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Forecasting of load is essential for operating power systems. India recently witnessed one of the worst power crisis with the highest ever power demand of 207 GW on April 29, 2022. The demand in the month of May and June 2022 was estimated to reach 215 GW. The peak demand this year 2023, according to the electricity ministry, is predicted to be around 230 GW from April to June. The inability to meet certain fundamental issues as power can take a toll on any country's economy. Proper prediction helps in proper decision making and planning. The main objective of this paper is to predict day ahead electrical load demand for Assam. Statistical and Machine Learning Algorithms has been studied. The study has been carried out using real-time data for the years 2016, 2017 and 2018. The paper presents a detailed analysis of the different hyper parameters of the deep learning models and their effect is seen on the learning efficiency. A novel stacked forecasting model is proposed using neural networks as base learners and CatBoost as the meta-learner. The performance of the proposed model has been evaluated and compared with individual models in terms of training time and accuracy using different error metrics namely MAE, MSE, RMSE, MAPE and R2 score. A comparison of the proposed prediction model with the prediction models available in literature has been presented. The conclusion states that both the statistical and machine learning algorithms used in this study act as useful tools for daily load forecasting with considerable accuracy; yet machine learning algorithm outperforms the statistical methods. The entire work has been done in Google Colaboratory using Python as the programming language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engagement has been defined as an attitude toward work, as a positive, satisfying, work‐related state of mind characterized by high levels of vigour, dedication, and absorption. Both its definition and its assessment have been controversial; however, new methods for its assessment, including artificial intelligence (AI), have been introduced in recent years. Therefore, this research aims to determine the state of the art of AI in the study of engagement. To this end, we conducted a systematic review in accordance with PRISMA to analyse the publications to date on the use of AI for the analysis of engagement. The search, carried out in six databases, was filtered, and 15 papers were finally analysed. The results show that AI has been used mainly to assess and predict engagement levels, as well as to understand the relationships between engagement and other variables. The most commonly used AI techniques are machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), and all publications use structured and unstructured data, mainly from self‐report instruments, social networks, and datasets. The accuracy of the models varies from 22% to 87%, and its main benefit has been to help both managers and HR staff understand employee engagement, although it has also contributed to research. Most of the articles have been published since 2015, and the geography has been global, with publications predominantly in India and the US. In conclusion, this study highlights the state of the art in AI for the study of engagement and concludes that the number of publications is increasing, indicating that this is possibly a new field or area of research in which important advances can be made in the study of engagement through new and novel techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text classification involves organizing textual information into predefined classes, a task which is particularly useful in domains like sentiment analysis, spam detection, and content labeling. In India, where a massive amount of information is generated daily through newspapers and social media, Hindi is one of the most widely used and spoken languages. However, there is limited research on Hindi text classification and, particularly, regarding Hindi news classification. This paper presents a research study to classify Hindi news articles published in Hindi-language newspapers in India by using and comparing various Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) algorithms. To prepare the textual news data for classification, pre-processing and feature engineering techniques, such as count vectorizer, Tf-Idf vectorizer and Doc2Vec, were used and applied to convert texts into vectors. This pre-processing step on the textual data was very challenging due to the presence of multimodal words, conjunctions, punctuation, and special characters in Hindi texts. The study considered Hindi news headlines from predetermined categories (Science, Sports, Entertainment and Business) and, among the different ML and DL models tested and evaluated, Linear Regression with Doc2Vec vectorizer and SGD classifier with Tf-Idf vectorizer produced best accuracies of 97.04% and 96.59%, respectively. The best performing DL model was found to be the Bi-LSTM with an accuracy of approximately 97% on the testing data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant majority of the population in India makes their living through agriculture. Different illnesses that develop due to changing weather patterns and are caused by pathogenic organisms impact the yields of diverse plant species. The present article analyzed some of the existing techniques in terms of data sources, pre-processing techniques, feature extraction techniques, data augmentation techniques, models utilized for detecting and classifying diseases that affect the plant, how the quality of images was enhanced, how overfitting of the model was reduced, and accuracy. The research papers for this study were selected using various keywords from peer-reviewed publications from various databases published between 2010 and 2022. A total of 182 papers were identified and reviewed for their direct relevance to plant