Social Carpooling-Based Road Congestion Mitigation: A Three-Level Analysis

Why is traffic congestion getting worse? A decomposition of the contributors to growing congestion in San Francisco-Determining the Role of TNCs

Understanding transit ridership in an equity context through a comparison of statistical and machine learning algorithms

Water quality assessment plays a crucial role in various aspects, including human health, environmental impact, agricultural productivity, and industrial processes. Machine learning (ML) algorithms offer the ability to automate water quality evaluation and allow for effective and rapid assessment of parameters associated with water quality. This article proposes an ML-based classification model for water quality prediction. The model was tested with 14 ML algorithms and considers 20 features that represent various substances present in water samples and their concentrations. The dataset used in the study comprises 7,996 samples, and the model development involves several stages, including data preprocessing, Yeo–Johnson transformation for data normalization, principal component analysis (PCA) for feature selection, and the application of the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) to address class imbalance. Performance metrics, such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score, are provided for each algorithm with and without SMOTE. LightGBM, XGBoost, CatBoost, and Random Forest were identified as the best-performing algorithms. XGBoost achieved the highest accuracy of 96.31% without SMOTE and had a precision of 0.933. The application of SMOTE enhanced the performance of CatBoost. These findings provide valuable insights for ML-based water quality assessment, aiding researchers and professionals in decision-making and management.

In the semiconductor manufacturing industry, Automatic Defect Classification (ADC) plays an important role in maintaining high wafer inspection quality and reducing yield loss. ADC performance has benefitted from using machine learning (ML) algorithms; however, performance is negatively affected by the data imbalance and limited amounts of training data. Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) is an oversampling technique to adjust the skewed class distribution of a dataset so that the bias of the majority class is reduced. This paper shows that applying SMOTE achieved higher accuracy and purity on two imbalanced datasets, consisting of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images collected with ASML-HMI eP™ and eScan® series inspection tools. The ML models are also less sensitive to the selection of hyperparameters when SMOTE is applied. We also show that better classification results can be obtained with less training samples with SMOTE; we conducted an experiment where a ML model trained on only 25% of samples with SMOTE achieved a higher ADC accuracy and purity performance compared to the same ML model trained on all samples but without SMOTE. In another experiment using a highly imbalanced SEM dataset with very few counts of the defect-of- interest (DOI), the combination of SMOTE and random undersampling of the majority class improves the accuracy by up to 5x while maintaining the same level of purity.

Investigating the applicability of ADAPTS activity-based model in air quality analysis

This study investigates the use of machine learning (ML) models combined with a Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) and its variants to predict perioperative pressure injuries (PIs) in an imbalanced dataset. PIs are a significant healthcare problem, often leading to prolonged hospitalization and increased medical costs. Conventional risk assessment scales are limited in their ability to predict PIs accurately, prompting the exploration of ML techniques to address this challenge.We utilized data from 7,292 patients admitted to a tertiary care hospital in Shanghai between May 2017 and July 2023, with a final dataset of 2,972 patients, including 158 with PIs. Seven ML algorithms-Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR), Random Forest (RF), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Extra Trees (ET), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and Decision Trees (DT)-were used in conjunction with SMOTE, SMOTE+ENN, Borderline-SMOTE, ADASYN, and GAN to balance the dataset and improve model performance.Results revealed significant improvements in model performance when SMOTE and its variants were used. For instance, the XGBoost model hadan AUC of 0.996 with SMOTE, compared to 0.800 on raw data. SMOTE+ENN and Borderline-SMOTE further enhanced the models' ability to identify minority classes. External validation indicatedthat XGBoost, RF, and ET exhibited the highest stability and accuracy, with XGBoost having an AUC of 0.977. SHAP analysis revealed that factors such as anesthesia grade, age, and serum albumin levels significantly influenced model predictions.In conclusion, integrating SMOTE with ML algorithms effectively addressed a data imbalance and improved the prediction of perioperative PIs. Future work should focus on refining SMOTE techniques and exploring their application to larger, multi-center datasets to enhance the generalizability of these findings, and especially for diseaseswith a lowincidence.

Transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber and Lyft have grown tremendously over the last decade, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nonetheless, relatively little publicly available data exist about the users of these services, their travel behaviors, volume of use, the times and locations of TNC trips, and how TNC services are affecting transportation system performance overall. This paper describes the methods and descriptive results of the first large-scale smartphone-based TNC user survey conducted in the California Bay Area in the fall 2018 and spring of 2019.

Imbalance data is common in real-world applications like text categorization, face recognition for gender classification, medical diagnosis, fraud detection, oil-spills detection of satellite images. Most of the algorithms in machine learning are focusing on classification of majority class while ignoring or misclassifying minority sample. The minority samples are those that rarely occur but very important. It is commonly agreed that standard classifiers such as neural networks, support vector machines, and C4.5 are heavily biased in recognizing mostly the majority class since they are built to achieve overall accuracy to which the minority class contributes very little. In this study, we demonstrate how the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) can significantly improve the imbalance problem in gender classification from the data-level perspective. Hu’s moment of the face images was generated as the numerical descriptors with different imbalance ratio and classified using a supervised decision tree (J48) algorithm. The results show that prior to preprocessing the data with SMOTE, the minority group was severely misclassified as the majority group. Our claims are confirmed through the application of SMOTE in reducing the imbalance effects before inducing the decision tree.

An artificial intelligence-based decision support system for early and accurate diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease

Pooled rideshare is considered an effective future travel mode for improving vehicle utilization and reducing congestion in urban transportation systems. However, its adoption remains limited due to insufficient passenger acceptance and uncertain economic benefits for transportation network companies (TNCs). The emergence of autonomous vehicles brings new momentum to pooled ridesharing services through centralized fleet management. Nevertheless, most existing studies examine traveler behavior and fleet operations separately, leaving the interaction between passenger preferences and operational strategies insufficiently represented. This study proposed an integrated behavioral–operational framework that jointly considers traveler choice behavior and fleet management decisions. An Integrated Choice and Latent Variable (ICLV) model is estimated using 8296 national survey responses collected in the United States in 2025 to capture post-pandemic traveler attitudes toward pooled rideshare. The behavioral model is embedded into a proactive assignment and repositioning strategy implemented on the POLARIS agent-based simulation platform. Simulation experiments are conducted in two urban networks, Greenville (SC) and Austin (TX), under multiple fleet size scenarios. Results show that the new pooling behavior model significantly increases pooling adoption compared with the previous mixed logit model, indicating that it better captures real-world traveler behavior. And the higher pooling adoption also reshapes the TNC trip structure in Greenville. Compared to the baseline in the POLARIS platform, the integrated framework increases pooling adoption and TNC profitability while reducing VMT, empty seat rates, and overall energy consumption. These findings provide insights for the sustainable deployment of pooled SAV services in heterogeneous urban environments.

In this paper, the problem that consists of the four travel choices (i.e., trip generation, trip distribution, modal split, and traffic assignment) with variable demand is deliberately formulated as a non-linear mathematical model. The associated optimality conditions are presented. A heuristic solution algorithm that adopts combined model concept was proposed. By way of supernetwork techniques, each combined model can be addressed as an “extended” traffic assignment problem and solved using any available traffic assignment solution algorithm. As compared with the traditional four-step travel demand forecasting procedure, this heuristic has advantage of considering the travelers' travel behavior throughout the solution procedure and hence more suitable to be applied to the transportation planning applications in the real world.

Prediction of dark cutting carcasses in cattle using machine learning algorithms with stockperson actions and animal behaviors at abattoir: A study in Türkiye.

