Target specific mining of COVID-19 scholarly articles using one-class approach

An Improved K-means Clustering Algorithm Towards an Efficient Data-Driven Modeling

K-means algorithm is one of the well-known unsupervised machine learning algorithms. The algorithm typically finds out distinct non-overlapping clusters in which each point is assigned to a group. The minimum squared distance technique distributes each point to the nearest clusters or subgroups. One of the K-means algorithm’s main concerns is to find out the initial optimal centroids of clusters. It is the most challenging task to determine the optimum position of the initial clusters’ centroids at the very first iteration. This paper proposes an approach to find the optimal initial centroids efficiently to reduce the number of iterations and execution time. To analyze the effectiveness of our proposed method, we have utilized different real-world datasets to conduct experiments. We have first analyzed COVID-19 and patient datasets to show our proposed method’s efficiency. A synthetic dataset of 10M instances with 8 dimensions is also used to estimate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms traditional kmeans++ and random centroids initialization methods regarding the computation time and the number of iterations.

A Real-Time Crowd Monitoring and Management System for Social Distance Classification and Healthcare Using Deep Learning

Coronavirus born COVID-19 disease has spread its roots in the whole world. It is primarily spread by physical contact. As a preventive measure, proper crowd monitoring and management systems are required to be installed in public places to limit sudden outbreaks and impart improved healthcare. The number of new infections can be significantly reduced by adopting social distancing measures earlier. Motivated by this notion, a real-time crowd monitoring and management system for social distance classification is proposed in this research paper. In the proposed system, people are segregated from the background using the YOLO v4 object detection technique, and then the detected people are tracked by bounding boxes using the Deepsort technique. This system significantly helps in COVID-19 prevention by social distance detection and classification in public places using surveillance images and videos captured by the cameras installed in these places. The performance of this system has been assessed using mean average precision (mAP) and frames per second (FPS) metrics. It has also been evaluated by deploying it on Jetson Nano, a low-cost embedded system. The observed results show its suitability for real-time deployment in public places for COVID-19 prevention by social distance monitoring and classification.

Real time deep learning framework to monitor social distancing using improved single shot detector based on overhead position

The current COVID 19 halo infection has caused a severe catastrophe with its deadly spread. Despite the implementation of the vaccine, the severity of the infection has not diminished, and it has become stronger and more destructive. So, the only solution to protect ourselves from infection is social-distancing. Although social-distancing has been in practice for a long time, in most places it is not effectively followed, and it is very difficult to find out manually at all times whether people are following it or not. Therefore, we introduced a newly developed framework of deep-learning technique to automatically identify whether people maintain social-distancing or not using remote sensing top view images. Initially, we are detecting the context of image which includes information about the environment. Our detection model recognizes individuals using the boundary box. Then centroid is determined over every detected boundary box. By means of applying Euclidean distance, the pair range distances of the detected boundary box centroid are determined. To evaluate whether the distance measurement exceeds the minimum social distance limit, the violation threshold is established. We used Improved Single Shot Detector model for detecting a person over an image. Experiments are carried out on widely collected remote sensing images from various environments. Based on the object detection algorithm of deep learning, a variety of performance metrics are compared to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed model. Research outcome shows that, our proposed model outperforms well while recognize and detect a person in a well excellent way.

Statistical analysis of the Hungarian COVID-19 victims

With the wide spread of Coronavirus, most people who infected with the COVID-19, will recover without requiring special treatment. Whereas, elders and those with underlying medical problems are more likely to have serious illnesses, even be threatened with death. Many more disciplines try to find solutions and drive master plan to this global trouble. Consequently, by taking one particular population, Hungary, this study aims to explore a pattern of COVID-19 victims, who suffered from some underlying conditions. Age, gender, and underlying medical problems form the structure of the clustering. K-Means and two step clustering methods were applied for age-based and age-independent analysis. Grouping of the deaths in the form of two different scenarios may highlight some concepts of this deadly disease for public health professionals. Our result for clustering can forecast similar cases which are assigned to any cluster that it will be a serious cautious for the population.