disease detection and classification, of which 75 papers were selected for this review after exclusion based on the title, abstract, conclusion, and full text. Researchers will find this work to be a useful resource in recognizing the potential of various existing techniques through data-driven approaches while identifying plant diseases by enhancing system performance and accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In India, agriculture serves as the backbone of the economy, and is a primary source of employment. Despite the setbacks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the agriculture and allied sectors in India exhibited resilience, registered a growth of 3.4% during 2020–2121, even as the overall economic growth declined by 7.2% during the same period. The improvement of the agriculture sector holds paramount importance in sustaining the increasing population and safeguarding food security. Consequently, researchers worldwide have been concentrating on digitally transforming agriculture by leveraging advanced technologies to establish smart, sustainable, and lucrative farming systems. The advancement in remote sensing (RS) and machine learning (ML) has proven beneficial for farmers and policymakers in minimizing crop losses and optimizing resource utilization through valuable crop insights. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of studies dedicated to the application of RS and ML in addressing agriculture-related challenges in India. We conducted a systematic literature review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines and evaluated research articles published from 2015 to 2022. The objective of this study is to shed light on the application of both RS and ML technique across key agricultural domains, encompassing "crop management", "soil management", and "water management, ultimately leading to their improvement. This study primarily focuses on assessing the current status of using intelligent geospatial data analytics in Indian agriculture. Majority of the studies were carried out in the crop management category, where the deployment of various RS sensors led yielded substantial improvements in agricultural monitoring. The integration of remote sensing technology and machine learning techniques can enable an intelligent approach to agricultural monitoring, thereby providing valuable recommendations and insights for effective agricultural management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Silicosis has been one of the most serious occupational public health problems worldwide for many decades. The global burden of silicosis is largely unknown, although it is thought to be more prevalent in low and medium-income countries. Individual studies among workers exposed to silica dust in various industries, however, reveal a high prevalence of silicosis in India. This paper is an updated review of the novel challenges and opportunities for silicosis prevention and control in India. Main body: The unregulated informal sector employs workers on contractual appointment thereby insulating the employers from legislative provisions. Due to a lack of awareness of the serious health risks and low-income levels, symptomatic workers tend to disregard the symptoms and continue working in dusty environments. To prevent any future dust exposure, the workers must be moved to an alternative job in the same factory where they will not be exposed to silica dust. Government regulatory bodies, on the other hand, must guarantee that factory owners relocate workers to another vocation as soon as they exhibit signs of silicosis. Technological advances such as artificial intelligence and machine learning might assist industries in implementing effective and cost-saving dust control measures. A surveillance system needs to be established for the early detection and tracking of all patients with silicosis. A pneumoconiosis elimination program encompassing health promotion, personal protection, diagnostic criteria, preventive measures, symptomatic management, prevention of silica dust exposure, treatment, and rehabilitation is felt important for wider adoption. Conclusion: Silica dust exposure and its consequences are fully preventable, with the benefits of prevention considerably outweighing the benefits of treating patients with silicosis. A comprehensive national health program on silicosis within the public health system would strengthen surveillance, notification, and management of workers exposed to silica dust in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the importance of investigating DR using machine learning and a computational method to rank DR risk factors by importance using different machine learning models. The dataset was collected from four large population-based studies conducted in India between 2001 and 2010 on the prevalence of DR and its risk factors. We deployed different machine learning models on the dataset to rank the importance of the variables (risk factors). The study uses a t-test and Shapely additive explanations (SHAP) to rank the risk factors. Then, it uses five machine learning models (K-Nearest Neighbor, Decision Tree, Support Vector Machines, Logistic Regression, and Naive Bayes) to identify the unimportant risk factors based on the area under the curve criterion to predict DR. To determine the overall significance of risk variables, a weighted average of each classifier's importance is used. The ranking of risk variables is provided to machine learning models. To construct a model for DR prediction, the combination of risk factors with the highest AUC is chosen. The results show that the risk factors glycosylated hemoglobin and systolic blood pressure were present in the top three risk factors for DR in all five machine learning models when the t-test was used for ranking. Furthermore, the risk factors, namely, systolic blood pressure and history of hypertension, were present in the top five risk factors for DR in all the