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Background: Differentiating seminomas from nonseminomas is crucial for formulating optimal treatment strategies for testicular germ cell tumors (TGCTs). Therefore, our study aimed to develop and validate a clinical-radiomics model for this purpose., Methods: In this study, 221 patients with TGCTs confirmed by pathology from four hospitals were enrolled and classified into training (n = 126), internal validation (n = 55) and external test (n = 40) cohorts. Radiomics features were extracted from the CT images. After feature selection, we constructed a clinical model, radiomics models and clinical-radiomics model with different machine learning algorithms. The top-performing model was chosen utilizing receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. Decision curve analysis (DCA) was also conducted to assess its practical utility., Results: Compared with those of the clinical and radiomics models, the clinical-radiomics model demonstrated the highest discriminatory ability, with AUCs of 0.918 (95 % CI: 0.870 - 0.966), 0.909 (95 % CI: 0.829 - 0.988) and 0.839 (95 % CI: 0.709 - 0.968) in the training, validation and test cohorts, respectively. Moreover, DCA confirmed that the combined model had a greater net benefit in predicting seminomas and nonseminomas., Conclusion: The clinical-radiomics model serves as a potential tool for noninvasive differentiation between testicular seminomas and nonseminomas, offering valuable guidance for clinical treatment., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Soft sensors have become reliable tools for estimating difficult-to-measure target variables in modern industrial processes. In order to make full use of labeled and unlabeled samples, an active semi-supervised soft sensor modeling method is proposed, which combines active learning and semi-supervised learning to maximize model performance and minimize the laboratory analysis cost of expanding the labeled sample data set. First, manifold regularization is introduced into the deep extreme learning machine (DELM) algorithm to form a semi-supervised DELM that improves the performance of a model trained with unlabeled samples. Then, considering non-Gaussian processes and the error information between the predicted and true values, an active sample selection strategy based on error Gaussian mixture model is developed. Using this strategy, the most uncertain and representative unlabeled samples are selected for labeling, and thereby expanding the labeled sample data set. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified using industrial debutanizer process data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The class imbalance learning problem is an important topic that has attracted considerable attention in machine learning and data mining. The most common method of addressing imbalanced datasets is the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE). However, the SMOTE and its variants suffer from the noise derived from the interpolation of synthetic examples. In this paper, an overproduce-and-choose strategy, which is divided into the overproduction and selection phases, is proposed to generate an appropriate set of synthetic examples for imbalance learning problems. In the overproduction phase, a new interpolation mechanism is developed to produce numerous synthetic examples, while in the selection phase, the synthetic examples that are beneficial to the classification task are selected by using instance selection based on evolutionary computation. Experiments are conducted on a large number of datasets selected from the real-world applications. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is significantly better than SMOTE and its well-known variants in terms of several metrics, including G-mean (GM) and area under the curve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classification is one of the most important topics in machine learning. However, most of these works focus on the two-class classification (i.e., classification into 'positive' and 'negative'), whereas studies on multi-class classification are far from enough. In this study, we develop a novel methodology of multiple classifier systems (MCS) with one-vs-one (OVO) scheme for the multi-class classification task. First, the multi-class classification problem is divided into as many pairs of easier-to-solve binary sub-problems as possible. Subsequently, an optimal MCS is generated for each sub-problem using a roulette-based feature subspace selection and validation procedure. Finally, to identify the final class of a query sample, an OVO aggregation strategy is employed to obtain the class from the confidence score matrix derived from the MCS. To verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach, a thorough experimental study is performed. The extracted findings supported by the proper statistical analysis indicate the strength of the proposed method with respect to the state-of-the-art methods for multi-class classification problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The One-vs-One (OVO) scheme that decomposes the original more complicated problem into as many as possible pairs of easier-to-solve binary sub-problems is one of the most popular techniques for handling multi-class classification problems. In this paper, we propose an improved Dynamic Ensemble Selection (DES) procedure, which aims to enhance the OVO scheme via dynamically selecting a group of appropriate heterogeneous classifiers in each sub-problem for each query example. To do so, twenty heterogeneous classification algorithms are selected to obtain a set of candidate classifiers for each sub-problem derived from the OVO decomposition. Then, a simple yet efficient DES procedure is developed to execute the dynamic selection for each query example in each sub-problem. Finally, all the selected binary heterogeneous ensembles are combined by using majority voting to obtain the final output class. To evaluate the proposed method, we carry out a series of experiments on twenty