Artificial intelligence (AI) models have reached a very significant level of accuracy. While their superior performance offers considerable benefits, their inherent complexity often decreases human trust, which slows their application in high-risk decision-making domains, such as finance. The field of explainable AI (XAI) seeks to bridge this gap, aiming to make AI models more understandable. This survey, focusing on published work from 2018 to 2024, categorizes XAI approaches that predict financial time series. In this article, explainability and interpretability are distinguished, emphasizing the need to treat these concepts separately, as they are not applied the same way in practice. Through clear definitions, a rigorous taxonomy of XAI approaches, a complementary characterization, and examples of XAI’s application in the finance industry, this article provides a comprehensive view of XAI’s current role in finance. It can also serve as a guide for selecting the most appropriate XAI approach for future applications.

Clustering DNA sequences into functional groups is an important problem in bioinformatics. We propose a new alignment-free algorithm, mBKM, based on a new distance measure, DMk, for clustering gene sequences. This method transforms DNA sequences into the feature vectors which contain the occurrence, location and order relation of k-tuples in DNA sequence. Afterwards, a hierarchical procedure is applied to clustering DNA sequences based on the feature vectors.

As time evolves, communities in a social network may undergo various changes known as critical events. For instance, a community can either split into several other communities, expand into a larger community, shrink to a smaller community, remain stable or merge into another community. Prediction of critical events has attracted increasing attention in the recent literature. Learning the evolution of communities over time is a key step towards predicting the critical events the communities may undergo. This is an important and difficult issue in the study of social networks. In the work to date, there is a lack of formal approaches for modeling and predicting critical events over time. This motivates our effort to design a new statistical method for event prediction in order to make better use of histories of past changes. To this end, this paper proposes a sliding window analysis from which we develop a model that simultaneously exploits an autoregressive model and survival analysis techniques. The autoregressive model is employed here to simulate the evolution of the community structure, whereas the survival analysis techniques allow the prediction of future changes the community may undergo.

The rapid burgeoning of available protein data makes the use of clustering within families of proteins increasingly important. The challenge is to identify subfamilies of evolutionarily related sequences. This identification reveals phylogenetic relationships, which provide prior knowledge to help researchers understand biological phenomena. A good evolutionary model is essential to achieve a clustering that reflects the biological reality, and an accurate estimate of protein sequence similarity is crucial to the building of such a model. Most existing algorithms estimate this similarity using techniques that are not necessarily biologically plausible, especially for hard-to-align sequences such as proteins with different domain structures, which cause many difficulties for the alignment-dependent algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel similarity measure based on matching amino acid subsequences. This measure, named SMS for Substitution Matching Similarity, is especially designed for application to non-aligned protein sequences. It allows us to develop a new alignment-free algorithm, named CLUSS, for clustering protein families. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first alignment-free algorithm for clustering protein sequences. Unlike other clustering algorithms, CLUSS is effective on both alignable and non-alignable protein families. In the rest of the paper, we use the term "phylogenetic" in the sense of "relatedness of biological functions".