machine learning models when SHAP was used for ranking. Finally, when an ensemble of the five machine learning models was employed, independently with both the t-test and SHAP, systolic blood pressure and diabetes mellitus duration were present in the top four risk factors for diabetic retinopathy. Decision Tree and K-Nearest Neighbor resulted in the highest AUCs of 0.79 (t-test) and 0.77 (SHAP). Moreover, K-Nearest Neighbor predicted DR with 82.6% (t-test) and 78.3% (SHAP) accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are increasingly utilized in share market services due to significant efficiencies and benefits for companies and investors across the globe. This has resulted in an alteration in the firm's business models and has a potential impact on the effectiveness of the share market and could harm investors. Indian share market is also witnessing the usage of this technology by market intermediaries. The present regulatory framework of Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on share market intermediaries is not dealing with the Fintech/technology 2.0-based products and services offered in retail trading and investment advisor platforms in India. The research is primarily based on the normative method presenting a qualitative analysis of the usage of AI & ML in various business models by share market intermediaries. How various share market regulators are addressing and regulating this technology usage and their judicial exposition. The paper concludes that the Indian share market is no exception & SEBI require to look at this new transformation and address the challenges posed by it. SEBI needs to take a proactive step to promote, guide & regulate usages of AI & ML which is gradually seeking the attention of Indian share market intermediaries into their business models and get the maximum benefit out of these technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change poses a major threat to global food security. Agricultural systems that rely on monsoon rainfall are especially vulnerable to changes in climate variability. This paper uses machine learning to deepen understanding of how monsoon variability impacts agricultural productivity. We demonstrate that random forest modelling is effective in representing rice production variability in response to monsoon weather variability. Our random forest modelling found monsoon weather predictors explain similar levels of detrended anomaly variation in both rice yield (33%) and area harvested (35%). The role of weather in explaining harvested rice area highlights that production area changes are an important pathway through which weather extremes impact agricultural productivity, which may exacerbate losses that occur through changes in per-area yields. We find that downwelling shortwave radiation flux is the most important weather variable in explaining variation in yield anomalies, with proportion of area under irrigation being the most important predictor overall. Machine learning modelling is capable of representing crop-climate variability in monsoonal agriculture and reveals additional information compared to traditional parametric models. For example, non-linear yield and area responses of irrigation, monsoon onset and season length all match biophysical expectations. Overall, we find that random forest modelling can reveal complex non-linearities and interactions between climate and rice production variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landslides are a significant issue in India due to the country's varied topography, heavy monsoon rains, and deforestation, which contribute to soil instability and increased landslide risk. These natural disasters can cause damage to infrastructure and loss of life. In light of the ongoing problem of landslides in India, this research paper aims to address the need for effective landslide prediction strategies. Through the findings of this research study, a novel approach has been presented for predicting landslide occurrences in India, which will aid in reducing the impact of these events on infrastructure, communities, and lives. The work that has been carried out using data and information based in India has shown to have a low accuracy level. As a result, the model created using this information is not deemed to be very reliable. This study focuses on predicting landslides in India using machine learning models such as (Xtreme Gradient Boost) XGboost, random forest, and AdaBoost. Previous research on landslide prediction in India had not been widely done or had not achieved acceptable accuracy levels. This study aims to address this gap in knowledge and improve the predictability of landslides in India. The research is based on a database of different areas in India and aims to increase awareness and save lives and resources by predicting landslides with 91% accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim/Purpose This paper aims to analyze the availability and pricing of perishable farm produce before and during the lockdown restrictions imposed due to Covid-19. This paper also proposes machine learning and deep learning models to help the farmers decide on an appropriate market to sell their farm produce and get a fair price for their product. Background Developing countries like India have regulated agricultural markets governed by country-specific protective laws like the Essential Commodities Act and the Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) Act. These regulations restrict the sale of agricultural produce to a predefined set of local markets. Covid-19 pandemic led to a lockdown during the first half of 2020 which resulted in supply disruption and demand-supply mismatch of agricultural commodities at these local markets. These demand-supply dynamics led to disruptions in the pricing of the farm produce leading to a lower price realization for farmers. Hence it is essential to analyze the impact of this disruption on the pricing of farm