Abstract
Time series forecasting is a challenging task with applications in a wide range of domains. Auto-regression is one of the most common approaches to address these problems. Accordingly, observations are modelled by multiple regression using their past lags as predictor variables. We investigate the extension of auto-regressive processes using statistics which summarise the recent past dynamics of time series. The result of our research is a novel framework called VEST, designed to perform feature engineering using univariate and numeric time series automatically. The proposed approach works in three main steps. First, recent observations are mapped onto different representations. Second, each representation is summarised by statistical functions. Finally, a filter is applied for feature selection. We discovered that combining the features generated by VEST with auto-regression significantly improves forecasting performance in a database composed by 90 time series with high sampling frequency. However, we also found that there are no improvements when the framework is applied for multi-step forecasting or in time series with low sample size. VEST is publicly available online.

Abstract
Arbitrary, inconsistent, or faulty decision-making raises serious concerns, and preventing unfair models is an increasingly important challenge in Machine Learning. Data often reflect past discriminatory behavior, and models trained on such data may reflect bias on sensitive attributes, such as gender, race, or age. One approach to developing fair models is to preprocess the training data to remove the underlying biases while preserving the relevant information, for example, by correcting biased labels. While multiple label noise correction methods are available, the information about their behavior in identifying discrimination is very limited. In this work, we develop an empirical methodology to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of label noise correction techniques in ensuring the fairness of models trained on biased datasets. Our methodology involves manipulating the amount of label noise and can be used with fairness benchmarks but also with standard ML datasets. We apply the methodology to analyze six label noise correction methods according to several fairness metrics on standard OpenML datasets. Our results suggest that the Hybrid Label Noise Correction [20] method achieves the best trade-off between predictive performance and fairness. Clustering-Based Correction [14] can reduce discrimination the most, however, at the cost of lower predictive performance.

Abstract
A growing number of organizations are adopting a strategy of breaking down large data analysis problems into specific sub-problems, tailoring models for each. However, handling a large number of individual models can pose challenges in understanding organization-wide phenomena. Recent studies focus on using decision trees to create a consensus model by aggregating local decision trees into sets of rules. Despite efforts, the resulting models may still be incomplete, i.e., not able to cover the entire decision space. This paper explores methodologies to tackle this issue by generating complete consensus models from incomplete rule sets, relying on rough estimates of the distribution of independent variables. Two approaches are introduced: synthetic dataset creation followed by decision tree training and a specialized algorithm for creating a decision tree from symbolic data. The feasibility of generating complete decision trees is demonstrated, along with an empirical evaluation on a number of datasets.

Abstract
Covid-19 is a serious disease caused by the Sars-CoV-2 virus that has been first reported in China at late 2019 and has rapidly spread around the world. As the virus affects mostly the lungs, chest X-rays are one of the safest and most accessible ways of diagnosing the infection. In this paper, we propose the use of an approach for detecting Covid-19 in chest X-ray images through the extraction and classification of local and global percolation-based features. The method was applied in two datasets: one containing 2,002 segmented samples split into two classes (Covid-19 and Healthy); and another containing 1,125 non-segmented samples split into three classes (Covid-19, Healthy and Pneumonia). The 48 obtained percolation features were given as input to six different classifiers and then AUC and accuracy values were evaluated. We employed the 10-fold cross-validation method and evaluated the lesion sub-types with binary and multiclass classification using the Hermite Polynomial classifier, which had never been employed in this context. This classifier provided the best overall results when compared to other five machine learning algorithms. These results based in the association of percolation features and Hermite polynomial can contribute to the detection of the lesions by supporting specialists in clinical practices.

Abstract
Recent state-of-the-art forecasting methods are trained on collections of time series. These methods, often referred to as global models, can capture common patterns in different time series to improve their generalization performance. However, they require large amounts of data that might not be available. Moreover, global models may fail to capture relevant patterns unique to a particular time series. In these cases, data augmentation can be useful to increase the sample size of time series datasets. The main contribution of this work is a novel method for generating univariate time series synthetic samples. Our approach stems from the insight that the observations concerning a particular time series of interest represent only a small fraction of all observations. In this context, we frame the problem of training a forecasting model as an imbalanced learning task. Oversampling strategies are popular approaches used to handle the imbalance problem in machine learning. We use these techniques to create synthetic time series observations and improve the accuracy of forecasting models. We carried out experiments using 7 different databases that contain a total of 5502 univariate time series. We found that the proposed solution outperforms both a global and a local model, thus providing a better trade-off between these two approaches. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

Abstract
In this work, a method based on the use of explainable artificial intelligence techniques with multiscale and multidimensional fractal techniques is presented in order to investigate histological images stained with Hematoxylin-Eosin. The CNN GoogLeNet neural activation patterns were explored, obtained from the gradient-weighted class activation mapping and locally-interpretable model-agnostic explanation techniques. The feature vectors were generated with multiscale and multidimensional fractal techniques, specifically fractal dimension, lacunarity and percolation. The features were evaluated by ranking each entry, using the ReliefF algorithm. The discriminative power of each solution was defined via classifiers with different heuristics. The best results were obtained from LIME, with a significant increase in accuracy and AUC rates when compared to those provided by GoogLeNet. The details presented here can contribute to the development of models aimed at the classification of histological images. © 2024 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda.