A Novel Approach for Apple Freshness Prediction Based on Gas Sensor Array and Optimized Neural Network.

Apple is an important cash crop in China, and the prediction of its freshness can effectively reduce its storage risk and avoid economic loss. The change in the concentration of odor information such as ethylene, carbon dioxide, and ethanol emitted during apple storage is an important feature to characterize the freshness of apples. In order to accurately predict the freshness level of apples, an electronic nose system based on a gas sensor array and wireless transmission module is designed, and a neural network prediction model using an improved Sparrow Search Algorithm (SSA) based on chaotic sequence (Tent) to optimize Back Propagation (BP) is proposed. The odor information emitted by apples is studied to complete an apple freshness prediction. Furthermore, by fitting the relationship between the prediction coefficient and the input vector, the accuracy benchmark of the prediction model is set, which further improves the prediction accuracy of apple odor information. Compared with the traditional prediction method, the system has the characteristics of simple operation, low cost, reliable results, mobile portability, and it avoids the damage to apples in the process of freshness prediction to realize non-destructive testing.

Factors influencing clinical pharmacists' integration into the clinical multidisciplinary care team.

Objectives: To investigate the factors influencing clinical pharmacists' integration into the clinical multidisciplinary care team, using interprofessional collaboration between clinical pharmacists and physicians as the focus. Methods: Through stratified random sampling, a cross-sectional questionnaire survey was conducted among clinical pharmacists and physicians in secondary and tertiary hospitals in China from July to August 2022. The questionnaire, comprising the Physician-Pharmacist Collaborative Index (PPCI) scale to reflect the collaboration level and a combined scale to measure influencing factors, was made available in two versions for clinical pharmacists and physicians. Multiple linear regression was adopted to analyze the association between the collaboration level and influencing factors, as well as the heterogeneity of the significant factors in hospitals of different grades. Results: Valid self-reported data from 474 clinical pharmacists and 496 paired physicians were included, who were serving in 281 hospitals from 31 provinces. In terms of participant-related factors, standardized training and academic degree, respectively, exerted significant positive effects on the perceived collaboration level by clinical pharmacists and physicians. In terms of context characteristics, manager support and system construction were the main factors for improving collaboration. In terms of exchange characteristics, clinical pharmacists having good communication skills, physicians trusting others' professional competence and values, and both parties having consistent expectations had significant positive effects on collaboration. Conclusion: The study provides a baseline data set on the current level and associated factors of clinical pharmacists' collaboration with other professionals in China and other countries with a related health system, providing references for individuals, universities, hospitals, and national policymakers to facilitate the development of clinical pharmacy and multidisciplinary models and further improve the patient-centered integrated disease treatment system.

Mapping the Peds QLTM 4.0 onto CHU-9D: a cross-sectional study in functional dyspepsia population from China.

Objective: The study aims to develop a mapping algorithm from the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory™ 4. 0 (Peds QL 4.0) onto Child Health Utility 9D (CHU-9D) based on the cross-sectional data of functional dyspepsia (FD) children and adolescents in China. Methods: A sample of 2,152 patients with FD completed both the CHU-9D and Peds QL 4.0 instruments. A total of six regression models were used to develop the mapping algorithm, including ordinary least squares regression (OLS), the generalized linear regression model (GLM), MM-estimator model (MM), Tobit regression (Tobit) and Beta regression (Beta) for direct mapping, and multinomial logistic regression (MLOGIT) for response mapping. Peds QL 4.0 total score, Peds QL 4.0 dimension scores, Peds QL 4.0 item scores, gender, and age were used as independent variables according to the Spearman correlation coefficient. The ranking of indicators, including the mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE), adjusted R2, and consistent correlation coefficient (CCC), was used to assess the predictive ability of the models. Results: The Tobit model with selected Peds QL 4.0 item scores, gender and age as the independent variable predicted the most accurate. The best-performing models for other possible combinations of variables were also shown. Conclusion: The mapping algorithm helps to transform Peds QL 4.0 data into health utility value. It is valuable for conducting health technology evaluations within clinical studies that have only collected Peds QL 4.0 data.

Effects of Particle Swarm Optimisation on a Hybrid Load Balancing Approach for Resource Optimisation in Internet of Things.

The internet of things, a collection of diversified distributed nodes, implies a varying choice of activities ranging from sleep monitoring and tracking of activities, to more complex activities such as data analytics and management. With an increase in scale comes even greater complexities, leading to significant challenges such as excess energy dissipation, which can lead to a decrease in IoT devices' lifespan. Internet of things' (IoT) multiple variable activities and ample data management greatly influence devices' lifespan, making resource optimisation a necessity. Existing methods with respect to aspects of resource management and optimisation are limited in their concern of devices energy dissipation. This paper therefore proposes a decentralised approach, which contains an amalgamation of efficient clustering techniques, edge computing paradigms, and a hybrid algorithm, targeted at curbing resource optimisation problems and life span issues associated with IoT devices. The decentralised topology aimed at the resource optimisation of IoT places equal importance on resource allocation and resource scheduling, as opposed to existing methods, by incorporating aspects of the static (round robin), dynamic (resource-based), and clustering (particle swarm optimisation) algorithms, to provide a solid foundation for an optimised and secure IoT. The simulation constructs five test-case scenarios and uses performance indicators to evaluate the effects the proposed model has on resource optimisation in IoT. The simulation results indicate the superiority of the PSOR2B to the ant colony, the current centralised optimisation approach, LEACH, and C-LBCA.

An Alternating-Direction-Method of Multipliers-Incorporated Approach to Symmetric Non-Negative Latent Factor Analysis.

Large-scale undirected weighted networks are frequently encountered in big-data-related applications concerning interactions among a large unique set of entities. Such a network can be described by a Symmetric, High-Dimensional, and Incomplete (SHDI) matrix whose symmetry and incompleteness should be addressed with care. However, existing models fail in either correctly representing its symmetry or efficiently handling its incomplete data. For addressing this critical issue, this study proposes an Alternating-Direction-Method of Multipliers (ADMM)-based Symmetric Non-negative Latent Factor Analysis (ASNL) model. It adopts fourfold ideas: 1) implementing the data density-oriented modeling for efficiently representing an SHDI matrix's incomplete and imbalanced data; 2) separating the non-negative constraints from the decision parameters to avoid truncations during the training process; 3) incorporating the ADMM principle into its learning scheme for fast model convergence; and 4) parallelizing the training process with load balance considerations for high efficiency. Empirical studies on four SHDI matrices demonstrate that ASNL significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art models in both prediction accuracy for missing data of an SHDI and computational efficiency. It is a promising model for handling large-scale undirected networks raised in real applications.

Logical Topology Inference via CPGCN Joint Optimizing With Pedestrian Re-Id.

With the rise of artificial intelligence, deep learning has become the main research method of pedestrian recognition re-identification (re-id). However, most of the existing researches usually just determine the retrieval order based on the geographical location of cameras, which ignore the spatio-temporal logic characteristics of pedestrian flow. Furthermore, most of these methods rely on common object detection to detect and match pedestrians directly, which will separate the logical connection between videos from different cameras. In this research, a novel pedestrian re-identification model assisted by logical topological inference is proposed, which includes: 1) a joint optimization mechanism of pedestrian re-identification and multicamera logical topology inference, which makes the multicamera logical topology provides the retrieval order and the confidence for re-identification. And meanwhile, the results of pedestrian re-identification as a feedback modify logical topological inference; 2) a dynamic spatio-temporal information driving logical topology inference method via conditional probability graph convolution network (CPGCN) with random forest-based transition activation mechanism (RF-TAM) is proposed, which focuses on the pedestrian's walking direction at different moments; and 3) a pedestrian group cluster graph convolution network (GC-GCN) is designed to measure the correlation between embedded pedestrian features. Some experimental analyses and real scene experiments on datasets CUHK-SYSU, PRW, SLP, and UJS-reID indicate that the designed model can achieve a better logical topology inference with an accuracy of 87.3% and achieve the top-1 accuracy of 77.4% and the mAP accuracy of 74.3% for pedestrian re-identification.

CEModule: A Computation Efficient Module for Lightweight Convolutional Neural Networks.

Lightweight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) rely heavily on the design of lightweight convolutional modules (LCMs). For an LCM, lightweight design based on repetitive feature maps (LoR) is currently one of the most effective approaches. An LoR mainly involves an extraction of feature maps from convolutional layers (CE) and feature map regeneration through cheap operations (RO). However, existing LoR approaches carry out lightweight improvements only from the aspect of RO but ignore the problems of poor generalization, low stability, and high computation workload incurred in the CE part. To alleviate these problems, this article introduces the concept of key features from a CNN model interpretation perspective. Subsequently, it presents a novel LCM, namely CEModule, focusing on the CE part. CEModule increases the number of key features to maintain a high level of accuracy in classification. In the meantime, CEModule employs a group convolution strategy to reduce floating-point operations (FLOPs) incurred in the training process. Finally, this article brings forth a dynamic adaptation algorithm ( α -DAM) to enhance the generalization of CEModule-enabled lightweight CNN models, including the developed CENet in dealing with datasets of different scales. Compared with the state-of-the-art results, CEModule reduces FLOPs by up to 54% on CIFAR-10 while maintaining a similar level of accuracy in classification. On ImageNet, CENet increases accuracy by 1.2% following the same FLOPs and training strategies.

Learning Transactional Behavioral Representations for Credit Card Fraud Detection.

