by the mind-matter interaction hypothesis. On the other hand, and unlike Radin, et al., 2016, we also report significant although even smaller anomalies in the control dataset. This leads us to conclude that this particular dataset does not provide strong evidence of mind-matter interaction, yet certainly contains inexplicable anomalies that should motivate replication attempts in highly controlled environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Data reconciliation has played a significant role in rectifying process data which can meet the conservation laws in industrial processes. Generally, the actual measurements are often easily contaminated by different gross errors. Thus, it is essential to build robust data reconciliation methods to alleviate the impact of gross errors and provide accurate data. In this paper, a novel robust estimator is proposed to improve the robustness of data reconciliation method, which is based on a new robust estimation function. First, the main robust properties are analyzed with its objective and influence functions for the proposed robust estimator. Then, the effectiveness of the new robust data reconciliation method is demonstrated on a linear numerical case and a nonlinear example. Moreover, it is further used to a practical industrial evaporation production process, which also demonstrates that the process data can be better reconciled with the proposed robust estimator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to modify Shewhart, the weighted variance and skewness correction methods in industrial statistical process control. The robust and asymmetric control limits of range chart are constructed to use in contaminated and skewed distributed process. The way of construction of control limits is simple and corresponds to three methods in which sample range estimator is replaced with the robust interquartile range. These three modified methods are evaluated in terms of their type I risks and average run length by using simulation study. The performance of the proposed range charts is assessed when the Phases I and II data are uncontaminated and contaminated. The Weibull, gamma and lognormal distributions are chosen since they can represent a wide variety of shapes from nearly symmetric to highly skewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the design of an automatic parallelization framework. The kernel supplied at its front end was suggested as an instrument for parallel potential assessment. It was used to measure the maximum achievable speedups in the major set of the CHStone benchmark suite programs. In such framework, we suggested the liberation of parallelism incrementally. We proposed a data dependency heuristic-based transformation method to make true dependences dissociation. We generated an internal representation (IR2), where the Banerjee test conditions are met. Two among three of Banerjee test conditions came to be committed. In shared memory many/multicore platforms, the third condition could be satisfied by privatization. We would be able to choose the safe and the opportune pairwise (mapping-privatization) scheme among a number of threads mapping scenarios that become available in the IR2 structure. Instrumentation on a subset of CHStone benchmark was carried out as a validity proof of our proposal, and the results confirmed that our framework kernel is robust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Honey bee populations have been declining precipitously over the past decade, and multiple causative factors have been identified. Recent research indicates that these frequently co-occurring stressors interact, often in unpredictable ways, therefore it has become important to develop robust methods to assess their effects both in isolation and in combination. Most such efforts focus on honey bee workers, but the state of a colony also depends on the health and productivity of its queen. However, it is much more difficult to quantify the performance of queens relative to workers in the field, and there are no laboratory assays for queen performance. Here, we present a new system to monitor honey bee queen egg laying under laboratory conditions and report the results of experiments showing the effects of pollen nutrition on egg laying. These findings suggest that queen egg laying and worker physiology can be manipulated in this system through pollen nutrition, which is consistent with findings from field colonies. The results generated using this controlled, laboratory-based system suggest that worker physiology controls queen egg laying behavior. Additionally, the quantitative data generated in these experiments highlight the utility of the system for further use as a risk assessment tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying the underlying models in a set of data points that is contaminated by noise and outliers leads to a highly complex multi-model fitting problem. This problem can be posed as a clustering problem by the projection of higher-order affinities between data points into a graph, which can be clustered using spectral clustering. Calculating all possible higher-order affinities is computationally expensive. Hence, in most cases, only a subset is used. In this paper, we propose an effective sampling method for obtaining a highly accurate approximation of the full graph, which is required to solve multi-structural model fitting problems in computer vision. The proposed method is based on the observation that the usefulness of a graph for segmentation improves as the distribution of the hypotheses that are used to build the graph approaches the distribution of the actual parameters for the given data. In this paper, we approximate this actual parameter distribution by using a $k$ th-order statistics-based cost function, and the samples are generated using a greedy algorithm that is coupled with a data sub-sampling strategy. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed method is both accurate and computationally efficient compared with the state-of-the-art robust multi-model fitting techniques. The implementation of the method is publicly available from https://github.com/RuwanT/model-fitting-cbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce OpenEnsembles, a Python toolkit for performing and analyzing ensemble clustering. Ensemble clustering is the process of creating many clustering solutions for a given dataset and utilizing the relationships observed across the ensemble to identify final solutions, which are more robust, stable or better than the individual solutions within the ensemble. The OpenEnsembles library provides a unified interface for applying transformations to data, clustering data, visualizing individual clustering solutions, visualizing and finishing the ensemble, and calculating validation metrics for a clustering solution for any given partitioning of the data. We have documented examples of using OpenEnsembles to create, analyze, and visualize a number of different types of ensemble approaches on toy and example datasets. OpenEnsembles is released under the GNU General Public License version 3, can be installed via Conda or the Python Package Index (pip), and is available at https://github.com/NaegleLab/OpenEnsembles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an effective multiscale energy-based global ternary image (E-GTI) representation for action recognition from depth sequences. The unique property of our representation is that it takes the spatiotemporal discrimination and action speed variations into account, intending to solve the problems of distinguishing similar actions and identifying the actions with different speeds in one goal. The entire method is carried out in two stages. In the first stage, consecutive depth frames are used to generate global ternary image (GTI) features, which implicitly capture both inter-frame motion regions and motion directions. Specifically, each pixel in the GTI represents one of three possible states, namely, positive, negative, and neutral, which indicate the increased, decreased, and same depth values, respectively. To cope with speed variations in actions, energy-based sampling method is utilized, leading to multiscale E-GTI features, where the multiscale scheme can efficiently capture the temporal relationships among frames. In the second stage, all the E-GTI features are transformed by Radon transform (RT) as robust descriptors, which are aggregated by the bag-of-visual-words model as a compact representation. Extensive experiments on benchmark data sets show that our representation outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, since it captures discriminating spatiotemporal information of actions. Due to the merits of energy-based sampling and RT methods, our representation shows robustness to speed variations, depth noise, and partial occlusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In cyber-physical systems (CPS), physical behaviors are typically controlled by digital hardware. As a consequence, continuous behaviors are discretized by sampling and quantization prior to their processing. Quantifying the similarity between CPS behaviors and their specification is an important ingredient in evaluating correctness and quality of such systems. We propose a novel procedure for measuring robustness between digitized CPS signals and signal temporal logic (STL) specifications. We first equip STL with quantitative semantics based on the weighted edit distance, a metric that quantifies both space and time mismatches between digitized CPS behaviors. We then develop a dynamic programming algorithm for computing the robustness degree between digitized signals and STL specifications. In order to promote hardware-based monitors we implemented our approach in FPGA. We evaluated it on automotive benchmarks defined by research community, and also on realistic data obtained from magnetic sensor used in modern cars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a robust estimator of correlation as a data preprocessing stage to the Prony method that is able to suppress white impulsive noise. The method consists of the following steps. First, the bus voltage magnitudes and phase angles are combined to build a set of complex-valued measurements. Second, the outliers of the complex-valued data samples, which are induced by impulsive noise, are identified and suppressed using the iteratively reweighted phase–phase correlator; the latter is a robust estimator of correlation for complex-valued Gaussian processes, which has been extended here to handle outliers in both magnitude and phase angle of voltage phasor measurements. Finally, the classical Prony method is applied on the robustly estimated voltage phase angles. The good performance of the proposed method is demonstrated through simulations carried out on the two-area four-machine system, on the simplified WECC 179-bus system, as well as on real PMU data. Simulation results show that the method is very fast to compute and is compatible with real-time application requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given a classification task, an approach to improve accuracy relies on the use of abstaining classifiers. These classifiers are trained to reject observations for which predicted values are not reliable enough: these rejected observations belong to an abstaining area in the feature space. Two equivalent methods exist to theoretically compute the optimal abstaining area for a given classification problem. The first one is based on the posterior probability computed by the model and the other is based on the derivative of the ROC function of the model. Although the second method has proved to give the best results, in small-sample settings such as the one found in omics data, the estimation of posterior probabilities and derivative of ROC curve are both lacking of precision leading to far from optimal abstaining areas. As a consequence none of the two methods bring the expected improvements in accuracy. We propose five alternative algorithms to compute the abstaining area adapted to small-sample problems. The idea of these algorithms is to compute an accurate and robust estimation of the ROC curve and its derivatives. These estimation are mainly based on the assumption that the distribution of the output of the classifier for each class is normal or mixture of normal distributions. These distributions are estimated by a kernel density estimator or Bayesian semiparametric estimator. Another method works on the approximation of the convex hull of the ROC curve. Once the derivative of the ROC curve are estimated, the optimal abstaining area can be directly computed. The performance of our algorithms are directly related to their capacity to compute an accurate estimation of the ROC curve. A sensitivity analysis of our methods to the dataset size and rejection cost has been done on a set of experiments. We show that our methods improve the performances of the abstaining classifiers on several real datasets and for different learning algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a self-learning decision making procedure for robust real-time train rescheduling in case of disturbances. The procedure is applicable to aperiodic timetables of mixed-tracked networks and it consists of three steps. The first two are executed in real-time and provide the rescheduled timetable, while the third one is executed offline and guarantees the self-learning part of the method. In particular, in the first step, a robust timetable is determined, which is valid for a finite time horizon . This robust timetable is obtained solving a mixed integer linear programming problem aimed at finding the optimal compromise between two objectives: the minimization of the delays of the trains and the maximization of the robustness of the timetable. In the second step, a merging procedure is first used to join the obtained timetable with the nominal one. Then, a heuristics is applied to identify and solve all conflicts eventually arising after the merging procedure. Finally, in the third step an offline cross-efficiency fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis technique is applied to evaluate the efficiency of the rescheduled timetable in terms of delays minimization and robustness maximization when different relevance weights (defining the compromise between the two optimization objectives) are used in the first step. The procedure is thus able to determine appropriate relevance weights to employ when disturbances of the same type affect again the network. The railway service provider can take advantage of this procedure to automate, optimize, and expedite the rescheduling process. Moreover, thanks to the self-learning capability of the procedure, the quality of the rescheduling is improved at each reapplication of the method. The technique is applied to a real data set related to a regional railway network in Southern Italy to test its effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presented a new data-driven robust control scheme for unknown nonlinear systems in the presence of input saturation and external disturbances. According to the input and output data of the nonlinear system, a recurrent neural network (RNN) data-driven model is established to reconstruct the dynamics of the nonlinear system. An adaptive output-feedback controller is developed to approximate the unknown disturbances and a novel input saturation compensation method is used to attenuate the effect of the input saturation. Under the proposed adaptive control scheme, the uniformly ultimately bounded convergence of all the signals of the closed-loop nonlinear system is guaranteed via Lyapunov analysis. The simulation results are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed data-driven robust controller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a recent self-sampled-data control algorithm applied to nonlinear systems with actuator failures. Our approach uses the linear model of a given nonlinear system, and based on a granted actuator fault observer method, an asynchronous sampled-data fault compensator controller is then formulated. The proposed sampling rule is realized by using an event-detector monitoring signal invention. On this way, the sampled rate is self governed and asynchronous by nature. Hence, our contribution is twofold. Fist, a new auto-generated non-uniform sampled-data mechanism is stated. Second, we grant an event-triggered control law with actuator failure observation and compensation. Our findings are completely supported by employing Lyapunov's theory. Finally, according to our numerical experiments applied to an undamped torsional pendulum, our design is able to detect a failure in the actuator device and it can stabilize the undamped torsional pendulum system presenting better performance in comparison to its open-loop deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some research suggests infants display a tendency to judge others’ prosocial behavior, and in particular, that infants show a strong preference for prosocial others. For example, data from one frequently cited and well-publicized study showed that, after watching a puppet