Abstract
Data-driven decision models based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been widely used in the public and private sectors. These models present challenges and are intended to be fair, effective and transparent in public interest areas. Bias, fairness and government transparency are aspects that significantly impact the functioning of a democratic society. They shape the government's and its citizens' relationship, influencing trust, accountability, and the equitable treatment of individuals and groups. Data-driven decision models can be biased at several process stages, contributing to injustices. Our research purpose is to understand fairness in the use of causal discovery for public procurement. By analysing Portuguese public contracts data, we aim i) to predict the place of execution of public contracts using the PC algorithm with sp-mi, smc-chi(2) and mc-chi(2) conditional independence tests; ii) to analyse and compare the fairness in those scenarios using Predictive Parity Rate, Proportional Parity, Demographic Parity and Accuracy Parity metrics. By addressing fairness concerns, we pursue to enhance responsible data-driven decision models. We conclude that, in our case, fairness metrics make an assessment more local than global due to causality pathways. We also observe that the Proportional Parity metric is the one with the lowest variance among all metrics and one with the highest precision, and this reinforces the observation that the Agency category is the one that is furthest apart in terms of the proportion of the groups.

Abstract

Abstract
Various relevant aspects of our lives relate to the places we visit and our daily activities. The movement of individuals between regular places, such as work, school, or other important personal locations is getting increasing attention due to the pervasiveness of geolocation devices and the amount of data they generate. This paper presents an approach for personal location prediction using a probabilistic model and data mining techniques over mobility data streams. We extract the individuals’ locations from relevant events in a data stream to build and maintain a Markov Chain over the important places. We evaluate the method over 3 real-world datasets. The results show the usefulness of the proposal in comparison with other well-known approaches.

Abstract
To maintain the performance of the latest generation of onshore and offshore wind turbine systems, a new methodology must be proposed to enhance the maintenance policy. In this context, this paper introduces an approach to designing a decision support tool that combines predictive capabilities with anomaly explanations for effective IoT predictive maintenance tasks. Essentially, the paper proposes an approach that integrates a predictive maintenance model with an explicative decision-making system. The key challenge is to detect anomalies and provide plausible explanations, enabling human operators to determine the necessary actions swiftly. To achieve this, the proposed approach identifies a minimal set of relevant features required to generate rules that explain the root causes of issues in the physical system. It estimates that certain features, such as the active power generator, blade pitch angle, and the average water temperature of the voltage circuit protection in the generator's sub-components, are particularly critical to monitor. Additionally, the approach simplifies the computation of an efficient predictive maintenance model. Compared to other deep learning models, the identified model provides up to 80% accuracy in anomaly detection and up to 96% for predicting the remaining useful life of the system under study. These performance metrics and indicators values are essential for enhancing the decision-making process. Moreover, the proposed decision support tool elucidates the onset of degradation and its dynamic evolution based on expert knowledge and data gathered through Internet of Things (IoT) technology and inspection reports. Thus, the developed approach should aid maintenance managers in making accurate decisions regarding inspection, replacement, and repair tasks. The methodology is demonstrated using a wind farm dataset provided by Energias De Portugal.

Abstract
Recommendation systems play a crucial role in modern e-commerce and streaming services. However, the limited availability of public datasets hampers the rapid development of more efficient and accurate recommendation algorithms within the research community. This work introduces a stream-based data generator designed to generate user preferences for a set of items while accommodating progressive changes in user preferences. The underlying principle involves using user/item embeddings to derive preferences by exploring the proximity of these embeddings. Whether randomly generated or learned from a real finite data stream, these embeddings serve as the basis for generating new preferences. We investigate how this fundamental model can adapt to shifts in user behavior over time; in our framework, changes correspond to alterations in the structure of the tripartite graph, reflecting modifications in the underlying embeddings. Through an analysis of real-life data streams, we demonstrate that the proposed model is effective in capturing actual preferences and the changes that they can exhibit over time. Thus, we characterize these changes and develop a generalized method capable of simulating realistic data, thereby generating streams with similar yet controllable drift dynamics.

Abstract
Long-tailed data are a special type of multiclass imbalanced data with a very large amount of minority/tail classes that have a very significant combined influence. Long-tailed learning (LTL) aims to build high-performance models on datasets with long-tailed distributions that can identify all the classes with high accuracy, in particular the minority/tail classes. It is a cutting-edge research direction that has attracted a remarkable amount of research effort in the past few years. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey of the latest advances in long-tailed visual learning. We first propose a new taxonomy for LTL, which consists of eight different dimensions, including data balancing, neural architecture, feature enrichment, logits adjustment, loss function, bells and whistles, network optimization, and posthoc processing techniques. Based on our proposed taxonomy, we present a systematic review of LTL methods, discussing their commonalities and alignable differences. We also analyze the differences between imbalance learning and LTL. Finally, we discuss prospects and future directions in this field.