Credit card fraud detection is a challenging task since fraudulent actions are hidden in massive legitimate behaviors. This work aims to learn a new representation for each transaction record based on the historical transactions of users in order to capture fraudulent patterns accurately and, thus, automatically detect a fraudulent transaction. We propose a novel model by improving long short-term memory with a time-aware gate that can capture the behavioral changes caused by consecutive transactions of users. A current-historical attention module is designed to build up connections between current and historical transactional behaviors, which enables the model to capture behavioral periodicity. An interaction module is designed to learn comprehensive and rational behavioral representations. To validate the effectiveness of the learned behavioral representations, experiments are conducted on a large real-world transaction dataset provided to us by a financial company in China, as well as a public dataset. Experimental results and the visualization of the learned representations illustrate that our method delivers a clear distinction between legitimate behaviors and fraudulent ones, and achieves better fraud detection performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Task Transfer Learning for EEG Classification in Motor Imagery-Based BCI System.

The motor-imagery brain-computer interface system (MI-BCI) has a board prospect for development. However, long calibration time and lack of enough MI commands limit its use in practice. In order to enlarge the command set, we add the combinations of traditional MI commands as new commands into the command set. We also design an algorithm based on transfer learning so as to decrease the calibration time for collecting EEG signal and training model. We create feature extractor based on data from traditional commands and transfer patterns through the data from new commands. Through the comparison of the average accuracy between our algorithm and traditional algorithms and the visualization of spatial patterns in our algorithm, we find that the accuracy of our algorithm is much higher than traditional algorithms, especially as for the low-quality datasets. Besides, the visualization of spatial patterns is meaningful. The algorithm based on transfer learning takes the advantage of the information from source data. We enlarge the command set while shortening the calibration time, which is of significant importance to the MI-BCI application.

Zero-Shot Learning for EEG Classification in Motor Imagery-Based BCI System.

A brain-computer interface (BCI) based on motor imagery (MI) translates human intentions into computer commands by recognizing the electroencephalogram (EEG) patterns of different imagination tasks. However, due to the scarcity of MI commands and the long calibration time, using the MI-based BCI system in practice is still challenging. Zero-shot learning (ZSL), which can recognize objects whose instances may not have been seen during training, has the potential to substantially reduce the calibration time. Thus, in this context, we first try to use a new type of motor imagery task, which is a combination of traditional tasks and propose a novel zero-shot learning model that can recognize both known and unknown categories of EEG signals. This is achieved by first learning a non-linear projection from EEG features to the target space and then applying a novelty detection method to differentiate unknown classes from known classes. Applications to a dataset collected from nine subjects confirm the possibility of identifying a new type of motor imagery only using already obtained motor imagery data. Results indicate that the classification accuracy of our zero-shot based method accounts for 91.81% of the traditional method which uses all categories of data.

Distributed Set-Membership Filtering for Multirate Systems Under the Round-Robin Scheduling Over Sensor Networks.

In this paper, the distributed set-membership filtering problem is dealt with for a class of time-varying multirate systems in sensor networks with the communication protocol. For relieving the communication burden, the round-Robin (RR) protocol is exploited to orchestrate the transmission order, under which each sensor node only broadcasts partial information to both the corresponding local filter and its neighboring nodes. In order to meet the practical transmission requirements as well as reduce communication cost, the multirate strategy is proposed to govern the sampling/update rate of the plant, the sensors, and the filters. By means of the lifting technique, the augmented filtering error system is established with a unified sampling rate. The main purpose of the addressed filtering problem is to design a set of distributed filters such that, in the simultaneous presence of the RR transmission protocol, the multirate mechanism, and the bounded noises, there exists a certain ellipsoid that includes all possible error states at each time instant. Then, the desired distributed filter gains are obtained by minimizing such an ellipsoid in the sense of the minimum trace of the weighted matrix. The proposed resource-efficient filtering algorithm is of a recursive form, thereby facilitating the online implementation. A numerical simulation example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol-based distributed filter design method.

Stability analysis for stochastic Cohen-Grossberg neural networks with mixed time delays.

In this letter, the global asymptotic stability analysis problem is considered for a class of stochastic Cohen-Grossberg neural networks with mixed time delays, which consist of both the discrete and distributed time delays. Based on an Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional and the stochastic stability analysis theory, a linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach is developed to derive several sufficient conditions guaranteeing the global asymptotic convergence of the equilibrium point in the mean square. It is shown that the addressed stochastic Cohen-Grossberg neural networks with mixed delays are globally asymptotically stable in the mean square if two LMIs are feasible, where the feasibility of LMIs can be readily checked by the Matlab LMI toolbox. It is also pointed out that the main results comprise some existing results as special cases. A numerical example is given to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed global stability criteria.