Abstract
Pet owners are increasingly becoming conscious of their pet's necessities and are paying more attention to their overall wellness. The well-being of their pets is intricately linked to their own emotional and physical well-being. Some veterinary system solutions are emerging to provide proactive healthcare options for pets. One such solution offers the continuous monitoring of a pet's activity through accelerometer tracking devices. Based on data collected by this application, in this paper, we study different time aggregation and three unsupervised machine learning techniques to identify anomalies in pet behaviour data. Specifically, three algorithms, Isolation Forest, Local Outlier Factor, and K-Nearest Neighbour, with various thresholds to differentiate between normal and abnormal events. Results conducted on ten pets (five cats and five dogs) show that the most effective approach is to use daily data divided into periods. Moreover, the Local Outlier Factor is the best algorithm for detecting anomalies when prioritizing the identification of true positives. However, it also produces a high false positive ratio.

Abstract
The rise of environmental crimes has become a major concern globally as they cause significant damage to ecosystems, public health and result in economic losses. The availability of vast sensor data provides an opportunity to analyze environmental data proactively. This helps to detect irregularities and uncover potential criminal activities. This paper highlights the critical role played by machine learning (ML) and remote sensing technologies in the continuously evolving scenarios of environmental crime. By examining some case studies on detecting illegal fishing, illegal oil spills, illegal landfills, and illegal logging, we delve into the practical implementation of data-driven approaches for environmental crime detection. Our goal with this study is to provide an overview of the existing research in this area and foster the use of ML and data science techniques to enhance environmental crime detection.

Abstract
We present parametric probabilistic models for numerical distributional variables. The proposed models are based on the representation of each distribution by a location measure and inter-quantile ranges, for given quantiles, thereby characterizing the underlying empirical distributions in a flexible way. Multivariate Normal distributions are assumed for the whole set of indicators, considering alternative structures of the variance-covariance matrix. For all cases, maximum likelihood estimators of the corresponding parameters are derived. This modelling allows for hypothesis testing and multivariate parametric analysis. The proposed framework is applied to Analysis of Variance and parametric Discriminant Analysis of distributional data. A simulation study examines the performance of the proposed models in classification problems under different data conditions. Applications to Internet traffic data and Portuguese official data illustrate the relevance of the proposed approach.

Abstract
Accurate evaluation of forecasting models is essential for ensuring reliable predictions. Current practices for evaluating and comparing forecasting models focus on summarising performance into a single score, using metrics such as SMAPE. We hypothesize that averaging performance over all samples dilutes relevant information about the relative performance of models. Particularly, conditions in which this relative performance is different than the overall accuracy. We address this limitation by proposing a novel framework for evaluating univariate time series forecasting models from multiple perspectives, such as one-step ahead forecasting versus multi-step ahead forecasting. We show the advantages of this framework by comparing a state-of-the-art deep learning approach with classical forecasting techniques. While classical methods (e.g. ARIMA) are long-standing approaches to forecasting, deep neural networks (e.g. NHITS) have recently shown state-of-the-art forecasting performance in benchmark datasets. We conducted extensive experiments that show NHITS generally performs best, but its superiority varies with forecasting conditions. For instance, concerning the forecasting horizon, NHITS only outperforms classical approaches for multi-step ahead forecasting. Another relevant insight is that, when dealing with anomalies, NHITS is outperformed by methods such as Theta. These findings highlight the importance of evaluating forecasts from multiple dimensions.

Abstract
This research addresses the challenge of generating synthetic data that resembles real-world data while preserving privacy. With privacy laws protecting sensitive information such as healthcare data, accessing sufficient training data becomes difficult, resulting in an increased difficulty in training Machine Learning models and in overall worst models. Recently, there has been an increased interest in the usage of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to generate synthetic data since they enable researchers to generate more data to train their models. GANs, however, may not be suitable for privacy-sensitive data since they have no concern for the privacy of the generated data. We propose modifying the known Conditional Tabular GAN (CTGAN) model by incorporating a privacy-aware loss function, thus resulting in the Private CTGAN (PCTGAN) method. Several experiments were carried out using 10 public domain classification datasets and comparing PCTGAN with CTGAN and the state-of-the-art privacy-preserving model, the Differential Privacy CTGAN (DP-CTGAN). The results demonstrated that PCTGAN enables users to fine-tune the privacy fidelity trade-off by leveraging parameters, as well as that if desired, a higher level of privacy.

Abstract
Early identification of failures is a critical task in predictive maintenance, preventing potential problems before they manifest and resulting in substantial time and cost savings for industries. We propose an approach that predicts failures in the near future. First, a deep learning model combining long short-term memory and convolutional neural network architectures predicts signals for a future time horizon using real-time data. In the second step, an autoencoder based on convolutional neural networks detects anomalies in these predicted signals. Finally, a verification step ensures that a fault is considered reliable only if it is corroborated by anomalies in multiple signals simultaneously. We validate our approach using publicly available Air Production Unit (APU) data from Porto metro trains. Two significant conclusions emerge from our study. Firstly, experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating a high fault detection rate and a reduced number of false positives. Secondly, the adaptability of this proposal allows for the customization of configuration of different time horizons and relationship between the signals to meet specific detection requirements.