Enhancing estimation of water quality index using stacking machine learning techniques: The case of Southern Bug River.

Sub-Saharan Africa continues to shoulder the heaviest burden of malaria. The 2024 World Health Organisation (WHO) malaria report highlighted that Africa contributed an alarming 94% of the global cases and 95% of the deaths. In the WHO African region, progress towards elimination and management of malaria is hindered by weak health systems and a lack of traditional diagnostic methods such as microscopy and malaria Rapid Diagnostic Tests (mRDTs). The primary aim of this paper is to develop a machine learning (ML) ensemble model for malaria diagnosis using clinical and demographic data, tailored for resource-limited settings. A retrospective study was conducted using 637 patient records from Gutu Mission Hospital and Gweru Provincial Hospital in Zimbabwe. Clinical symptoms (fever, chills, abdominal pain, headache and diarrhea) and demographic features (age, gender, residence and travel history) were analysed. Data preprocessing included handling class imbalance using the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) and feature selection using Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE). Seven individual ML models, including Logistic regression (LR), Random Forest (RF), Decision Trees (DT), Gradient Boosting (GB), K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN), Naive Bayes (NB) and XGBoost were trained and evaluated on the malaria dataset. The individual models were further combined to build, train and evaluate ensemble models such as Bagging, Stacking, Soft Voting and AdaBoost. Model performance was assessed using accuracy, precision, confusion matrices, recall, F1 score, and AUC-ROC metrics. Clinical symptoms (chills: p-value=0.001, fever: p=0.003, diarrhea: p=0.01, abdominal pain: p< 0.001) were statistically significant predictors of malaria. Of the demographic factors, only travel history (p=0.02) showed a significant association with malaria. Among the seven individual ML models, GB achieved the highest predictive performance (Accuracy =0.94), followed by RF (Accuracy =0.94) and XGBoost (Accuracy =0.93). The stacking ensemble model outperformed all individual ML models and other ensemble models (bagging, soft voting and AdaBoost), achieving accuracy =0.96, precision =0.95, recall =0.98, F1 score =0.96 and AUC-ROC =0.98. This study demonstrates that ML, particularly ensemble models, can be used to improve malaria diagnosis significantly. The integration of these models into a web-based application could provide a scalable and accessible diagnostic tool for healthcare workers in resource-limited settings.

Optimisation and interpretation of machine and deep learning models for improved water quality management in Lake Loktak

Su kaynaklarının planlanması ve tarımsal su yönetimi için referans bitki su tüketiminin (ET0) doğru tahmin edilmesi oldukça önemlidir. Bu çalışmada üç farklı makine öğrenimi yönteminin, yapay sinir ağları (YSA), rassal ağaç (RT) ve gauss süreç regresyonu (GPR), yarı nemli iklim koşullarına sahip bir bölgeden alınan iklim verileri kullanılarak günlük ET0’ı tahmin etme performansları araştırılmıştır. Modelleri eğitmek ve test etmek için Bafra’da 2018–2020 döneminde toplanan günlük meteorolojik verilerin beş girdi kombinasyonu [günlük ortalama (Tort), maksimum (Tmax) ve minimum sıcaklık (Tmin), rüzgar hızı (u2), bağıl nem (RHort) ve güneşlenme şiddeti (Rs) hem tam hem de eksik kombinasyonları dahil] kullanılmıştır. Makine öğrenimi modellerinin performansı ise FAO-56 Penman Monteith (FAO-56 PM) standart denklemi ile karşılaştırılmıştır. Modellerin doğruluğunu değerlendirmek için dört farklı istatistiksel performans indeksi kullanılmıştır [belirleme katsayısı (R2), ortalama mutlak hata (MAE), hata kareleri toplamının karekökü (RMSE) ve Nash–Sutcliffe etkinlik katsayısı (NSE)]. Sonuçlar, her beş senaryoda da YSA modellerinin RT ve GPR modellerinden daha iyi performans gösterdiğini ortaya koymuştur. Tüm verilerin girdi olarak kullanıldığı beşinci senaryo için YSA modelleri tarafından tahmin edilen ET0 değerlerinin FAO-56 PM değerleri ile iyi bir uyum içinde olduğu belirlenmiştir (R2=0.988, MAE=0.166, RMSE=0.205, NSE=0.984). Bununla birlikte meteorolojik veriler tam olmadığında bile sadece Tort, RHort ve Rs ile oldukça yüksek günlük ET0 tahminleri elde edilmiştir. Genel olarak, radyasyona dayalı makine öğrenimi modelleri, sıcaklığa dayalı makine öğrenimi modellerinden daha iyi performans göstermiştir. Sonuçlar, yarı nemli iklim özelliklerine sahip bir bölgede YSA modelinin ET0'ı oldukça verimli ve doğru bir şekilde modellemek için etkili bir şekilde kullanılabileceğini göstermektedir.

The ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict has exacerbated the global crisis of natural gas supply, particularly in Europe. During the winter season, major importers of liquefied natural gas (LNG), such as South Korea and Japan, were directly affected by fluctuating spot LNG prices. This study aimed to use machine learning (ML) to predict the Japan Korea Marker (JKM), a spot LNG price index, to reduce price fluctuation risks for LNG importers such as the Korean Gas Corporation (KOGAS). Hence, price prediction models were developed based on long short-term memory (LSTM), artificial neural network (ANN), and support vector machine (SVM) algorithms, which were used for time series data prediction. Eighty-seven variables were collected for JKM prediction, of which eight were selected for modeling. Four scenarios (scenarios A, B, C, and D) were devised and tested to analyze the effect of each variable on the performance of the models. Among the eight variables, JKM, national balancing point (NBP), and Brent price indexes demonstrated the largest effects on the performance of the ML models. In contrast, the variable of LNG import volume in China had the least effect. The LSTM model showed a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.195, making it the best-performing algorithm. However, the LSTM model demonstrated a decreased in performance of at least 57% during the COVID-19 period, which raises concerns regarding the reliability of the test results obtained during that time. The study compared the ML models’ prediction performances with those of the traditional statistical model, autoregressive integrated moving averages (ARIMA), to verify their effectiveness. The comparison results showed that the LSTM model’s performance deviated by an MAE of 15–22%, which can be attributed to the constraints of the small dataset size and conceptual structural differences between the ML and ARIMA models. However, if a sufficiently large dataset can be secured for training, the ML model is expected to perform better than the ARIMA. Additionally, separate tests were conducted to predict the trends of JKM fluctuations and comprehensively validate the practicality of the ML models. Based on the test results, LSTM model, identified as the optimal ML algorithm, achieved a performance of 53% during the regular period and 57% d during the abnormal period (i.e., COVID-19). Subject matter experts agreed that the performance of the ML models could be improved through additional studies, ultimately reducing the risk of price fluctuations when purchasing spot LNG.

In this study, six machine learning (ML) models, namely, random forest (RF), Gaussian process regression (GPR), support vector regression (SVR), decision tree (DT), least squares support vector machine (LSSVM), and multivariate adaptive regression spline (MARS) models, were employed to reconstruct the missing daily‐averaged discharge in a mega‐delta from 1980 to 2015 using upstream‐downstream multi‐station data. The performance and accuracy of each ML model were assessed and compared with the stage‐discharge rating curves (RCs) using four statistical indicators, Taylor diagrams, violin plots, scatter plots, time‐series plots, and heatmaps. Model input selection was performed using mutual information and correlation coefficient methods after three data pre‐processing steps: normalization, Fourier series fitting, and first‐order differencing. The results showed that the ML models are superior to their RC counterparts, and MARS and RF are the most reliable algorithms, although MARS achieves marginally better performance than RF. Compared to RC, MARS and RF reduced the root mean square error (RMSE) by 135% and 141% and the mean absolute error by 194% and 179%, respectively, using year‐round data. However, the performance of MARS and RF developed for the climbing (wet season) and recession (dry season) limbs separately worsened slightly compared to that developed using the year‐round data. Specifically, the RMSE of MARS and RF in the falling limb was 856 and 1,040 m3/s, respectively, while that obtained using the year‐round data was 768 and 789 m3/s, respectively. In this study, the DT model is not recommended, while the GPR and SVR models provide acceptable results.

