Due to the availability of smart metering infrastructure, high-resolution electric consumption data is readily available to study the dynamics of residential electric consumption at finely resolved spatial and temporal scales. Analyzing the electric consumption data enables the policymakers and building owners to understand consumer’s demand-consumption behaviors. Furthermore, analysis and accurate forecasting of electric consumption are substantial for consumer involvement in time-of-use tariffs, critical peak pricing, and consumer-specific demand response initiatives. Alongside its vast economic and sustainability implications, such as energy wastage and decarbonization of the energy sector, accurate consumption forecasting facilitates power system planning and stable grid operations. Energy consumption forecasting is an active research area; despite the abundance of devised models, electric consumption forecasting in residential buildings remains challenging due to high occupant energy use behavior variability. Hence the search for an appropriate model for accurate electric consumption forecasting is ever continuing. To this aim, this paper presents a spatial and temporal ensemble forecasting model for short-term electric consumption forecasting. The proposed work involves exploring electric consumption profiles at the apartment level through cluster analysis based on the k-means algorithm. The ensemble forecasting model consists of two deep learning models; Long Short-Term Memory Unit (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). First, the apartment-level historical electric consumption data is clustered. Later the clusters are aggregated based on consumption profiles of consumers. At the building and floor level, the ensemble models are trained using aggregated electric consumption data. The proposed ensemble model forecasts the electric consumption at three spatial scales apartment, building, and floor level for hourly, daily, and weekly forecasting horizon. Furthermore, the impact of spatial-temporal granularity and cluster analysis on the prediction accuracy is analyzed. The dataset used in this study comprises high-resolution electric consumption data acquired through smart meters recorded on an hourly basis over the period of one year. The consumption data belongs to four multifamily residential buildings situated in an urban area of South Korea. To prove the effectiveness of our proposed forecasting model, we compared our model with widely known machine learning models and deep learning variants. The results achieved by our proposed ensemble scheme verify that model has learned the sequential behavior of electric consumption by producing superior performance with the lowest MAPE of 4.182 and 4.54 at building and floor level prediction, respectively. The experimental findings suggest that the model has efficiently captured the dynamic electric consumption characteristics to exploit ensemble model diversities and achieved lower forecasting error. The proposed ensemble forecasting scheme is well suited for predictive modeling and short-term load forecasting.

A brain tumor is the growth of abnormal cells in certain brain tissues with a high mortality rate; therefore, it requires high precision in diagnosis, as a minor human judgment can eventually cause severe consequences. Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) serves as a non-invasive tool to detect the presence of a tumor. However, Rician noise is inevitably instilled during the image acquisition process, which leads to poor observation and interferes with the treatment. Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems can perform early diagnosis of the disease, potentially increasing the chances of survival, and lessening the need for an expert to analyze the MRIs. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have proven to be very effective in tumor detection in brain MRIs. There have been multiple studies dedicated to brain tumor classification; however, these techniques lack the evaluation of the impact of the Rician noise on state-of-the-art deep learning techniques and the consideration of the scaling impact on the performance of the deep learning as the size and location of tumors vary from image to image with irregular shape and boundaries. Moreover, transfer learning-based pre-trained models such as AlexNet and ResNet have been used for brain tumor detection. However, these architectures have many trainable parameters and hence have a high computational cost. This study proposes a two-fold solution: (a) Multi-Scale CNN (MSCNN) architecture to develop a robust classification model for brain tumor diagnosis, and (b) minimizing the impact of Rician noise on the performance of the MSCNN. The proposed model is a multi-class classification solution that classifies MRIs into glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and non-tumor. The core objective is to develop a robust model for enhancing the performance of the existing tumor detection systems in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, MRIs are denoised using a Fuzzy Similarity-based Non-Local Means (FSNLM) filter to improve the classification results. Different evaluation metrics are employed, such as accuracy, precision, recall, specificity, and F1-score, to evaluate and compare the performance of the proposed multi-scale CNN and other state-of-the-art techniques, such as AlexNet and ResNet. In addition, trainable and non-trainable parameters of the proposed model and the existing techniques are also compared to evaluate the computational efficiency. The experimental results show that the proposed multi-scale CNN model outperforms AlexNet and ResNet in terms of accuracy and efficiency at a lower computational cost. Based on experimental results, it is found that our proposed MCNN2 achieved accuracy and F1-score of 91.2% and 91%, respectively, which is significantly higher than the existing AlexNet and ResNet techniques. Moreover, our findings suggest that the proposed model is more effective and efficient in facilitating clinical research and practice for MRI classification.

