Toward Accelerated Training of Parallel Support Vector Machines Based on Voronoi Diagrams.

Typical applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN), such as in Industry 4.0 and smart cities, involves acquiring and processing large amounts of data in federated systems. Important challenges arise for machine learning algorithms in this scenario, such as reducing energy consumption and minimizing data exchange between devices in different zones. This paper introduces a novel method for accelerated training of parallel Support Vector Machines (pSVMs), based on ensembles, tailored to these kinds of problems. To achieve this, the training set is split into several Voronoi regions. These regions are small enough to permit faster parallel training of SVMs, reducing computational payload. Results from experiments comparing the proposed method with a single SVM and a standard ensemble of SVMs demonstrate that this approach can provide comparable performance while limiting the number of regions required to solve classification tasks. These advantages facilitate the development of energy-efficient policies in WSN.

Health Sufficiency Indicators for Pandemic Monitoring.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 disease, spreading all around the world and causing a worldwide pandemic, has lead to the collapse of the health systems of the most affected countries. Due to the ease of transmission, early prevention measures are proved to be fundamental to control the pandemic and, hence, the saturation of the health systems. Given the difficulty of obtaining characteristics of these systems of different countries and regions, it is necessary to define indicators based on basic information that enable the assessment of the evolution of the impact of a disease in a health system along with fair comparisons among different ones. This present paper introduces the Health Sufficiency Indicator (HSI), in its accumulated and daily versions. This indicator measures the additional pressure that a health care system has to deal with due to a pandemic. Hence, it allows to evaluate the capacity of a health system to give response to the corresponding needs arising from a pandemic and to compare the evolution of the disease among different regions. In addition, the Potential Occupancy Ratio (POR) in both its hospital ward bed and ICU bed versions is here introduced to asses the impact of the pandemic in the capacity of hospitals. These indicators and other well-known ones are applied to track the evolution of the impact of the disease on the Spanish health system during the first wave of the pandemic, both on national and regional levels. An international comparison among the most affected countries is also performed.

Entropy Measures for Stochastic Processes with Applications in Functional Anomaly Detection.

We propose a definition of entropy for stochastic processes. We provide a reproducing kernel Hilbert space model to estimate entropy from a random sample of realizations of a stochastic process, namely functional data, and introduce two approaches to estimate minimum entropy sets. These sets are relevant to detect anomalous or outlier functional data. A numerical experiment illustrates the performance of the proposed method; in addition, we conduct an analysis of mortality rate curves as an interesting application in a real-data context to explore functional anomaly detection.

Combining Entropy Measures for Anomaly Detection.

The combination of different sources of information is a problem that arises in several situations, for instance, when data are analysed using different similarity measures. Often, each source of information is given as a similarity, distance, or a kernel matrix. In this paper, we propose a new class of methods which consists of producing, for anomaly detection purposes, a single Mercer kernel (that acts as a similarity measure) from a set of local entropy kernels and, at the same time, avoids the task of model selection. This kernel is used to build an embedding of data in a variety that will allow the use of a (modified) one-class Support Vector Machine to detect outliers. We study several information combination schemes and their limiting behaviour when the data sample size increases within an Information Geometry context. In particular, we study the variety of the given positive definite kernel matrices to obtain the desired kernel combination as belonging to that variety. The proposed methodology has been evaluated on several real and artificial problems.

Factor structure and stability of a quality questionnaire within a postgraduate program / Estructura factorial y estabilidad de un cuestionario sobre la calidad de un programa de postgrado

In this work we describe an instrument based on the use of a factor analysis technique in order to measure the quality of education within a Postgraduate degree offered by a public Spanish university. We showed that the instrument has satisfactory psychometric properties (reliability and validity). Regarding the factorial solution, three main dimensions have been determined, namely: importance given to the subject; educational resources and knowledge of the subject (previous and posterior). It is important to remark that these three dimensions were consistently detected in all the factorial analyses performed (total sample and separate academic years). These three dimensions should be considered as fundamental when designing an instrument to evaluate educational quality. These findings may be taken as a basis for the design of future strategies for the evaluation of educational quality on other type of degrees within the higher education area

En este trabajo se describe un instrumento basado en el uso de una técnica de análisis factorial con el fin de medir la calidad de la educación a través de una muestra de estudiantes de postgrado de una universidad pública española. El instrumento tiene unas aceptables propiedades psicométricas (fiabilidad y validez). En cuanto a la solución factorial, tres dimensiones principales se han determinado: la importancia dada a la materia; recursos educativos y conocimiento de la materia (anterior y posterior). Es importante destacar que estas tres dimensiones se han detectado consistentemente en todo el análisis factorial: muestra total y cursos separados. Estas tres dimensiones deben ser consideradas como aspectos fundamentales en el diseño de un instrumento para evaluar la calidad educativa. Estos hallazgos pueden ser tomados como base para el diseño de estrategias futuras para la evaluación de la calidad educativa en otro tipo de estudios dentro del área de la educación superior

Academia Joven: Mundial y Nacional / No disponible

No disponible

Optimization instances for deterministic and stochastic problems on energy efficient investments planning at the building level.

Optimization instances relate to the input and output data stemming from optimization problems in general. Typically, an optimization problem consists of an objective function to be optimized (either minimized or maximized) and a set of constraints. Thus, objective and constraints are jointly a set of equations in the optimization model. Such equations are a combination of decision variables and known parameters, which are usually related to a set domain. When this combination is a linear combination, we are facing a classical Linear Programming (LP) problem. An optimization instance is related to an optimization model. We refer to that model as the Symbolic Model Specification (SMS) containing all the sets, variables, and parameters symbols and relations. Thus, a whole instance is composed by the SMS, the elements in each set, the data values for all the parameters, and, eventually, the optimal decisions resulting from the optimization solution. This data article contains several optimization instances from a real-world optimization problem relating to investment planning on energy efficient technologies at the building level.

Combination and selection of traffic safety expert judgments for the prevention of driving risks.

In this paper, we describe a new framework to combine experts’ judgments for the prevention of driving risks in a cabin truck. In addition, the methodology shows how to choose among the experts the one whose predictions fit best the environmental conditions. The methodology is applied over data sets obtained from a high immersive cabin truck simulator in natural driving conditions. A nonparametric model, based in Nearest Neighbors combined with Restricted Least Squared methods is developed. Three experts were asked to evaluate the driving risk using a Visual Analog Scale (VAS), in order to measure the driving risk in a truck simulator where the vehicle dynamics factors were stored. Numerical results show that the methodology is suitable for embedding in real time systems.

Estimation of high-density regions using One-Class Neighbor Machines.

In this paper, we investigate the problem of estimating high-density regions from univariate or multivariate data samples. We estimate minimum volume sets, whose probability is specified in advance, known in the literature as density contour clusters. This problem is strongly related to One-Class Support Vector Machines (OCSVM). We propose a new method to solve this problem, the One-Class Neighbor Machine (OCNM) and we show its properties. In particular, the OCNM solution asymptotically converges to the exact minimum volume set prespecified. Finally, numerical results illustrating the advantage of the new method are shown.