Remote sensing datasets offer a unique opportunity to observe spatial and temporal trends in water quality indicators (WQIs), such as chlorophyll-a, salinity, and turbidity, across various aquatic ecosystems. In this study, we used available in situ WQI measurements (chlorophyll-a: 17, salinity: 478, and turbidity: 173) along with Landsat-8 surface reflectance data to examine the capability of empirical and machine learning (ML) models in retrieving these indicators over Matagorda Bay, Texas, between 2014 and 2023. We employed 36 empirical models to retrieve chlorophyll-a (12 models), salinity (2 models), and turbidity (22 models) and 4 ML families—deep neural network (DNN), distributed random forest, gradient boosting machine, and generalized linear model—to retrieve salinity and turbidity. We used the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (NSE), correlation coefficient (r), and normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) to assess the performance of empirical and ML models. The results indicate that (1) the empirical models displayed minimal effectiveness when applied over Matagorda Bay without calibration; (2) once calibrated over Matagorda Bay, the performance of the empirical models experienced significant improvements (chlorophyll-a—NRMSE: 0.91 ± 0.03, r: 0.94 ± 0.04, NSE: 0.89 ± 0.06; salinity—NRMSE: 0.24 ± 0, r: 0.24 ± 0, NSE: 0.06 ± 0; turbidity—NRMSE: 0.15 ± 0.10, r: 0.13 ± 0.09, NSE: 0.03 ± 0.03); (3) ML models outperformed calibrated empirical models when used to retrieve turbidity and salinity, and (4) the DNN family outperformed all other ML families when used to retrieve salinity (NRMSE: 0.87 ± 0.09, r: 0.49 ± 0.09, NSE: 0.23 ± 0.12) and turbidity (NRMSE: 0.63± 0.11, r: 0.79 ± 0.11, NSE: 0.60 ± 0.20). The developed approach provides a reference context, a structured framework, and valuable insights for using empirical and ML models and Landsat-8 data to retrieve WQIs over aquatic ecosystems. The modeled WQI data could be used to expand the footprint of in situ observations and improve current efforts to conserve, enhance, and restore important habitats in aquatic ecosystems.

Comprehensive comparison of various machine learning algorithms for short-term ozone concentration prediction

Machine learning (ML) models provide more choices to patients with diabetes mellitus (DM) to more properly manage blood glucose (BG) levels. However, because of numerous types of ML algorithms, choosing an appropriate model is vitally important. In a systematic review and network meta-analysis, this study aimed to comprehensively assess the performance of ML models in predicting BG levels. In addition, we assessed ML models used to detect and predict adverse BG (hypoglycemia) events by calculating pooled estimates of sensitivity and specificity. PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Explore databases were systematically searched for studies on predicting BG levels and predicting or detecting adverse BG events using ML models, from inception to November 2022. Studies that assessed the performance of different ML models in predicting or detecting BG levels or adverse BG events of patients with DM were included. Studies with no derivation or performance metrics of ML models were excluded. The Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies tool was applied to assess the quality of included studies. Primary outcomes were the relative ranking of ML models for predicting BG levels in different prediction horizons (PHs) and pooled estimates of the sensitivity and specificity of ML models in detecting or predicting adverse BG events. In total, 46 eligible studies were included for meta-analysis. Regarding ML models for predicting BG levels, the means of the absolute root mean square error (RMSE) in a PH of 15, 30, 45, and 60 minutes were 18.88 (SD 19.71), 21.40 (SD 12.56), 21.27 (SD 5.17), and 30.01 (SD 7.23) mg/dL, respectively. The neural network model (NNM) showed the highest relative performance in different PHs. Furthermore, the pooled estimates of the positive likelihood ratio and the negative likelihood ratio of ML models were 8.3 (95% CI 5.7-12.0) and 0.31 (95% CI 0.22-0.44), respectively, for predicting hypoglycemia and 2.4 (95% CI 1.6-3.7) and 0.37 (95% CI 0.29-0.46), respectively, for detecting hypoglycemia. Statistically significant high heterogeneity was detected in all subgroups, with different sources of heterogeneity. For predicting precise BG levels, the RMSE increases with a rise in the PH, and the NNM shows the highest relative performance among all the ML models. Meanwhile, current ML models have sufficient ability to predict adverse BG events, while their ability to detect adverse BG events needs to be enhanced. PROSPERO CRD42022375250; https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?RecordID=375250.