With the development of modern power systems (smart grid), energy consumption prediction becomes an essential aspect of resource planning and operations. In the last few decades, industrial and commercial buildings have thoroughly been investigated for consumption patterns. However, due to the unavailability of data, the residential buildings could not get much attention. During the last few years, many solutions have been devised for predicting electric consumption; however, it remains a challenging task due to the dynamic nature of residential consumption patterns. Therefore, a more robust solution is required to improve the model performance and achieve a better prediction accuracy. This paper presents an ensemble approach based on learning to a statistical model to predict the short-term energy consumption of a multifamily residential building. Our proposed approach utilizes Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Kalman Filter (KF) to build an ensemble prediction model to predict short term energy demands of multifamily residential buildings. The proposed approach uses real energy data acquired from the multifamily residential building, South Korea. Different statistical measures are used, such as mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and $R^2$ score, to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach and compare it with existing models. The experimental results reveal that the proposed approach predicts accurately and outperforms the existing models. Furthermore, a comparative analysis is performed to evaluate and compare the proposed model with conventional machine learning models. The experimental results show the effectiveness and significance of the proposed approach compared to existing energy prediction models. The proposed approach will support energy management to effectively plan and manage the energy supply and demands of multifamily residential buildings.

Drilling data for groundwater extraction incur changes over time due to variations in hydrogeological and weather conditions. At any time, if there is a need to deploy a change in drilling operations, drilling companies keep monitoring the time-series drilling data to make sure it is not introducing any changes or new errors. Therefore, a solution is needed to predict groundwater levels (GWL) and detect a change in boreholes data to improve drilling efficiency. The proposed study presents an ensemble GWL prediction (E-GWLP) model using boosting and bagging models based on stacking techniques to predict GWL for enhancing hydraulic resource management and planning. The proposed research study consists of two modules; descriptive analysis of boreholes data and GWL prediction model using ensemble model based on stacking. First, descriptive analysis techniques, such as correlation analysis and difference mechanisms, are applied to investigate boreholes log data for extracting underlying characteristics, which is critical for enhancing hydraulic resource management. Second, an ensemble prediction model is developed based on multiple hydrological patterns using robust machine learning (ML) techniques to predict GWL for enhancing drilling efficiency and water resource management. The architecture of the proposed ensemble model involves three boosting algorithms as base models (level-0) and a bagging algorithm as a meta-model that combines the base models predictions (level-1). The base models consist of the following boosting algorithms; eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting (GB). The meta-model includes Random Forest (RF) as a bagging algorithm referred to as a level-1 model. Furthermore, different evaluation metrics are used, including mean absolute error (MAE), mean square error (MSE), and root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and R2 score. The performance of the proposed E-GWLP model is compared with existing ensemble and baseline models. The experimental results reveal that the proposed model performed accurately in respect of MAE, MSE, and RMSE of 0.340, 0.564, and 0.751, respectively. The MAPE and R2 score of our proposed approach is 12.658 and 0.976, respectively, which signifies the importance of our work. Moreover, experimental results suggest that E-GWLP model is suitable for sustainable water resource management and improves reservoir engineering.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising methodology for collaboratively training machine learning models on decentralized devices. Notwithstanding, the effective synchronization and consolidation of model updates originating from diverse devices, in conjunction with the appropriate configuration of network topologies, persist as crucial obstacles. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the current techniques and methodologies utilized in the synchronization, consolidation, and network topologies of Federated Learning. The present study explores diverse synchronization strategies utilized for the purpose of coordinating model updates from geographically distributed cross-silo edge nodes. The study takes into account several factors, including communication efficiency and privacy preservation. This study delves into the intricacies of model consolidation techniques, such as weighted and personalized aggregation methods, to evaluate their efficacy in consolidation of local model updates into a global model, while taking into consideration statistical heterogeneity and resource constraints. In addition, an examination is conducted on the importance of network topologies in Federated Learning (FL), taking into account their influence on communication efficacy, confidentiality, expandability, resilience, and resource allocation. The survey assesses and contrasts the efficacies and constraints of extant methodologies, discerns deficiencies in present investigations, and provides insights for future progressions. The objective of this survey is to provide a thorough examination of FL synchronization, consolidation, and network topologies, with the intention of offering a valuable reference for individuals engaged in Federated Learning, including researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders. This survey aims to support the advancement of more effective and resilient FL systems.