The cornerstone of stroke care is expedient management that varies depending on the time since stroke onset. Consequently, clinical decision making is centered on accurate knowledge of timing and often requires a radiologist to interpret Computed Tomography (CT) of the brain to confirm the occurrence and age of an event. These tasks are particularly challenging due to the subtle expression of acute ischemic lesions and the dynamic nature of their appearance. Automation efforts have not yet applied deep learning to estimate lesion age and treated these two tasks independently, so, have overlooked their inherent complementary relationship. To leverage this, we propose a novel end-to-end multi-task transformer-based network optimized for concurrent segmentation and age estimation of cerebral ischemic lesions. By utilizing gated positional self-attention and CT-specific data augmentation, the proposed method can capture long-range spatial dependencies while maintaining its ability to be trained from scratch under low-data regimes commonly found in medical imaging. Furthermore, to better combine multiple predictions, we incorporate uncertainty by utilizing quantile loss to facilitate estimating a probability density function of lesion age. The effectiveness of our model is then extensively evaluated on a clinical dataset consisting of 776 CT images from two medical centers. Experimental results demonstrate that our method obtains promising performance, with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.933 for classifying lesion ages <=4.5 hours compared to 0.858 using a conventional approach, and outperforms task-specific state-of-the-art algorithms.
A causal decomposition analysis allows researchers to determine whether the difference in a health outcome between two groups can be attributed to a difference in each group's distribution of one or more modifiable mediator variables. With this knowledge, researchers and policymakers can focus on designing interventions that target these mediator variables. Existing methods for causal decomposition analysis either focus on one mediator variable or assume that each mediator variable is conditionally independent given the group label and the mediator-outcome confounders. In this paper, we propose a flexible causal decomposition analysis method that can accommodate multiple correlated and interacting mediator variables, which are frequently seen in studies of health behaviors and studies of environmental pollutants. We extend a Monte Carlo-based causal decomposition analysis method to this setting by using a multivariate mediator model that can accommodate any combination of binary and continuous mediator variables. Furthermore, we state the causal assumptions needed to identify both joint and path-specific decomposition effects through each mediator variable. To illustrate the reduction in bias and confidence interval width of the decomposition effects under our proposed method, we perform a simulation study. We also apply our approach to examine whether differences in smoking status and dietary inflammation score explain any of the Black-White differences in incident diabetes using data from a national cohort study.
Predictive maintenance plays a critical role in ensuring the uninterrupted operation of industrial systems and mitigating the potential risks associated with system failures. This study focuses on sensor-based condition monitoring and explores the application of deep learning techniques using a hydraulic system testbed dataset. Our investigation involves comparing the performance of three models: a baseline model employing conventional methods, a single CNN model with early sensor fusion, and a two-lane CNN model (2L-CNN) with late sensor fusion. The baseline model achieves an impressive test error rate of 1% by employing late sensor fusion, where feature extraction is performed individually for each sensor. However, the CNN model encounters challenges due to the diverse sensor characteristics, resulting in an error rate of 20.5%. To further investigate this issue, we conduct separate training for each sensor and observe variations in accuracy. Additionally, we evaluate the performance of the 2L-CNN model, which demonstrates significant improvement by reducing the error rate by 33% when considering the combination of the least and most optimal sensors. This study underscores the importance of effectively addressing the complexities posed by multi-sensor systems in sensor-based condition monitoring.
Sleep is the primary mean of recovery from accumulated fatigue and thus plays a crucial role in fostering people's mental and physical well-being. Sleep quality monitoring systems are often implemented using wearables that leverage their sensing capabilities to provide sleep behaviour insights and recommendations to users. Building models to estimate sleep quality from sensor data is a challenging task, due to the variability of both physiological data, perception of sleep quality, and the daily routine across users. This challenge gauges the need for a comprehensive dataset that includes information about the daily behaviour of users, physiological signals as well as the perceived sleep quality. In this paper, we try to narrow this gap by proposing Bilateral Heart rate from multiple devices and body positions for Sleep measurement (BiHeartS) dataset. The dataset is collected in the wild from 10 participants for 30 consecutive nights. Both research-grade and commercial wearable devices are included in the data collection campaign. Also, comprehensive self-reports are collected about the sleep quality and the daily routine.
We investigate the properties of random feature ridge regression (RFRR) given by a two-layer neural network with random Gaussian initialization. We study the non-asymptotic behaviors of the RFRR with nearly orthogonal deterministic unit-length input data vectors in the overparameterized regime, where the width of the first layer is much larger than the sample size. Our analysis shows high-probability non-asymptotic concentration results for the training errors, cross-validations, and generalization errors of RFRR centered around their respective values for a kernel ridge regression (KRR). This KRR is derived from an expected kernel generated by a nonlinear random feature map. We then approximate the performance of the KRR by a polynomial kernel matrix obtained from the Hermite polynomial expansion of the activation function, whose degree only depends on the orthogonality among different data points. This polynomial kernel determines the asymptotic behavior of the RFRR and the KRR. Our results hold for a wide variety of activation functions and input data sets that exhibit nearly orthogonal properties. Based on these approximations, we obtain a lower bound for the generalization error of the RFRR for a nonlinear student-teacher model.
