Predicting life satisfaction using machine learning and explainable AI.

Life satisfaction is a crucial facet of human well-being. Hence, research on life satisfaction is incumbent for understanding how individuals experience their lives and influencing interventions targeted at enhancing mental health and well-being. Life satisfaction has traditionally been measured using analog, complicated, and frequently error-prone methods. These methods raise questions concerning validation and propagation. However, this study demonstrates the potential for machine learning algorithms to predict life satisfaction with a high accuracy of 93.80% and a 73.00% macro F1-score. The dataset comes from a government survey of 19000 people aged 16-64 years in Denmark. Using feature learning techniques, 27 significant questions for assessing contentment were extracted, making the study highly reproducible, simple, and easily interpretable. Furthermore, clinical and biomedical large language models (LLMs) were explored for predicting life satisfaction by converting tabular data into natural language sentences through mapping and adding meaningful counterparts, achieving an accuracy of 93.74% and macro F1-score of 73.21%. It was found that life satisfaction prediction is more closely related to the biomedical domain than the clinical domain. Ablation studies were also conducted to understand the impact of data resampling and feature selection techniques on model performance. Moreover, the correlation between primary determinants with different age brackets was analyzed, and it was found that health condition is the most important determinant across all ages. The best performing Machine Learning model trained in this study is deployed on a public server, ensuring unrestricted usage of the model. We highlight the advantages of machine learning methods for predicting life satisfaction and the significance of XAI for interpreting and validating these predictions. This study demonstrates how machine learning, large language models and XAI can jointly contribute to building trust and understanding in using AI to investigate human behavior, with significant ramifications for academics and professionals working to quantify and comprehend subjective well-being.

Predictive modeling of consumer purchase behavior on social media: Integrating theory of planned behavior and machine learning for actionable insights.

In recent times, it has been observed that social media exerts a favorable influence on consumer purchasing behavior. Many organizations are adopting the utilization of social media platforms as a means to promote products and services. Hence, it is crucial for enterprises to understand the consumer buying behavior in order to thrive. This article presents a novel approach that combines the theory of planned behavior (TPB) with machine learning techniques to develop accurate predictive models for consumer purchase behavior. This study examines three distinct factors of the theory of planned behavior (attitude, social norm, and perceived behavioral control) that provide insights into the primary determinants influencing online purchasing behavior. A total of eight machine learning algorithms, namely K-nearest neighbor, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, AdaBoost, and Gradient Boosting, were utilized in order to forecast consumer purchasing behavior. Empirical findings indicate that gradient boosting demonstrates superior performance in predicting customer buying behavior, with an accuracy rate of 0.91 and a macro F1 score of 0.91. This holds true when all factors, namely attitude (ATTD), social norm (SN), and perceived behavioral control (PBC), are included in the analysis. Furthermore, we incorporated Explainable AI (XAI), specifically LIME (Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations), to elucidate how the best machine learning model (i.e. gradient boosting) makes its prediction. The findings indicate that LIME has demonstrated a high level of confidence in accurately predicting the influence of low and high behavior. The outcome presented in this article has several implications. For instance, this article presents a novel way to combine the theory of planned behavior with machine learning techniques in order to predict consumer purchase behavior. This integration allows for a comprehensive analysis of factors influencing online purchasing decisions. Also, the incorporation of Explainable AI enhances the transparency and interpretability of the model. This feature is valuable for organizations seeking insights into factors driving predictions and the reasons behind certain outcomes. Moreover, these observations have the potential to offer valuable insights for businesses in customizing their marketing strategies to align with these influential factors.

Mitigating carbon footprint for knowledge distillation based deep learning model compression.