produce at a granular level. Moreover, the farmers need a tool that guides them with the most suitable market/city/town to sell their farm produce to get a fair price. Methodology One hundred and fifty thousand samples from the agricultural dataset, released by the Government of India, were used to perform statistical analysis and identify the supply disruptions as well as price disruptions of perishable agricultural produce. In addition, more than seventeen thousand samples were used to implement and train machine learning and deep learning models that can predict and guide the farmers about the appropriate market to sell their farm produce. In essence, the paper uses descriptive analytics to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on agricultural produce pricing. The paper explores the usage of prescriptive analytics to recommend an appropriate market to sell agricultural produce. Contribution Five machine learning models based on Logistic Regression, K-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, and Gradient Boosting, and three deep learning models based on Artificial Neural Networks were implemented. The performance of these models was compared using metrics like Precision, Recall, Accuracy, and F1-Score. Findings Among the five classification models, the Gradient Boosting classifier was the optimal classifier that achieved precision, recall, accuracy, and F1 score of 99%. Out of the three deep learning models, the Adam optimizer-based deep neural network achieved precision, recall, accuracy, and F1 score of 99%. Recommendations for Practitioners Gradient boosting technique and Adam-based deep learning model should be the preferred choice for analyzing agricultural pricing-related problems. Recommendations for Researchers Ensemble learning techniques like Random Forest and Gradient boosting perform better than non-Ensemble classification techniques. Hyperparameter tuning is an essential step in developing these models and it improves the performance of the model. Impact on Society Statistical analysis of the data revealed the true nature of demand and supply and price disruption. This analysis helps to assess the revenue impact borne by the farmers due to Covid-19. The machine learning and deep learning models help the farmers to get a better price for their crops. Though the dataset used in this paper is related to India, the outcome of this research work applies to many developing countries that have similar regulated markets. Hence farmers from developing countries across the world can benefit from the outcome of this research work. Future Research The machine learning and deep learning models were implemented and tested for markets in and around Bangalore. The model can be expanded to cover other markets within India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

About 10.5 percent of global adult population is living with diabetes. India has 77 million diabetic patients, it is the second highest in the world. Developing countries such as India face a huge burden of diabetes and its complications. Even children at the age of five are suffering from this disease. It is high time that people understand the gravity of the situation and make themselves fit to fight the disease than to suffer with it. If diabetes is not identified and treated in right time, it may lead to chronical health issues. In this paper a machine learning based prediction model is built to find the factors leading to complicated health issues such as cardio vascular disease. This model identifies the attributes that highly contribute to cardio vascular disease and compare various machine learning algorithms to predict cardio vascular disease among diabetic patients. It identifies the best algorithm from a set of supervised learning algorithms such as KNN, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Naïve Bayes and Gradient Boosting for prediction based on several performance metrics. The algorithms are compared based on the performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, time taken to train and time taken to test. We identified that Decision Tree with entropy as the split criterion achieved the highest accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the growing significance of solar energy, the paper presents the findings of the maiden study on the long-term seasonal performance assessment of three PV module technologies—monocrystalline (m-Si), polycrystalline (p-Si), and amorphous silicon (a-Si) housed in a 1 MW solar plant installed at a local steppe climate in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India using the key performance indicators (KPIs), daily power generation, final yield (Y f), reference yield (Y r), total energy loss (T EL) and performance ratio (PR). Notably, the am-Si PV modules were found to be the best performing technology, with an average PR of 71.26% and the lowest average total energy loss of 631 h during the monitored period. Moreover, PV systems have become more popular as a source of green, clean energy; yet, they have low base-load energy sustainability. Explainable AI (XAI) aids in understanding predictions made by the machine learning models. The importance of XAI lies in the comprehension and trust which is embedded into the results of machine learning algorithms. Therefore, the present work builds a comprehensive XAI model for predicting KPIs and assesses the performance of several learning algorithms using R-value, MAE, the number of iterations, and execution time. The Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm predicts the KPIs for p-Si, am-Si, and m-Si with prediction accuracies of 98.63%, 98.58%, and 90.09%, respectively. In summary, this study not only advances our understanding of PV module performance in a steppe climate context but also contributes to the broader field by integrating an XAI model for transparent and reliable predictions of the KPIs. [Display omitted] • Comparison of m-Si, p-Si, and a-Si PV