datasets selected from the KEEL repository. The results supported by proper statistical tests demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of our proposed method, compared with state-of-the-art methods for OVO-based multi-class classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-class imbalance learning problems suffering from the different distribution of classes occur in many real-world applications. One-versus-One (OVO) decomposition strategy is a common and useful technique used to address multi-class classification problems, which consists in dividing the original multi-class problem into all binary class sub-problems. The effort to reduce the effect of non-competent classifiers has proven to be a useful way of improving the performance in the OVO scheme. However, these approaches might not be effective for imbalance scenarios, since they are based on standard biased learning procedures. On this account, we propose a novel approach named Distance-based Relative Competence Weighting with Adaptive Synthetic Example Generation (DRCW-ASEG), which properly addresses the synergy between imbalance learning and dynamic classifier weighting in OVO scheme. This new proposed algorithm aims to dynamically produce synthetic examples of minority classes in the stage of dynamic weighting process. We develop a thorough experimental study in order to verify the benefits of the proposed algorithm considering different base binary classifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-class classification problems can be addressed by using decomposition strategy. One of the most popular decomposition techniques is the One-vs-One (OVO) strategy, which consists of dividing multi-class classification problems into as many as possible pairs of easier-to-solve binary sub-problems. To discuss the presence of classes with different cost, in this paper, we examine the behavior of an ensemble of Cost-Sensitive Back-Propagation Neural Networks (CSBPNN) with OVO binarization techniques for multi-class problems. To implement this, the original multi-class cost-sensitive problem is decomposed into as many sub-problems as possible pairs of classes and each sub-problem is learnt in an independent manner using CSBPNN. Then a combination method is used to aggregate the binary cost-sensitive classifiers. To verify the synergy of the binarization technique and CSBPNN for multi-class cost-sensitive problems, we carry out a thorough experimental study. Specifically, we first develop the study to check the effectiveness of the OVO strategy for multi-class cost-sensitive learning problems. Then, we develop a comparison of several well-known aggregation strategies in our scenario. Finally, we explore whether further improvement can be achieved by using the management of non-competent classifiers. The experimental study is performed with three types of cost matrices and proper statistical analysis is employed to extract the meaningful findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solar energy constitutes an effective supplement to traditional energy sources. However, photovoltaic power generation (PVPG) is strongly weather-dependent, and thus highly intermittent. High-precision forecasting of PVPG forms the basis of the production, transmission, and distribution of electricity, ensuring the stability and reliability of power systems. In this work, we propose a deep learning based framework for accurate PVPG forecasting. In particular, taking advantage of the long short-term memory (LSTM) network in solving sequential-data based regression problems, this paper considers the specific domain knowledge of PV and proposes a physics-constrained LSTM (PC-LSTM) to forecast the hourly day-ahead PVPG. It aims to overcome the shortcoming of recent machine learning algorithms that are applied based only on massive data, and thus easily producing unreasonable forecasts. Real-life PV datasets are adopted to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the models. Sensitivity analysis is conducted for the selection of input feature variables based on a two-stage hybrid method. The results indicate that the proposed PC-LSTM model possesses stronger forecasting capability than the standard LSTM model. It is more robust against PVPG forecasting, and more suitable for PVPG forecasting with sparse data in practice. The PC-LSTM model also demonstrates superior performance with higher accuracy of PVPG forecasting compared to conventional machine learning and statistical methods. • Domain knowledge of PV is firstly considered into the deep-learning model. • A two-stage hybrid method is proposed to select the input feature variables. • PC-LSTM is more robust against PV power output forecasting than the basic LSTM. • PC-LSTM has advantages in the forecasting of PV power generation with sparse data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class imbalance learning is one of the most important topics in the field of machine learning and data mining, and the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Techniques (SMOTE) is the common method to handle this issue. The main shortcomings of the classic SMOTE and its variants is the interpolation of potential noise and unrepresentative examples. This paper is devoted to proposing a novel parameter-free SMOTE mechanism to produce sufficient representative synthetic examples while avoiding interpolating noisy examples. Specifically, two types of minority class examples are defined, namely boundary and safe minority examples. The synthetic examples generation procedure fully reflects the characteristics of the minority class examples with filling the region dominated by the minority class and expanding the margin of the minority class. To verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, a thorough experimental study on forty datasets selected from real-world applications is carried out. The experimental results indicate that our proposed method is competitive to the classic SMOTE and its state-of-the-art variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]