While there is wide agreement that physical activity is an important component of a healthy lifestyle, it is unclear how many people adhere to public health recommendations on physical activity. The Physical Activity Guidelines (PAG), published by the CDC, provide guidelines to American adults, but it is difficult to assess compliance with these guidelines. The PAG further complicate adherence assessment by recommending activity to occur in at least 10 minute bouts. To better understand the measurement capabilities of various instruments to quantify activity, and to propose an approach to evaluate activity relative to the PAG, researchers at Iowa State University administered the Physical Activity Measurement Survey (PAMS) to over 1,000 participants in four different Iowa counties. In this paper, we develop a two-part Bayesian measurement error model and apply it to the PAMS data in order to assess compliance to the PAG in the Iowa adult population. The model accurately accounts for the 10 minute bout requirement put forth in the PAG. The measurement error model corrects biased estimates and accounts for day to day variation in activity. The model is also applied to the nationally representative National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
Robustness to adversarial attacks is typically evaluated with adversarial accuracy. While essential, this metric does not capture all aspects of robustness and in particular leaves out the question of how many perturbations can be found for each point. In this work, we introduce an alternative approach, adversarial sparsity, which quantifies how difficult it is to find a successful perturbation given both an input point and a constraint on the direction of the perturbation. We show that sparsity provides valuable insight into neural networks in multiple ways: for instance, it illustrates important differences between current state-of-the-art robust models them that accuracy analysis does not, and suggests approaches for improving their robustness. When applying broken defenses effective against weak attacks but not strong ones, sparsity can discriminate between the totally ineffective and the partially effective defenses. Finally, with sparsity we can measure increases in robustness that do not affect accuracy: we show for example that data augmentation can by itself increase adversarial robustness, without using adversarial training.
Temporal irreversibility, often referred to as the arrow of time, is a fundamental concept in statistical mechanics. Markers of irreversibility also provide a powerful characterisation of information processing in biological systems. However, current approaches tend to describe temporal irreversibility in terms of a single scalar quantity, without disentangling the underlying dynamics that contribute to irreversibility. Here we propose a broadly applicable information-theoretic framework to characterise the arrow of time in multivariate time series, which yields qualitatively different types of irreversible information dynamics. This multidimensional characterisation reveals previously unreported high-order modes of irreversibility, and establishes a formal connection between recent heuristic markers of temporal irreversibility and metrics of information processing. We demonstrate the prevalence of high-order irreversibility in the hyperactive regime of a biophysical model of brain dynamics, showing that our framework is both theoretically principled and empirically useful. This work challenges the view of the arrow of time as a monolithic entity, enhancing both our theoretical understanding of irreversibility and our ability to detect it in practical applications.
Biomedical Natural Language Processing (NLP) tends to become cumbersome for most researchers, frequently due to the amount and heterogeneity of text to be processed. To address this challenge, the industry is continuously developing highly efficient tools and creating more flexible engineering solutions. This work presents the integration between industry data engineering solutions for efficient data processing and academic systems developed for Named Entity Recognition (LasigeUnicage\_NER) and Relation Extraction (BiOnt). Our design reflects an integration of those components with external knowledge in the form of additional training data from other datasets and biomedical ontologies. We used this pipeline in the 2022 LitCoin NLP Challenge, where our team LasigeUnicage was awarded the 7th Prize out of approximately 200 participating teams, reflecting a successful collaboration between the academia (LASIGE) and the industry (Unicage). The software supporting this work is available at \url{//github.com/lasigeBioTM/Litcoin-Lasige_Unicage}.
The decentralized and privacy-preserving nature of federated learning (FL) makes it vulnerable to backdoor attacks aiming to manipulate the behavior of the resulting model on specific adversary-chosen inputs. However, most existing defenses based on statistical differences take effect only against specific attacks, especially when the malicious gradients are similar to benign ones or the data are highly non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID). In this paper, we revisit the distance-based defense methods and discover that i) Euclidean distance becomes meaningless in high dimensions and ii) malicious gradients with diverse characteristics cannot be identified by a single metric. To this end, we present a simple yet effective defense strategy with multi-metrics and dynamic weighting to identify backdoors adaptively. Furthermore, our novel defense has no reliance on predefined assumptions over attack settings or data distributions and little impact on benign performance. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct comprehensive experiments on different datasets under various attack settings, where our method achieves the best defensive performance. For instance, we achieve the lowest backdoor accuracy of 3.06% under the difficult Edge-case PGD, showing significant superiority over previous defenses. The results also demonstrate that our method can be well-adapted to a wide range of non-IID degrees without sacrificing the benign performance.
This paper does not describe a working system. Instead, it presents a single idea about representation which allows advances made by several different groups to be combined into an imaginary system called GLOM. The advances include transformers, neural fields, contrastive representation learning, distillation and capsules. GLOM answers the question: How can a neural network with a fixed architecture parse an image into a part-whole hierarchy which has a different structure for each image? The idea is simply to use islands of identical vectors to represent the nodes in the parse tree. If GLOM can be made to work, it should significantly improve the interpretability of the representations produced by transformer-like systems when applied to vision or language