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Publications

Publications by LIAAD

2024

Characterisation of Dansgaard-Oeschger events in palaeoclimate time series using the matrix profile method

Authors
Barbosa, S; Silva, ME; Rousseau, DD;

Publication
NONLINEAR PROCESSES IN GEOPHYSICS

Abstract
Palaeoclimate time series, reflecting the state of Earth's climate in the distant past, occasionally display very large and rapid shifts showing abrupt climate variability. The identification and characterisation of these abrupt transitions in palaeoclimate records is of particular interest as this allows for understanding of millennial climate variability and the identification of potential tipping points in the context of current climate change. Methods that are able to characterise these events in an objective and automatic way, in a single time series, or across two proxy records are therefore of particular interest. In our study the matrix profile approach is used to describe Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events, abrupt warmings detected in the Greenland ice core, and Northern Hemisphere marine and continental records. The results indicate that canonical events DO-19 and DO-20, occurring at around 72 and 76 ka, are the most similar events over the past 110 000 years. These transitions are characterised by matching transitions corresponding to events DO-1, DO-8, and DO-12. They are abrupt, resulting in a rapid shift to warmer conditions, followed by a gradual return to cold conditions. The joint analysis of the delta 18O and Ca2+ time series indicates that the transition corresponding to the DO-19 event is the most similar event across the two time series.

2024

Document Level Event Extraction from Narratives

Authors
Cunha, LF;

Publication
ADVANCES IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL, ECIR 2024, PT V

Abstract
One of the fundamental tasks in Information Extraction (IE) is Event Extraction (EE), an extensively studied and challenging task [13,15], which aims to identify and classify events from the text. This involves identifying the event's central word (trigger) and its participants (arguments) [1]. These elements capture the event semantics and structure, which have applications in various fields, including biomedical texts [42], cybersecurity [24], economics [12], literature [32], and history [33]. Structured knowledge derived from EE can also benefit other downstream tasks such as Question Answering [20,30], Natural Language Understanding [21], Knowledge Base Graphs [3,37], summarization [8,10,41] and recommendation systems [9,18]. Despite the existence of several English EE systems [2,22,25,26], they face limited portability to other languages [4] and most of them are designed for closed domains, posing difficulties in generalising. Furthermore, most current EE systems restrict their scope to the sentence level, assuming that all arguments are contained within the same sentence as their corresponding trigger. However, real-world scenarios often involve event arguments spanning multiple sentences, highlighting the need for document-level EE.

2024

An Interpretable Human-in-the-Loop Process to Improve Medical Image Classification

Authors
Santos, JC; Santos, MS; Abreu, PH;

Publication
ADVANCES IN INTELLIGENT DATA ANALYSIS XXII, PT I, IDA 2024

Abstract
Medical imaging classification improves patient prognoses by providing information on disease assessment, staging, and treatment response. The high demand for medical imaging acquisition requires the development of effective classification methodologies, occupying deep learning technologies, the pool position for this task. However, the major drawback of such techniques relies on their black-box nature which has delayed their use in real-world scenarios. Interpretability methodologies have emerged as a solution for this problem due to their capacity to translate black-box models into clinical understandable information. The most promising interpretability methodologies are concept-based techniques that can understand the predictions of a deep neural network through user-specified concepts. Concept activation regions and concept activation vectors are concept-based implementations that provide global explanations for the prediction of neural networks. The explanations provided allow the identification of the relationships that the network learned and can be used to identify possible errors during training. In this work, concept activation vectors and concept activation regions are used to identify flaws in neural network training and how this weakness can be mitigated in a human-in-the-loop process automatically improving the performance and trustworthiness of the classifier. To reach such a goal, three phases have been defined: training baseline classifiers, applying the concept-based interpretability, and implementing a human-in-the-loop approach to improve classifier performance. Four medical imaging datasets of different modalities are included in this study to prove the generality of the proposed method. The results identified concepts in each dataset that presented flaws in the classifier training and consequently, the human-in-the-loop approach validated by a team of 2 clinicians team achieved a statistically significant improvement.

2024

Data-Centric Federated Learning for Anomaly Detection in Smart Grids and Other Industrial Control Systems

Authors
Perdigão, D; Cruz, T; Simões, P; Abreu, PH;

Publication
NOMS 2024 IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium, Seoul, Republic of Korea, May 6-10, 2024

Abstract

2024

A Perspective on the Missing at Random Problem: Synthetic Generation and Benchmark Analysis

Authors
Cabrera-Sánchez, JF; Pereira, RC; Abreu, PH; Silva-Ramírez, EL;

Publication
IEEE ACCESS

Abstract
Progressively more advanced and complex models are proposed to address problems related to computer vision, forecasting, Internet of Things, Big Data and so on. However, these disciplines require preprocessing steps to obtain meaningful results. One of the most common problems addressed in this stage is the presence of missing values. Understanding the reason why missingness occurs helps to select data imputation methods that are more adequate to complete these missing values. Missing at Random synthetic generation presents challenges such as achieving extreme missingness rates and preserving the consistency of the mechanism. To address these shortcomings, three new methods that generate synthetic missingness under the Missing at Random mechanism are proposed in this work and compared to a baseline model. This comparison considers a benchmark covering 33 data sets and five missingness rates $(10\%, 20\%, 40\%, 60\%, 80\%)$ . Seven data imputation methods are compared to evaluate the proposals, ranging from traditional methods to deep learning methods. The results demonstrate that the proposals are aligned with the baseline method in terms of the performance and ranking of data imputation methods. Thus, three new feasible and consistent alternatives for synthetic missingness generation under Missing at Random are presented.

2024

Enhancing mammography: a comprehensive review of computer methods for improving image quality

Authors
Santos, JC; Santos, MS; Abreu, PH;

Publication
PROGRESS IN BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING

Abstract
Mammography imaging remains the gold standard for breast cancer detection and diagnosis, but challenges in image quality can lead to misdiagnosis, increased radiation exposure, and higher healthcare costs. This comprehensive review evaluates traditional and machine learning-based techniques for improving mammography image quality, aiming to benefit clinicians and enhance diagnostic accuracy. Our literature search, spanning 2015 - 2024, identified 115 articles focusing on contrast enhancement and noise reduction methods, including histogram equalization, filtering, unsharp masking, fuzzy logic, transform-based techniques, and advanced machine learning approaches. Machine learning, particularly architectures integrating denoising autoencoders with convolutional neural networks, emerged as highly effective in enhancing image quality without compromising detail. The discussion highlights the success of these techniques in improving mammography images' visual quality. However, challenges such as high noise ratios, inconsistent evaluation metrics, and limited open-source datasets persist. Addressing these issues offers opportunities for future research to further advance mammography image enhancement methodologies.

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