modules in a 1 MW solar plant, Gandhinagar, India, showed long-term performance. • a-Si PV modules outperformed with a 71.26% PR and the lowest 631 hours energy loss, surpassing m-Si and p-Si technologies. • Study underscores XAI's role in ML predictions, developing a robust model to predict KPIs and evaluate learning algorithms. • Levenberg-Marquardt showed high accuracy: 98.63% for p-Si, 98.58% for a-Si, and 90.09% for m-Si PV modules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anemia is one of the most pressing public health issues in the world with iron deficiency a major public health issue worldwide. The highest prevalence of anemia is in developing countries. The complete blood count is a blood test used to diagnose the prevalence of anemia. While earlier studies have framed the problem of diagnosis as a binary classification problem, this paper frames it as a multi class (three classes) classification problem with mild, moderate and severe classes. The three classes for the anemia classification (mild, moderate, severe) are so chosen as the world health organization (WHO) guidelines formalize this categorization based on the Haemoglobin (HGB) values of the chosen sample of patients in the Complete Blood Count (CBC) patient data set. Complete blood count test data was collected in an outpatient clinical setting in India. We used Feature selection with Majority voting to identify the key attributes in the input patient data set. In addition, since the original data set was imbalanced we used Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) to balance the data set. Four data sets including the original data set were used to perform the data experiments. Six standard machine learning algorithms were utilised to test our four data sets, performing multi class classification. Benchmarking these algorithms was performed and tabulated using both10 fold cross validation and hold out methods. The experimental results indicated that multilayer perceptron network was predominantly giving good recall values across mild and moderate class which are early and middle stages of the disease. With a good prediction model at early stages, medical intervention can provide preventive measure from further deterioration into severe stage or recommend the use of supplements to overcome this problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air is one of the most fundamental constituents for the sustenance of life on earth. The meteorological, traffic factors, consumption of nonrenewable energy sources, and industrial parameters are steadily increasing air pollution. These factors affect the welfare and prosperity of life on earth; therefore, the nature of air quality in our environment needs to be monitored continuously. The Air Quality Index (AQI), which indicates air quality, is influenced by several individual factors such as the accumulation of NO2, CO, O3, PM2.5, SO2, and PM10. This research paper aims to predict and forecast the AQI with Machine Learning (ML) techniques, namely linear regression and time series analysis. Primarily, Multilinear Regression (MLR) model, supervised machine learning, is developed to predict AQI. NO2, Ozone(O2), PM 2.5, and SO2 sensor output collected from Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), Chennai region, India, fed as input features and optimized AQI calculated from sensor's output set as a target to train the regression model. The obtained model parameters are validated with new and unseen sensor output. The Key Performance Indices (KPI) like coefficient of determination, root mean square error, and mean absolute error were calculated to validate the model accuracy. The K-cross-fold validation for testing data of MLR was obtained as around 92%. Secondly, the Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) time series model is applied to forecast the AQI. The obtained model parameters were validated with unseen data with a timestamp. The forecasted AQI value of the next 15 days lies in a 95 % confidence interval zone. The model accuracy of test data was obtained as more than 80%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thyroid hormones are essential for all the metabolic and reproductive activities with significance to growth, and neuron development in the human body. The thyroid hormone dysfunction has many ill consequences, affecting the human population; thereby being a global epidemic. It is noticed that every one in 10 persons suffer from different thyroid disorders in India. In recent years, many researchers have implemented various disease predictive models based on Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Increasing the accuracy of disease classification is a critical and challenging task. To increase the accuracy of classification, in this paper, we propose a hybrid optimization algorithm‐based feature selection design for thyroid disease classifier with rough type‐2 fuzzy support vector machine. This work uses the hybrid optimization algorithm, which combines the firefly algorithm (FA) and butterfly optimization algorithm (BOA) to select the top‐n features. The proposed hybrid firefly butterfly optimization‐rough type‐2 fuzzy support vector machine (HFBO‐RT2FSVM) is evaluated with several key metrics such as specificity, accuracy, and sensitivity. We compare our approach with well‐known benchmark methods such as improved grey wolf optimization linear support vector machine (IGWO Linear SVM) and mixed‐kernel support vector machine (MKSVM) methods. From the experimental evaluations, we justify that our technique improves the accuracy by large thereby precise in identifying the thyroid disease. HFBO‐RT2FSVM model attained an accuracy of 99.28%, having specificity and sensitivity of 98 and 99.2%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How far the de-linking and morphological and hydrological degradation of tie channels connecting river to the wetland are caused for the areal and hydrological transformation