The forecast of electricity demand has been a recurrent research topic for decades, due to its economical and strategic relevance. Several Machine Learning (ML) techniques have evolved in parallel with the complexity of the electric grid. This paper reviews a wide selection of approaches that have used Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to forecast electricity demand, aiming to help newcomers and experienced researchers to appraise the common practices and to detect areas where there is room for improvement in the face of the current widespread deployment of smart meters and sensors, which yields an unprecedented amount of data to work with. The review looks at the specific problems tackled by each one of the selected papers, the results attained by their algorithms, and the strategies followed to validate and compare the results. This way, it is possible to highlight some peculiarities and algorithm configurations that seem to consistently outperform others in specific settings.

Recurrence is a critical aspect of breast cancer (BC) that is inexorably tied to mortality. Reuse of healthcare data through Machine Learning (ML) algorithms offers great opportunities to improve the stratification of patients at risk of cancer recurrence. We hypothesized that combining features from structured and unstructured sources would provide better prediction results for 5-year cancer recurrence than either source alone. We collected and preprocessed clinical data from a cohort of BC patients, resulting in 823 valid subjects for analysis. We derived three sets of features: structured information, features from free text, and a combination of both. We evaluated the performance of five ML algorithms to predict 5-year cancer recurrence and selected the best-performing to test our hypothesis. The XGB (eXtreme Gradient Boosting) model yielded the best performance among the five evaluated algorithms, with precision = 0.900, recall = 0.907, F1-score = 0.897, and area under the receiver operating characteristic AUROC = 0.807. The best prediction results were achieved with the structured dataset, followed by the unstructured dataset, while the combined dataset achieved the poorest performance. ML algorithms for BC recurrence prediction are valuable tools to improve patient risk stratification, help with post-cancer monitoring, and plan more effective follow-up. Structured data provides the best results when fed to ML algorithms. However, an approach based on natural language processing offers comparable results while potentially requiring less mapping effort.