show with three puppets, 74% of infants chose the puppet that “helped” rather than the puppet that “hindered” a third puppet from attaining its goal. The purpose of the current investigation was to replicate these methods and extend them by including a within-subject measure of infant puppet choice across repeated trials to assess the stability of infants’ choice. In the current study, 20 infants viewed a puppet show and chose between two puppets (i.e., helper or hinderer) immediately following the puppet show. Although results were similar to previously published work on the first-choice trial (65% of infants chose the helper puppet on the first trial), infants did not consistently choose the helper across trials; several infants demonstrated a side preference, with 9 infants almost exclusively choosing puppets presented on the right or left side. The current investigation addressed limitations of previous research by including a between-subjects (replication) as well as a within-subjects (extension) repeated measure of choice that allowed for the examination of the stability of the choice measure. Our results, particularly in light of other failed replications, raise questions regarding the robustness of infants’ preference for prosocial others and the reliability and validity of the single-choice paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detecting vehicles in aerial imagery plays an important role in a wide range of applications. The current vehicle detection methods are mostly based on sliding-window search and handcrafted or shallow-learning-based features, having limited description capability and heavy computational costs. Recently, due to the powerful feature representations, region convolutional neural networks (CNN) based detection methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in computer vision, especially Faster R-CNN. However, directly using it for vehicle detection in aerial images has many limitations: (1) region proposal network (RPN) in Faster R-CNN has poor performance for accurately locating small-sized vehicles, due to the relatively coarse feature maps; and (2) the classifier after RPN cannot distinguish vehicles and complex backgrounds well. In this study, an improved detection method based on Faster R-CNN is proposed in order to accomplish the two challenges mentioned above. Firstly, to improve the recall, we employ a hyper region proposal network (HRPN) to extract vehicle-like targets with a combination of hierarchical feature maps. Then, we replace the classifier after RPN by a cascade of boosted classifiers to verify the candidate regions, aiming at reducing false detection by negative example mining. We evaluate our method on the Munich vehicle dataset and the collected vehicle dataset, with improvements in accuracy and robustness compared to existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new non-fragile stochastic control method to investigate the robust sampled-data synchronization problem for uncertain chaotic Lurie systems (CLSs) with time-varying delays. The controller gain fluctuation and time-varying uncertain parameters are supposed to be random and satisfy certain Bernoulli distributed white noise sequences. Moreover, by choosing an appropriate Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional (LKF), which takes full advantage of the available information about the actual sampling pattern and the nonlinear condition, a novel synchronization criterion is developed for analyzing the corresponding synchronization error system. Furthermore, based on the most powerful free-matrix-based integral inequality (FMBII), the desired non-fragile sampled-data estimator controller is obtained in terms of the solution of linear matrix inequalities. Finally, three numerical simulation examples of Chua's circuit and neural network are provided to show the effectiveness and superiorities of the proposed theoretical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa is regarded as the least developed continent in terms of overall development and specifically in terms of human capital development (HCD) efforts. Research on the determinants of HCD in Africa is scanty, as the literature is dominated by country-specific studies as well as group of country studies that primarily focus on the effect of human capital on growth and other economic development parameters. Therefore, this paper investigates the determinants of human capital development in 33 African countries over a 14-year period from 2000 to 2013. The empirical analysis is predicated on Sen's capability approach that was modified following Binder and Georgiadis (2011) in order to explicitly account for the role of health, infrastructure and institutions as potential drivers of HCD. This is a departure from previous studies that focused primarily on the role of education. In addition to preliminary tests such as line plot, descriptive statistics and correlation analysis carried out, the data is analysed using panel unit root, cointegration and causality techniques. Findings show that all the variables are integrated of order one while HCD and its determinants have a stable long-run equilibrium relationship. Specifically, all the variables significantly influence HCD in the long run, whereas the contemporaneous models suggest that only institutions matter. Utilizing alternative estimators as well as estimation of subsamples, robustness tests reinforce our findings. Therefore, African governments may consider supporting HCD through sustained investment in the education and health sectors. At the same time, short-term gains may be attained through enhanced institutional quality and infrastructure development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]