This study highlights drought forecasting for understanding the semi-arid area in India, where drought phenomena play vital role in the irrigation, drinking water supplies, and sustaining the ecological with economic balance for every nation. Therefore, drought forecasting is important for the future drought planning based on the machine learning (ML) models. Hence, The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) at 3- and 6-month periods have been selected and used for future drought forecasting scenarios in area. The combinations of ten inputs SPI-1- and SPI-10 were used for predicting modeling for SPI-3 and SPI-6 timescales, that modeling developed based on the historical SPI datasets from 1989 to 2019 years. The SPI-3 and SPI-6 maximum and minimum values are shown SPI-3 (2.03 and -5.522) and SPI-6 (1.94 and -6.93). The SPI is a popular method for estimating the drought analysis and has been used everywhere at global level. The developed models have been compared with each other, with the best combination of input variables selected using subset regression models and sensitivity studies. After that, the active input parameters were used for forecasting of SPI-3 and SPI-6 values to understanding of drought in semi-arid area. The finest input variables combination have been used in the Ml models and established the novel five models such as robust linear regression, bagged trees, boosted trees, support vector regression (SVM-Linear), and Matern Gaussian Process Regression (Matern GPR) models. Such kind of models first time has been applied for the forecasting of future drought conditions. Whole models were fine and improved modeling by using hyperparameters tuning, bagging, and boosting models. Entire ML models’ accuracy was compared using different statistical metrics. Compared with five ML models accuracy, we have found that the Matern GPR model better accuracy than other ML models. The best model accuracy is R2 = 0.95 and 0.93, RMSE, MSE, MAE, MARE, and NSE values, respectively, for predicting SPI-3 and SPI-6 values in the area. Therefore, the Matern GPR model was identified as the finest ML algorithm for predicting SPI-3 and SPI-6 associated with other algorithms. This research demonstrates the Matern GPR model's efficacy in predicting multiscale SPI-3 and SPI-6 under climate variations. It can be helpful in soil and water resource conservation planning and management and understanding droughts in the entire basin areas of the country India.

For effective management of water quantity and quality, it is absolutely essential to estimate the pollution level of the existing surface water. This case study aims to evaluate the performance of twelve machine learning (ML) models, including five boosting-based algorithms (adaptive boosting, gradient boosting, histogram-based gradient boosting, light gradient boosting, and extreme gradient boosting), three decision tree-based algorithms (decision tree, extra trees, and random forest), and four ANN-based algorithms (multilayer perceptron, radial basis function, deep feed-forward neural network, and convolutional neural network), in estimating the surface water quality of the La Buong River in Vietnam. Water quality data at four monitoring stations alongside the La Buong River for the period 2010–2017 were utilized to calculate the water quality index (WQI). Prediction performance of the ML models was evaluated by using two efficiency statistics (i.e., R2 and RMSE). The results indicated that all twelve ML models have good performance in predicting the WQI but that extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) has the best performance with the highest accuracy (R2 = 0.989 and RMSE = 0.107). The findings strengthen the argument that ML models, especially XGBoost, may be employed for WQI prediction with a high level of accuracy, which will further improve water quality management.

This study proposes a novel approach to improve forecast accuracy and uncertainty quantification in time series forecasting through the synthesis of Machine Learning (ML) models with Dynamic Bayesian Predictive Synthesis (DBPS). We synthesize predictive distributions from three ML models—LightGBM, LSTM, and Prophet—through DBPS, notably employing Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models to estimate uncertainties for ML forecasts. Empirical analysis using meteorological data from Delhi, India, demonstrates that our proposed method outperforms individual ML models and conventional ensemble methods, achieving improvements of up to 25.2% in RMSE and 25.4% in MAE. Furthermore, evaluating predictive distributions using Log Predictive Density Ratio (LPDR) reveals superior performance to other models, indicating a more accurate capture of observational uncertainty. Analysis of DBPS weights reveals that the offsetting effect of prediction biases is one of the factors contributing to improved forecast accuracy. These findings suggest that the synthesis of ML models and DBPS enables more reliable forecasting and improved uncertainty quantification.

