Search

Background: Malaria is curable. Nonetheless, over 229 million cases of malaria were recorded in 2019, along with 409,000 deaths. Although over 42 million Brazilians are at risk of contracting malaria, 99% percent of all malaria cases in Brazil are located in or around the Amazon rainforest. Despite declining cases and deaths, malaria remains a major public health issue in Brazil. Accurate spatiotemporal prediction of malaria propagation may enable improved resource allocation to support efforts to eradicate the disease., Methods: In response to calls for novel research on malaria elimination strategies that suit local conditions, in this study, we propose machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models to predict the probability of malaria cases in the state of Amazonas. Using a dataset of approximately 6 million records (January 2003 to December 2018), we applied k-means clustering to group cities based on their similarity of malaria incidence. We evaluated random forest, long-short term memory (LSTM) and dated recurrent unit (GRU) models and compared their performance., Results: The LSTM architecture achieved better performance in clusters with less variability in the number of cases, whereas the GRU presents better results in clusters with high variability. Although Diebold-Mariano testing suggested that both the LSTM and GRU performed comparably, GRU can be trained significantly faster, which could prove advantageous in practice., Conclusions: All models showed satisfactory accuracy and strong performance in predicting new cases of malaria, and each could serve as a supplemental tool to support regional policies and strategies.

Public health interventions to counter the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated and increased digital adoption and use of the Internet for sourcing health information. Unfortunately, there is evidence to suggest that it has also accelerated and increased the spread of false information relating to COVID-19. The consequences of misinformation, disinformation and misinterpretation of health information can interfere with attempts to curb the virus, delay or result in failure to seek or continue legitimate medical treatment and adherence to vaccination, as well as interfere with sound public health policy and attempts to disseminate public health messages. While there is a significant body of literature, datasets and tools to support countermeasures against the spread of false information online in resource-rich languages such as English and Chinese, there are few such resources to support Portuguese, and Brazilian Portuguese specifically. In this study, we explore the use of machine learning and deep learning techniques to identify fake news in online communications in the Brazilian Portuguese language relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. We build a dataset of 11,382 items comprising data from January 2020 to February 2021. Exploratory data analysis suggests that fake news about the COVID-19 vaccine was prevalent in Brazil, much of it related to government communications. To mitigate the adverse impact of fake news, we analyse the impact of machine learning to detect fake news based on stop words in communications. The results suggest that stop words improve the performance of the models when keeping them within the message. Random Forest was the machine learning model with the best results, achieving 97.91% of precision, while Bi-GRU was the best deep learning model with an F1 score of 94.03%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Mobile network traffic prediction is an important input into network capacity planning and optimization. Existing approaches may lack the speed and computational complexity to account for bursting, non‐linear patterns, or other important correlations in time series mobile network data. We compare the performance of two deep learning (DL) architectures, long short‐term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU), and two conventional machine learning (ML) architectures—Random Forest and Decision Tree—for predicting mobile Internet traffic using 2 months of Telecom Italia data for Milan. K‐Means clustering was used a priori to group cells based on Internet activity, and the Grid Search method was used to identify the best configurations for each model. The predictive quality of the models was evaluated using root mean squared error and mean absolute error. Both DL algorithms were effective in modeling Internet activity and seasonality, both within days and across 2 months. We find variations in performance across clusters within the city. Overall, the DL models outperformed the conventional ML models, and the LSTM outperformed the GRU in our experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This last decade, the amount of data exchanged on the Internet increased by over a staggering factor of 100, and is expected to exceed well over the 500 exabytes by 2020. This phenomenon is mainly due to the evolution of high-speed broadband Internet and, more specifically, the popularization and wide spread use of smartphones and associated accessible data plans. Although 4G with its long-term evolution (LTE) technology is seen as a mature technology, there is continual improvement to its radio technology and architecture such as in the scope of the LTE Advanced standard, a major enhancement of LTE. However, for the long run, the next generation of telecommunication (5G) is considered and is gaining considerable momentum from both industry and researchers. In addition, with the deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications, smart cities, vehicular networks, e-health systems, and Industry 4.0, a new plethora of 5G services has emerged with very diverging and technologically challenging design requirements. These include high mobile data volume per area, high number of devices connected per area, high data rates, longer battery life for low-power devices, and reduced end-to-end latency. Several technologies are being developed to meet these new requirements, and each of these technologies brings its own design issues and challenges. In this context, deep learning models could be seen as one of the main tools that can be used to process monitoring data and automate decisions. As these models are able to extract relevant features from raw data (images, texts, and other types of unstructured data), the integration between 5G and DL looks promising and one that requires exploring. As main contribution, this paper presents a systematic review about how DL is being applied to solve some 5G issues. Differently from the current literature, we examine data from the last decade and the works that address diverse 5G specific problems, such as physical medium state estimation, network traffic prediction, user device location prediction, self network management, among others. We also discuss the main research challenges when using deep learning models in 5G scenarios and identify several issues that deserve further consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human falls are a global public health issue resulting in over 37.3 million severe injuries and 646,000 deaths yearly. Falls result in direct financial cost to health systems and indirectly to society productivity. Unsurprisingly, human fall detection and prevention are a major focus of health research. In this article, we consider deep learning for fall detection in an IoT and fog computing environment. We propose a Convolutional Neural Network composed of three convolutional layers, two maxpool, and three fully-connected layers as our deep learning model. We evaluate its performance using three open data sets and against extant research. Our approach for resolving dimensionality and modelling simplicity issues is outlined. Accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, and the Matthews Correlation Coefficient are used to evaluate performance. The best results are achieved when using data augmentation during the training process. The paper concludes with a discussion of challenges and future directions for research in this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]