Smoking-induced noncommunicable diseases (SiNCDs) have become a significant threat to public health and cause of death globally. In the last decade, numerous studies have been proposed using artificial intelligence techniques to predict the risk of developing SiNCDs. However, determining the most significant features and developing interpretable models are rather challenging in such systems. In this study, we propose an efficient extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) based framework incorporated with the hybrid feature selection (HFS) method for SiNCDs prediction among the general population in South Korea and the United States. Initially, HFS is performed in three stages: (I) significant features are selected by t-test and chi-square test; (II) multicollinearity analysis serves to obtain dissimilar features; (III) final selection of best representative features is done based on least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO). Then, selected features are fed into the XGBoost predictive model. The experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms several existing baseline models. In addition, the proposed model also provides important features in order to enhance the interpretability of the SiNCDs prediction model. Consequently, the XGBoost based framework is expected to contribute for early diagnosis and prevention of the SiNCDs in public health concerns.

This study proposes an efficient prediction method for coronary heart disease risk based on two deep neural networks trained on well-ordered training datasets. Most real datasets include an irregular subset with higher variance than most data, and predictive models do not learn well from these datasets. While most existing prediction models learned from the whole or randomly sampled training datasets, our suggested method draws up training datasets by separating regular and highly biased subsets to build accurate prediction models. We use a two-step approach to prepare the training dataset: (1) divide the initial training dataset into two groups, commonly distributed and highly biased using Principal Component Analysis, (2) enrich the highly biased group by Variational Autoencoders. Then, two deep neural network classifiers learn from the isolated training groups separately. The well-organized training groups enable a chance to build more accurate prediction models. When predicting the risk of coronary heart disease from the given input, only one appropriate model is selected based on the reconstruction error on the Principal Component Analysis model. Dataset used in this study was collected from the Korean National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey. We have conducted two types of experiments on the dataset. The first one proved how Principal Component Analysis and Variational Autoencoder models of the proposed method improves the performance of a single deep neural network. The second experiment compared the proposed method with existing machine learning algorithms, including Naïve Bayes, Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbor, Decision Tree, Support Vector Machine, and Adaptive Boosting. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperformed conventional machine learning algorithms by giving the accuracy of 0.892, specificity of 0.840, precision of 0.911, recall of 0.920, f-measure of 0.915, and AUC of 0.882.

Finding the correct boundary in noisy images is still a difficult task. This paper introduces a new edge following technique for boundary detection in noisy images. Utilization of the proposed technique is exhibited via its application to various types of medical images. Our proposed technique can detect the boundaries of objects in noisy images using the information from the intensity gradient via the vector image model and the texture gradient via the edge map. The performance and robustness of the technique have been tested to segment objects in synthetic noisy images and medical images including prostates in ultrasound images, left ventricles in cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) images, aortas in cardiovascular MR images, and knee joints in computerized tomography images. We compare the proposed segmentation technique with the active contour models (ACM), geodesic active contour models, active contours without edges, gradient vector flow snake models, and ACMs based on vector field convolution, by using the skilled doctors' opinions as the ground truths. The results show that our technique performs very well and yields better performance than the classical contour models. The proposed method is robust and applicable on various kinds of noisy images without prior knowledge of noise properties.

The rapid rise of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) becomes one of the serious health issues and the leading cause of death worldwide. In recent years, artificial intelligence-based systems have been developed to assist clinicians in decision-making to reduce morbidity and mortality. However, a common drawback of these modern studies is related to explanations of their output. In other words, understanding the inner logic behind the predictions is hidden to the end-user. Thus, clinicians struggle to interpret these models because of their black-box nature, and hence they are not acceptable in the medical practice. To address this problem, we have proposed a Deep Shapley Additive Explanations (DeepSHAP) based deep neural network framework equipped with a feature selection technique for NCDs prediction and explanation among the population in the United States. Our proposed framework comprises three components: First, representative features are done based on the elastic net-based embedded feature selection technique; second a deep neural network classifier is tuned with the hyper-parameters and used to train the model with the selected feature subset; third, two kinds of model explanation are provided by the DeepSHAP approach. Herein, (I) explaining the risk factors that affected the model's prediction from the population-based perspective; (II) aiming to explain a single instance from the human-centered perspective. The experimental results indicated that the proposed model outperforms various state-of-the-art models. In addition, the proposed model can improve the medical understanding of NCDs diagnosis by providing general insights into the changes in disease risk at the global and local levels. Consequently, DeepSHAP based explainable deep learning framework contributes not only to the medical decision support systems but also can provide to real-world needs in other domains.

Automatic anomaly detection for time-series is critical in a variety of real-world domains such as fraud detection, fault diagnosis, and patient monitoring. Current anomaly detection methods detect the remarkably low proportion of the actual abnormalities correctly. Furthermore, most of the datasets do not provide data labels, and require unsupervised approaches. By focusing on these problems, we propose a novel deep learning-based unsupervised anomaly detection approach (RE-ADTS) for time-series data, which can be applicable to batch and real-time anomaly detections. RE-ADTS consists of two modules including the time-series reconstructor and anomaly detector. The time-series reconstructor module uses the autoregressive (AR) model to find an optimal window width and prepares the subsequences for further analysis according to the width. Then, it uses a deep autoencoder (AE) model to learn the data distribution, which is then used to reconstruct a time-series close to the normal. For anomalies, their reconstruction error (RE) was higher than that of the normal data. As a result of this module, RE and compressed representation of the subsequences were estimated. Later, the anomaly detector module defines the corresponding time-series as normal or an anomaly using a RE based anomaly threshold. For batch anomaly detection, the combination of the density-based clustering technique and anomaly threshold is employed. In the case of real-time anomaly detection, only the anomaly threshold is used without the clustering process. We conducted two types of experiments on a total of 52 publicly available time-series benchmark datasets for the batch and real-time anomaly detections. Experimental results show that the proposed RE-ADTS outperformed the state-of-the-art publicly available anomaly detection methods in most cases.