of a wetland was not received enough attention in previous literature. This paper tried to explain this about the confluence reach of the Dwarka and Brahmni rivers in Moribund deltaic India. In order to explain the linkages 16 tie channels' change depicting variables and seven wetland area and hydrological transformation (consistency, hydro-period, water depth, water richness etc.) related variables were taken. Ordinary least square (OLS) regression was applied for explain the linkage. Machine learning approaches were applied for water richness mapping. Tie channel evolution was digitized from the Survey of India (SOI) toposheet (1974) and historical Google Earth images. The result revealed that, the tie channel witnessed morphological and hydrological degradations like channel constriction, channel clogging, flow lowering etc. and these were further identified as some vectors of areal shrinkage and growing hydrological insecurity in the linked wetlands. The total wetland area declined from 44.89 km2 to 16.86 km2 from 1991 to 2021. The rate of areal loss, shallowing WD, growing inconsistency of water presence, narrowing HP, and weakening WR was found high in recent times due to de-linking and degradations of tie channels. This approach of explanation of hydrological insecurity of wetland in relation to tie channel degradations, de-linking and findings are quite unique. So, re-linking and morphological correction of the tie channels would be a good policy for wetland restoration. • The floodplain wetland area was reduced by 37.55% between 1991 and 2021. • Tie channels were either lost or degraded losing sufficient water-carrying capacity. • Consistency, hydro-period, wetland depth declined in relation to tie channel loss. • De-linking of tie channel deteriorated water richness zone in wetlands. • Re-linking of tie channel could improve the hydrological condition of the wetland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the first fully homomorphic encryption scheme was published in 2009, many papers have been published on fully homomorphic encryption and its applications. Machine learning is one of the most interesting applications and has drawn a lot of attention from researchers. To better represent and understand the field of Homomorphic Encryption in Machine Learning (HEML), this paper utilizes automated citation and topic analysis to characterize the HEML research literature over the years and provide the bibliometrics assessments for this burgeoning field. This is conducted by using a bibliometric statistical analysis approach. We make use of web-based literature databases and automated tools to present the development of HEML. This allows us to target several popular topics for in-depth discussion. To achieve these goals, we have chosen the well-established Scopus literature database and analyzed them through keyword counts and Scopus relevance searches. The results show a relative increase in the number of papers published each year that involve both homomorphic cryptography and machine learning. Using text mining of articles titles, we have found that cloud computing is a popular topic in this field, which also includes neural networks, big data, and the Internet of Things. The analysis results show that China, the US, and India have generated almost half of all the research contributions in HEML. The citation statistics, keyword statistics, and topic analyses give us a quick overview of the development of the field, which can be of great help to new researchers. It is also possible to apply our methodology to other research areas, and we see great value in this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale tree planting has been advocated for decades in many countries as a cost-effective strategy to mitigate carbon, rejuvenate degraded landscapes, and support local livelihoods. Recent studies, however, suggest limited ecological and livelihood impacts of tree planting programs, indicating possible limits to tree planting as a natural climate solution. In this paper, we explore these carrying capacity-like limits by evaluating the site suitability of forestry landscapes of the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh using theory/expert-based rules and machine learning algorithms. We find that the state can only achieve a maximum of 31.54% forest cover due to socio-ecological and biophysical constraints, much less than India's goal of bringing 66% of the total geographical area of Himalayan states into forest cover. The low availability of suitable lands for growing trees, together with poor plantation site selection by forest range officers limit the use of tree planting as a sole climate mitigation strategy. To approach theoretical planting limits, we propose an ePSA (e-Plantation Site Assistant) recommendation system based on our site-suitability results to assist forest rangers in selecting suitable sites for planting trees. An initial deployment of the recommender system suggests its potential utility in shaping the long-term success of tree plantations as an effective carbon strategy in northern India and beyond. Overall, we argue that there is a need to realign over-ambitious national and international tree planting targets with actual limits from site characteristics to avoid massive wastage of funds and to obtain feasible carbon mitigation outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Feature engineering based framework for location-sensitive disaster event detection. • Augmentation of context-free and context-based features with place of occurrence. • Evaluation with unsupervised machine learning algorithm with 09 performance metrics. • AHP-TOPSIS based selection of an efficient machine learning algorithm and feature set. • Location-augmented context-based features outperformed traditional textual features. Disaster event detection aims to identify events like terrorist attacks, fire incidents, stampede incidents, building collapse, etc., reported in