Impact of Tree Cover Loss on Carbon Emission: A Learning-Based Analysis.

Describing the processes leading to deforestation is essential for the development and implementation of the forest policies. In this work, two different learning models were developed in order to identify the best possible model for the assessment of the deforestation causes and trends. We developed autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model and long short-term memory (LSTM) independently in order to see the trend between tree cover loss and carbon dioxide emission. This study includes the twenty-year data of Pakistan on tree cover loss and carbon emission from the Global Forest Watch (GFW) platform, a known platform to get numerical data. Minimum mean absolute error (MAE) for the prediction of tree cover loss and carbon emission obtained through ARIMA model is 0.89 and 0.95, respectively. The minimum MAE given by LSTM model is 0.33 and 0.43, respectively. There is no such kind of study conducted in order to identify the increase in carbon emission due to tree cover loss most specifically in Pakistan. The results endorsed that one of the main causes of increase in the pollution in the environment in terms of carbon emission is due to tree cover loss.

Improving Recognition of Overlapping Activities with Less Interclass Variations in Smart Homes through Clustering-Based Classification.

The systems of sensing technology along with machine learning techniques provide a robust solution in a smart home due to which health monitoring, elderly care, and independent living take advantage. This study addresses the overlapping problem in activities performed by the smart home resident and improves the recognition performance of overlapping activities. The overlapping problem occurs due to less interclass variations (i.e., similar sensors used in more than one activity and the same location of performed activities). The proposed approach overlapping activity recognition using cluster-based classification (OAR-CbC) that makes a generic model for this problem is to use a soft partitioning technique to separate the homogeneous activities from nonhomogeneous activities on a coarse-grained level. Then, the activities within each cluster are balanced and the classifier is trained to correctly recognize the activities within each cluster independently on a fine-grained level. We examine four partitioning and classification techniques with the same hierarchy for a fair comparison. The OAR-CbC evaluates on smart home datasets Aruba and Milan using threefold and leave-one-day-out cross-validation. We used evaluation metrics: precision, recall, F score, accuracy, and confusion matrices to ensure the model's reliability. The OAR-CbC shows promising results on both datasets, notably boosting the recognition rate of all overlapping activities more than the state-of-the-art studies.