Deep learning techniques have recently demonstrated remarkable success in numerous domains. Typically, the success of these deep learning models is measured in terms of performance metrics such as accuracy and mean average precision (mAP). Generally, a model's high performance is highly valued, but it frequently comes at the expense of substantial energy costs and carbon footprint emissions during the model building step. Massive emission of CO2 has a deleterious impact on life on earth in general and is a serious ethical concern that is largely ignored in deep learning research. In this article, we mainly focus on environmental costs and the means of mitigating carbon footprints in deep learning models, with a particular focus on models created using knowledge distillation (KD). Deep learning models typically contain a large number of parameters, resulting in a 'heavy' model. A heavy model scores high on performance metrics but is incompatible with mobile and edge computing devices. Model compression techniques such as knowledge distillation enable the creation of lightweight, deployable models for these low-resource devices. KD generates lighter models and typically performs with slightly less accuracy than the heavier teacher model (model accuracy by the teacher model on CIFAR 10, CIFAR 100, and TinyImageNet is 95.04%, 76.03%, and 63.39%; model accuracy by KD is 91.78%, 69.7%, and 60.49%). Although the distillation process makes models deployable on low-resource devices, they were found to consume an exorbitant amount of energy and have a substantial carbon footprint (15.8, 17.9, and 13.5 times more carbon compared to the corresponding teacher model). The enormous environmental cost is primarily attributable to the tuning of the hyperparameter, Temperature (τ). In this article, we propose measuring the environmental costs of deep learning work (in terms of GFLOPS in millions, energy consumption in kWh, and CO2 equivalent in grams). In order to create lightweight models with low environmental costs, we propose a straightforward yet effective method for selecting a hyperparameter (τ) using a stochastic approach for each training batch fed into the models. We applied knowledge distillation (including its data-free variant) to problems involving image classification and object detection. To evaluate the robustness of our method, we ran experiments on various datasets (CIFAR 10, CIFAR 100, Tiny ImageNet, and PASCAL VOC) and models (ResNet18, MobileNetV2, Wrn-40-2). Our novel approach reduces the environmental costs by a large margin by eliminating the requirement of expensive hyperparameter tuning without sacrificing performance. Empirical results on the CIFAR 10 dataset show that the stochastic technique achieves an accuracy of 91.67%, whereas tuning achieves an accuracy of 91.78%-however, the stochastic approach reduces the energy consumption and CO2 equivalent each by a factor of 19. Similar results have been obtained with CIFAR 100 and TinyImageNet dataset. This pattern is also observed in object detection classification on the PASCAL VOC dataset, where the tuning technique performs similarly to the stochastic technique, with a difference of 0.03% mAP favoring the stochastic technique while reducing the energy consumptions and CO2 emission each by a factor of 18.5.

Deep Learning Based Automatic Malaria Parasite Detection from Blood Smear and its Smartphone Based Application.

Malaria is a life-threatening disease that is spread by the Plasmodium parasites. It is detected by trained microscopists who analyze microscopic blood smear images. Modern deep learning techniques may be used to do this analysis automatically. The need for the trained personnel can be greatly reduced with the development of an automatic accurate and efficient model. In this article, we propose an entirely automated Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based model for the diagnosis of malaria from the microscopic blood smear images. A variety of techniques including knowledge distillation, data augmentation, Autoencoder, feature extraction by a CNN model and classified by Support Vector Machine (SVM) or K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) are performed under three training procedures named general training, distillation training and autoencoder training to optimize and improve the model accuracy and inference performance. Our deep learning-based model can detect malarial parasites from microscopic images with an accuracy of 99.23% while requiring just over 4600 floating point operations. For practical validation of model efficiency, we have deployed the miniaturized model in different mobile phones and a server-backed web application. Data gathered from these environments show that the model can be used to perform inference under 1 s per sample in both offline (mobile only) and online (web application) mode, thus engendering confidence that such models may be deployed for efficient practical inferential systems.

BanglaLekha-Isolated: A multi-purpose comprehensive dataset of Handwritten Bangla Isolated characters.

BanglaLekha-Isolated, a Bangla handwritten isolated character dataset is presented in this article. This dataset contains 84 different characters comprising of 50 Bangla basic characters, 10 Bangla numerals and 24 selected compound characters. 2000 handwriting samples for each of the 84 characters were collected, digitized and pre-processed. After discarding mistakes and scribbles, 1,66,105 handwritten character images were included in the final dataset. The dataset also includes labels indicating the age and the gender of the subjects from whom the samples were collected. This dataset could be used not only for optical handwriting recognition research but also to explore the influence of gender and age on handwriting. The dataset is publicly available at https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/hf6sf8zrkc/2.