Deep learning-based important weights-only transfer learning approach for COVID-19 CT-scan classification.

COVID-19 has become a pandemic for the entire world, and it has significantly affected the world economy. The importance of early detection and treatment of the infection cannot be overstated. The traditional diagnosis techniques take more time in detecting the infection. Although, numerous deep learning-based automated solutions have recently been developed in this regard, nevertheless, the limitation of computational and battery power in resource-constrained devices makes it difficult to deploy trained models for real-time inference. In this paper, to detect the presence of COVID-19 in CT-scan images, an important weights-only transfer learning method has been proposed for devices with limited runt-time resources. In the proposed method, the pre-trained models are made point-of-care devices friendly by pruning less important weight parameters of the model. The experiments were performed on two popular VGG16 and ResNet34 models and the empirical results showed that pruned ResNet34 model achieved 95.47% accuracy, 0.9216 sensitivity, 0.9567 F-score, and 0.9942 specificity with 41.96% fewer FLOPs and 20.64% fewer weight parameters on the SARS-CoV-2 CT-scan dataset. The results of our experiments showed that the proposed method significantly reduces the run-time resource requirements of the computationally intensive models and makes them ready to be utilized on the point-of-care devices.

Adaptive windowing based recurrent neural network for drift adaption in non-stationary environment.

In today's digital era, many applications generate massive data streams that must be sequenced and processed immediately. Therefore, storing large amounts of data for analysis is impractical. Now, this infinite amount of evolving data confronts concept drifts in data stream classification. Concept drift is a phenomenon in which the distribution of input data or the relationship between input data and target label changes over time. If the drifts are not addressed, the learning model's performance suffers. Non-stationary data streams must be processed as they arrive, and neural networks' built-in capabilities aid in the processing of huge non-stationary data streams. We proposed an adaptive windowing approach based on a gated recurrent unit, a variant of the recurrent neural network incrementally trained on incoming data (for the real-world airline and synthetic Streaming Ensemble Algorithm (SEA) datasets), and employed elastic weight consolidation with the Fisher information matrix to prevent forgetting. Unlike the traditional fixed window methodology, the proposed model dynamically increases the window size if the prediction is correct and reduces it if drifts occur. As a result, an adaptive recurrent neural network model can adapt to changes in the non-stationary data stream and provide consistent performance. Moreover, the findings revealed that on the airline and the SEA dataset, the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by achieving 67.74% and 91.70% accuracy, respectively. Further, the results demonstrated that the proposed model has a better accuracy of 3.6% and 1.6% for the SEA and the airline dataset, respectively.

AENeT: an attention-enabled neural architecture for fake news detection using contextual features.

In the current era of social media, the popularity of smartphones and social media platforms has increased exponentially. Through these electronic media, fake news has been rising rapidly with the advent of new sources of information, which are highly unreliable. Checking off a particular news article is genuine or fake is not easy for any end user. Search engines like Google are also not capable of telling about the fakeness of any news article due to its restriction with limited query keywords. In this paper, our end goal is to design an efficient deep learning model to detect the degree of fakeness in a news statement. We propose a simple network architecture that combines the use of contextual embedding as word embedding and uses attention mechanisms with relevant metadata available. The efficacy and efficiency of our models are demonstrated on several real-world datasets. Our model achieved 46.36% accuracy on the LIAR dataset, which outperforms the current state of the art by 1.49%.

A transfer learning with structured filter pruning approach for improved breast cancer classification on point-of-care devices.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: A significant progress has been made in automated medical diagnosis with the advent of deep learning methods in recent years. However, deploying a deep learning model for mobile and small-scale, low-cost devices is a major bottleneck. Further, breast cancer is more prevalent currently, and ductal carcinoma being its most common type. Although many machine/deep learning methods have already been investigated, still, there is a need for further improvement. METHOD: This paper proposes a novel deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based transfer learning approach complemented with structured filter pruning for histopathological image classification, and to bring down the run-time resource requirement of the trained deep learning models. In the proposed method, first, the less important filters are pruned from the convolutional layers and then the pruned models are trained on the histopathological image dataset. RESULTS: We performed extensive experiments using three popular pre-trained CNNs, VGG19, ResNet34, and ResNet50. With VGG19 pruned model, we achieved an accuracy of 91.25% outperforming earlier methods on the same dataset and architecture while reducing 63.46% FLOPs. Whereas, with the ResNet34 pruned model, the accuracy increases to 91.80% with 40.63% fewer FLOPs. Moreover, with the ResNet50 model, we achieved an accuracy of 92.07% with 30.97% less FLOPs. CONCLUSION: The experimental results reveal that the pre-trained model's performance complemented with filter pruning exceeds original pre-trained models. Another important outcome of the research is that the pruned model with reduced resource requirements can be deployed in point-of-care devices for automated diagnosis applications with ease.

EchoFakeD: improving fake news detection in social media with an efficient deep neural network.

The increasing popularity of social media platforms has simplified the sharing of news articles that have led to the explosion in fake news. With the emergence of fake news at a very rapid rate, a serious concern has produced in our society because of enormous fake content dissemination. The quality of the news content is questionable and there exists a necessity for an automated tool for the detection. Existing studies primarily focus on utilizing information extracted from the news content. We suggest that user-based engagements and the context related group of people (echo-chamber) sharing the same opinions can play a vital role in the fake news detection. Hence, in this paper, we have focused on both the content of the news article and the existence of echo chambers in the social network for fake news detection. Standard factorization methods for fake news detection have limited effectiveness due to their unsupervised nature and primarily employed with traditional machine learning models. To design an effective deep learning model with tensor factorization approach is the priority. In our approach, the news content is fused with the tensor following a coupled matrix-tensor factorization method to get a latent representation of both news content as well as social context. We have designed our model with a different number of filters across each dense layer along with dropout. To classify on news content and social context-based information individually as well as in combination, a deep neural network (our proposed model) was employed with optimal hyper-parameters. The performance of our proposed approach has been validated on a real-world fake news dataset: BuzzFeed and PolitiFact. Classification results have demonstrated that our proposed model (EchoFakeD) outperforms existing and appropriate baselines for fake news detection and achieved a validation accuracy of 92.30%. These results have shown significant improvements over the existing state-of-the-art models in the area of fake news detection and affirm the potential use of the technique for classifying fake news.

FakeBERT: Fake news detection in social media with a BERT-based deep learning approach.

In the modern era of computing, the news ecosystem has transformed from old traditional print media to social media outlets. Social media platforms allow us to consume news much faster, with less restricted editing results in the spread of fake news at an incredible pace and scale. In recent researches, many useful methods for fake news detection employ sequential neural networks to encode news content and social context-level information where the text sequence was analyzed in a unidirectional way. Therefore, a bidirectional training approach is a priority for modelling the relevant information of fake news that is capable of improving the classification performance with the ability to capture semantic and long-distance dependencies in sentences. In this paper, we propose a BERT-based (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) deep learning approach (FakeBERT) by combining different parallel blocks of the single-layer deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) having different kernel sizes and filters with the BERT. Such a combination is useful to handle ambiguity, which is the greatest challenge to natural language understanding. Classification results demonstrate that our proposed model (FakeBERT) outperforms the existing models with an accuracy of 98.90%.