Recognition of epileptic seizures from offline EEG signals is very important in clinical diagnosis of epilepsy. Compared with manual labeling of EEG signals by doctors, machine learning approaches can be faster and more consistent. However, the classification accuracy is usually not satisfactory for two main reasons: the distributions of the data used for training and testing may be different, and the amount of training data may not be enough. In addition, most machine learning approaches generate black-box models that are difficult to interpret. In this paper, we integrate transductive transfer learning, semi-supervised learning and TSK fuzzy system to tackle these three problems. More specifically, we use transfer learning to reduce the discrepancy in data distribution between the training and testing data, employ semi-supervised learning to use the unlabeled testing data to remedy the shortage of training data, and adopt TSK fuzzy system to increase model interpretability. Two learning algorithms are proposed to train the system. Our experimental results show that the proposed approaches can achieve better performance than many state-of-the-art seizure classification algorithms.

Background: COVID-19 is one of the greatest threats to human beings in terms of health care, economy, and society in recent history. Up to this moment, there have been no signs of remission, and there is no proven effective cure. Vaccination is the primary biomedical preventive measure against the novel coronavirus. However, public bias or sentiments, as reflected on social media, may have a significant impact on the progression toward achieving herd immunity. Objective: This study aimed to use machine learning methods to extract topics and sentiments relating to COVID-19 vaccination on Twitter. Methods: We collected 31,100 English tweets containing COVID-19 vaccine–related keywords between January and October 2020 from Australian Twitter users. Specifically, we analyzed tweets by visualizing high-frequency word clouds and correlations between word tokens. We built a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model to identify commonly discussed topics in a large sample of tweets. We also performed sentiment analysis to understand the overall sentiments and emotions related to COVID-19 vaccination in Australia. Results: Our analysis identified 3 LDA topics: (1) attitudes toward COVID-19 and its vaccination, (2) advocating infection control measures against COVID-19, and (3) misconceptions and complaints about COVID-19 control. Nearly two-thirds of the sentiments of all tweets expressed a positive public opinion about the COVID-19 vaccine; around one-third were negative. Among the 8 basic emotions, trust and anticipation were the two prominent positive emotions observed in the tweets, while fear was the top negative emotion. Conclusions: Our findings indicate that some Twitter users in Australia supported infection control measures against COVID-19 and refuted misinformation. However, those who underestimated the risks and severity of COVID-19 may have rationalized their position on COVID-19 vaccination with conspiracy theories. We also noticed that the level of positive sentiment among the public may not be sufficient to increase vaccination coverage to a level high enough to achieve vaccination-induced herd immunity. Governments should explore public opinion and sentiments toward COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccination, and implement an effective vaccination promotion scheme in addition to supporting the development and clinical administration of COVID-19 vaccines.

Recognition of epileptic electroencephalogram (EEG) signals using machine learning techniques is becoming popular. In general, the construction of intelligent epileptic EEG recognition system involves two steps. First, an appropriate feature extraction method is applied to obtain representative features from the original raw EEG signals. Second, an effective intelligent model is trained based on the extracted features. However, there exist two major challenges in the process: 1) it is nontrivial to determine the appropriate feature extraction method to be used; 2) although many classical machine learning methods have been used for epileptic EEG recognition, most of them are “black box” approaches and more interpretable methods are desirable. To address these two challenges, a new epileptic EEG recognition method based on a multiview learning framework and fuzzy system modeling is proposed. First, multiview EEG data are generated by employing different feature extraction methods to obtain the features from different views of the signals. Second, the classical Takagi-Sugeno-Kang fuzzy system (TSK-FS) is introduced as an easy-to-interpret recognition model to develop a multiview TSK-FS method, called MV-TSK-FS, to identify epileptic EEG signals. For the proposed MV-TSK-FS, the importance of each view, i.e., the importance of each feature extraction method, can be evaluated according to the weighting of each view, and consequently the final decision can be made based on the weighted outputs of different views. Experimental results indicate that the MV-TSK-FS is a promising method when compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Existing research reveals that the misclassification rate for imbalanced data depends heavily on the problematic areas due to the existence of small disjoints, class overlap, borderline, and rare data samples. In this study, by stacking zero-order Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) fuzzy subclassifiers on the minority class and its problematic areas in the deep ensemble, a novel deep-ensemble-level-based TSK fuzzy classifier (IDE-TSK-FC) for imbalanced data classification tasks is presented to achieve both promising classification performance and high interpretability of zero-order TSK fuzzy classifiers. Simultaneously, according to the stacked generalization principle, the proposed classifier lifts up oversampling from the data level to the deep ensemble level with a guarantee of enhanced generalization capability for class imbalance learning. In the structure of IDE-TSK-FC, the first interpretable zero-order TSK fuzzy subclassifier is built on the original training dataset. After that, several successive zero-order TSK fuzzy subclassifiers are stacked layer by layer on the newly identified problematic areas from the original training dataset plus the corresponding interpretable predictions obtained by the averaging strategy on all previous layers. IDE-TSK-FC simply takes the classical K-nearest neighboring algorithm at each layer to identify its problematic area that consists of the minority samples and its surrounding K majority neighbors. After randomly neglecting certain input features and randomly selecting the five Gaussian membership functions for all the chosen input features and the augmented feature in the premise of each fuzzy rule, each subclassifier can be quickly obtained by using the least learning machine to determine the consequent part of each fuzzy rule. The experimental results on both the public datasets and a real-world healthcare dataset demonstrate IDE-TSK-FC's superiority in class imbalanced learning.

The additive kernel least squares support vector machine (AK-LS-SVM) has been well used in classification tasks due to its inherent advantages. For example, additive kernels work extremely well for some specific tasks, such as computer vision classification, medical research, and some specialized scenarios. Moreover, the analytical solution using AK-LS-SVM can formulate leave-one-out cross-validation error estimates in a closed form for parameter tuning, which drastically reduces the computational cost and guarantee the generalization performance especially on small and medium datasets. However, AK-LS-SVM still faces two main challenges: 1) improving the classification performance of AK-LS-SVM and 2) saving time when performing a grid search for model selection. Inspired by the stacked generalization principle and the transfer learning mechanism, a layer-by-layer combination of AK-LS-SVM classifiers embedded with transfer learning is proposed in this paper. This new classifier is called deep transfer additive kernel least square support vector machine (DTA-LS-SVM) which overcomes these two challenges. Also, considering that imbalanced datasets are involved in many real-world scenarios, especially for medical data analysis, the deep-transfer element is extended to compensate for this imbalance, thus leading to the development of another new classifier iDTA-LS-SVM. In the hierarchical structure of both DTA-LS-SVM and iDTA-LS-SVM, each layer has an AK-LS-SVM and the predictions from the previous layer act as an additional input feature for the current layer. Importantly, transfer learning is also embedded to guarantee generalization consistency between the adjacent layers. Moreover, both iDTA-LS-SVM and DTA-LS-SVM can ensure the minimal leave-one-out error by using the proposed fast leave-one-out cross validation strategy on the training set in each layer. We compared the proposed classifiers DTA-LS-SVM and iDTA-LS-SVM with the traditional LS-SVM and SVM using additive kernels on seven public UCI datasets and one real world dataset. The experimental results show that both DTA-LS-SVM and iDTA-LS-SVM exhibit better generalization performance and faster learning speed.