Shear viscosity, though being a fundamental property of all fluids, is computationally expensive to calculate from equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. Recently, machine learning (ML) methods have been used to augment molecular simulations in many contexts, thus showing promise to estimate viscosity too in a relatively inexpensive manner. However, ML methods face significant challenges—such as overfitting, when the size of the data set is small, as is the case with viscosity. In this work, we train seven ML models to predict the shear viscosity of a Lennard–Jones fluid, with particular emphasis on addressing issues arising from a small data set. Specifically, the issues related to model selection, performance estimation and uncertainty quantification were investigated. First, we show that the widely used performance estimation procedure of using a single unseen data set shows a wide variability—in estimating the errors on—small data sets. In this context, the common practice of using cross validation (CV) to select the hyperparameters (model selection) can be adapted to estimate the generalization error (performance estimation) as well. We compare two simple CV procedures for their ability to do both model selection and performance estimation, and find that k-fold CV based procedure shows a lower variance of error estimates. Also, these CV procedures naturally lead to an ensemble of trained ML models. We discuss the role of performance metrics in training and evaluation and propose a method to rank the ML models based on multiple metrics. Finally, two methods for uncertainty quantification—Gaussian process regression (GPR) and ensemble method—were used to estimate the uncertainty on individual predictions. The uncertainty estimates from GPR were also used to construct an applicability domain using which the ML models provided even more reliable predictions on an independent viscosity data set generated in this work. Overall, the procedures prescribed in this work, together, lead to robust ML models for small data sets.

Anomaly detection is an important security mechanism for the Internet of Things (IoT). Existing works have been focused on developing accurate anomaly detection models. However, due to the resource-constrained nature of IoT networks and the requirement of real-time security operation, cost efficient (regarding computational efficiency and memory-consumption efficiency) approaches for anomaly detection are highly desirable in IoT applications. In this paper, we investigated machine learning (ML) enabled anomaly detection models for the IoT with regard to multi-objective optimization (Pareto optimization) that minimizes the detection error, execution time, and memory consumption simultaneously. Making use of well-known datasets consisting of network traffic traces captured in an IoT environment, we studied a variety of machine learning algorithms through the world-class H2O AI platform. Our experimental results show that the Gradient Boosting Machine, Random Forest, and Deep Learning models are the most accurate and fastest anomaly detection models; the Gradient Boosting Machine and Random Forest are the most accurate and memory-efficient models. These ML models form the Pareto-optimal set of anomaly detection models. Our results can be used by the industry to facilitate their selection of ML models for anomaly detection on various IoT networks based on their security requirements and system constraints.

Machine Learning Can Accurately Predict Overnight Stay, Readmission, and 30-Day Complications Following Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction

Perinatal depression (PND) is one of the most common medical complications during pregnancy and postpartum period, affecting 10–20% of pregnant individuals. Black and Latina women have higher rates of PND, yet they are less likely to be diagnosed and receive treatment. Machine learning (ML) models based on Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) have been effective in predicting postpartum depression in middle-class White women but have rarely included sufficient proportions of racial and ethnic minorities, which contributed to biases in ML models for minority women. Our goal is to determine whether ML models could serve to predict depression in early pregnancy in racial/ethnic minority women by leveraging EMR data. We extracted EMRs from a hospital in a large urban city that mostly served low-income Black and Hispanic women (N=5,875) in the U.S. Depressive symptom severity was assessed from a self-reported questionnaire, PHQ-9. We investigated multiple ML classifiers, used Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) for model interpretation, and determined model prediction bias with two metrics, Disparate Impact, and Equal Opportunity Difference. While ML model (Elastic Net) performance was low (ROCAUC=0.67), we identified well-known factors associated with PND, such as unplanned pregnancy and being single, as well as underexplored factors, such as self-report pain levels, lower levels of prenatal vitamin supplement intake, asthma, carrying a male fetus, and lower platelet levels blood. Our findings showed that despite being based on a sample mostly composed of 75% low-income minority women (54% Black and 27% Latina), the model performance was lower for these communities. In conclusion, ML models based on EMRs could moderately predict depression in early pregnancy, but their performance is biased against low-income minority women.