the online news articles or social media. Place of occurrence of disaster event is a significant feature associated with events for location-sensitive disaster event detection. Efficient feature selection and their augmentation with location information can contribute towards the evolution of traditional approaches and their adoption for location-sensitive disaster event detection leading to improvement in the overall process as a whole. Since the evaluation of event detection techniques deliberates various intrinsic and extrinsic performance metrics, the decision-making for the selection of feature sets is treated as a Multiple-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem. This paper proposes a framework, GeoClust , that is based on feature engineering of traditional textual features in order to enhance their capability for improved location-sensitive disaster event detection. The framework augments context-free and context-based textual feature sets with feature sets of place of occurrence of the events and evaluates their performance using unsupervised machine learning algorithms for various performance metrics. Finally, the best feature set is selected using AHP-TOPSIS technique of MCDM in order to tune the system for automatic and efficient location-sensitive disaster event detection in real-time. Extensive set of experiments have been performed in order to evaluate the framework on a dataset of online news articles reporting disaster events about terrorist attacks, fire incidents, stampede incidents, building collapse and maoist attacks happened at different locations in India. The results show that the location-augmented feature sets significantly improve performance of location-sensitive disaster event detection as compared with traditional feature sets. The results also demonstrate that the context-based feature sets with location-augmentation are ranked higher than the context-free feature sets in MCDM analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture is one of the most important sectors in the Indian context. It is one of the highest employing sectors in the Indian scenario. Unlike other sectors agriculture is highly dependent on the quality and the quantity of both the external factors like rainfall, climate, pH of the soil, fertilizers and insecticides used, and internal factors like the quality of seeds. This paper predicts the production of crops as a function of rainfall for four Indian States. This knowledge can be implemented in generating a rough overview of how the production is based on rainfall and how much can a specific crop production for the amount of rainfall it receives. Two crops each belonging to four different states are chosen and the best regression model for the crop of the state is chosen. There is no research done solely on how rainfall affects crops of particular states. The proposed method of evaluation is better than other existing methods of evaluation as it evaluates all the regression techniques (Linear Regression, Polynomial Regression, Support Vector Regression, Decision Tree Regression, Random Forest, and XGBRegression) for two crops of four individual states. For balanced evaluation, two states of North India and two states of South India are selected. The regression techniques are evaluated based on their Mean Squared Error. • Crops of same species have different production rates within a same country. • Performance of each algorithm is different for crops within state. • Rainfall is the key determining factor for crop production in India. • Production of crop is affected by environment more than the genotype. • Predicting the production provides high impetus for developing economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land Use Land Cover (LULC) change assessment and prediction are essential for optimised water resources planning and management. This paper attempts to intercompare the different LULC change modelling techniques (two-hybrid and two traditional models) to predict the future LULC change. These include Multi-Layer Perceptron Markov Chain (MLP_MC), Logistic Regression-Markov Model (LR-MC), and two hybrid models, namely, Multi-Layer Perceptron Markov Chain Cellular Automata (MLP_MC_CA), Logistic Regression Markov Model Cellular Automata (LR_MC_CA) models. These models were tested on Nagavali River Basin (NRB), a river basin in Southern India, which has seen significant land-use changes over the past two decades. Over the past two decades, the study region experienced dominant changes on the order of 17.42% and 15.22% decrease in scrubland and forest, respectively. At the same time, the agricultural land cover is increased by 35.28%. For the LULC prediction, the model was initially trained using the relevant driver variables and LULC maps of 2010 and 2015. The calibrated model was validated using the 2020 LULC map. The statistical results in terms of Kappa values and chi-square results reveal that the hybrid model MLP-MC-CA has a better agreement (Kappa coefficient 0.902) compared to the other models. Further, it is also observed that the CA-based models have a better ability to capture spatial connections. After combining the MLP_MC model with the Cellular Automata, the former model was improved by 10.8% in terms of the overall Kappa coefficient. The best model for LULC prediction over the next decade (LULC map of 2030) showed that the forest area would decrease by 9.02%, and the agricultural land would increase by 8.74%. Further, the results from the study indicate that the hybrid machine learning models provide a promising alternative for land-use change prediction. • Intercomparison of different Machine Learning Methods for Land Use Land Cover Prediction. • Hybrid model based on MLP_MC_CA outperforms other non-hybrid and traditional methods. • LULC 2030 for NRB showed that the forest area would decrease by 9.02%, and the agricultural land would increase by 8.74%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]