Diabetes is a chronic disease that continues to be a primary and worldwide health concern since the health of the entire population has been affected by it. Over the years, many academics have attempted to develop a reliable diabetes prediction model using machine learning (ML) algorithms. However, these research investigations have had a minimal impact on clinical practice as the current studies focus mainly on improving the performance of complicated ML models while ignoring their explainability to clinical situations. Therefore, the physicians find it difficult to understand these models and rarely trust them for clinical use. In this study, a carefully constructed, efficient, and interpretable diabetes detection method using an explainable AI has been proposed. The Pima Indian diabetes dataset was used, containing a total of 768 instances where 268 are diabetic, and 500 cases are non-diabetic with several diabetic attributes. Here, six machine learning algorithms (artificial neural network (ANN), random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR), AdaBoost, XGBoost) have been used along with an ensemble classifier to diagnose the diabetes disease. For each machine learning model, global and local explanations have been produced using the Shapley additive explanations (SHAP), which are represented in different types of graphs to help physicians in understanding the model predictions. The balanced accuracy of the developed weighted ensemble model was 90% with a F1 score of 89% using a five-fold cross-validation (CV). The median values were used for the imputation of the missing values and the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTETomek) was used to balance the classes of the dataset. The proposed approach can improve the clinical understanding of a diabetes diagnosis and help in taking necessary action at the very early stages of the disease.

to predict vestibular schwannoma (VS) response to radiosurgery by applying machine learning (ML) algorithms on radiomic features extracted from pre-treatment magnetic resonance (MR) images. patients with VS treated with radiosurgery in two Centers from 2004 to 2016 were retrospectively evaluated. Brain T1-weighted contrast-enhanced MR images were acquired before and at 24 and 36 months after treatment. Clinical and treatment data were collected contextually. Treatment responses were assessed considering the VS volume variation based on pre- and post-radiosurgery MR images at both time points. Tumors were semi-automatically segmented and radiomic features were extracted. Four ML algorithms (Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, Neural Network, and extreme Gradient Boosting) were trained and tested for treatment response (i.e., increased or non-increased tumor volume) using nested cross-validation. For training, feature selection was performed using the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator, and the selected features were used as input to separately build the four ML classification algorithms. To overcome class imbalance during training, Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique was used. Finally, trained models were tested on the corresponding held out set of patients to evaluate balanced accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. 108 patients treated with Cyberknife® were retrieved; an increased tumor volume was observed at 24 months in 12 patients, and at 36 months in another group of 12 patients. The Neural Network was the best predictive algorithm for response at 24 (balanced accuracy 73% ± 18%, specificity 85% ± 12%, sensitivity 60% ± 42%) and 36 months (balanced accuracy 65% ± 12%, specificity 83% ± 9%, sensitivity 47% ± 27%). radiomics may predict VS response to radiosurgery avoiding long-term follow-up as well as unnecessary treatment.

Skewed fat-tailed distributed (imbalance or class-imbalance) datasets pose over- whelming aberrations in numerous machine learning (ML) algorithms, particularly in real-life applications, especially in the domain of credit risk modelling, where default cases (minority-classes) are often outnumbered by non-default cases (majority-classes) cases or vice versa. Data-level (DL) approaches have been suggested in the recent literature as remedies for skewed fat-tailed distributed datasets. The popularized DL approach in contemporary studies is the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) and its variants that are capable of mitigating the risk of overfitting and minimizing the generalization errors. However, these approaches can introduce noisy instances that adversely diminish the robustness of the ML algorithms. Also, they are often amenable to the presence of nominal features with mismatching labels that are inherent in real-world datasets. To bridge these gaps, we proposed a hybrid innovation framework that effectively mitigates the aberrations presented by nominal features with mismatching labels and noisy instances simultaneously. The proposed approach is the SMOTE-edited nearest neighbors-encoding nominal and continuous (SMOTEENN-ENC) features. The efficacy of our novelty was evaluated against DL approaches suggested in the literature, orchestrated to handle skewed fat-tailed distributed datasets with inherent diverse features. This approach was coupled with widely employed ensemble algorithms, namely the random forest (RF) and the extreme gradient boost (XGBoost). The results suggested that our novelty, SMOTEENN-ENC, integrated with the XGBoost algorithm demonstrated superiority and stability in the predictive performance when applied to skewed fat-tailed distributed datasets with inherent diverse features.