A network-based positive and unlabeled learning approach for fake news detection

Fake news can rapidly spread through internet users and can deceive a large audience. Due to those characteristics, they can have a direct impact on political and economic events. Machine Learning approaches have been used to assist fake news identification. However, since the spectrum of real news is broad, hard to characterize, and expensive to label data due to the high update frequency, One-Class Learning (OCL) and Positive and Unlabeled Learning (PUL) emerge as an interesting approach for content-based fake news detection using a smaller set of labeled data than traditional machine learning techniques. In particular, network-based approaches are adequate for fake news detection since they allow incorporating information from different aspects of a publication to the problem modeling. In this paper, we propose a network-based approach based on Positive and Unlabeled Learning by Label Propagation (PU-LP), a one-class and transductive semi-supervised learning algorithm that performs classification by first identifying potential interest and non-interest documents into unlabeled data and then propagating labels to classify the remaining unlabeled documents. A label propagation approach is then employed to classify the remaining unlabeled documents. We assessed the performance of our proposal considering homogeneous (only documents) and heterogeneous (documents and terms) networks. Our comparative analysis considered four OCL algorithms extensively employed in One-Class text classification (k-Means, k-Nearest Neighbors Density-based, One-Class Support Vector Machine, and Dense Autoencoder), and another traditional PUL algorithm (Rocchio Support Vector Machine). The algorithms were evaluated in three news collections, considering balanced and extremely unbalanced scenarios. We used Bag-of-Words and Doc2Vec models to transform news into structured data. Results indicated that PU-LP approaches are more stable and achieve better results than other PUL and OCL approaches in most scenarios, performing similarly to semi-supervised binary algorithms. Also, the inclusion of terms in the news network activate better results, especially when news are distributed in the feature space considering veracity and subject. News representation using the Doc2Vec achieved better results than the Bag-of-Words model for both algorithms based on vector-space model and document similarity network.

Learning Target Class Feature Subspace (LTC-FS) Using Eigenspace Analysis and N-ary Search-Based Autonomous Hyperparameter Tuning for OCSVM

Existing dimensionality reduction (DR) techniques such as principal component analysis (PCA) and its variants are not suitable for target class mining due to the negligence of unique statistical properties of class-of-interest (CoI) samples. Conventionally, these approaches utilize higher or lower eigenvalued principal components (PCs) for data transformation; but the higher eigenvalued PCs may split the target class, whereas lower eigenvalued PCs do not contribute significant information and wrong selection of PCs leads to performance degradation. Considering these facts, the present research offers a novel target class-guided feature extraction method. In this approach, initially, the eigendecomposition is performed on variance–covariance matrix of only the target class samples, where the higher- and lower-valued eigenvectors are rejected via statistical analysis, and the selected eigenvectors are utilized to extract the most promising feature subspace. The extracted feature-subset gives a more tighter description of the CoI with enhanced associativity among target class samples and ensures the strong separation from nontarget class samples. One-class support vector machine (OCSVM) is evaluated to validate the performance of learned features. To obtain optimized values of hyperparameters of OCSVM a novel [Formula: see text]-ary search-based autonomous method is also proposed. Exhaustive experiments with a wide variety of datasets are performed in feature-space (original and reduced) and eigenspace (obtained from original and reduced features) to validate the performance of the proposed approach in terms of accuracy, precision, specificity and sensitivity.

Tracing the Pace of COVID-19 Research: Topic Modeling and Evolution

COVID-19 has been spreading rapidly around the world. With the growing attention on the deadly pandemic, discussions and research on COVID-19 are rapidly increasing to exchange latest findings with the hope to accelerate the pace of finding a cure. As a branch of information technology, artificial intelligence (AI) has greatly expedited the development of human society. In this paper, we investigate and visualize the on-going advancements of early scientific research on COVID-19 from the perspective of AI. By adopting the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model, this paper allocates the research articles into 50 key research topics pertinent to COVID-19 according to their abstracts. We present an overview of early studies of the COVID-19 crisis at different scales including referencing/citation behavior, topic variation and their inner interactions. We also identify innovative papers that are regarded as the cornerstones in the development of COVID-19 research. The results unveil the focus of scientific research, thereby giving deep insights into how the academic society contributes to combating the COVID-19 pandemic.

Deep learning-based bird eye view social distancing monitoring using surveillance video for curbing the COVID-19 spread

The escalating transmission intensity of COVID-19 pandemic is straining the healthcare systems worldwide. Due to the unavailability of effective pharmaceutical treatment and vaccines, monitoring social distancing is the only viable tool to strive against asymptomatic transmission. Pertaining to the need of monitoring the social distancing at populated areas, a novel bird eye view computer vision-based framework implementing deep learning and utilizing surveillance video is proposed. This proposed method employs YOLO v3 object detection model and uses key point regressor to detect the key feature points. Additionally, as the massive crowd is detected, the bounding boxes on objects are received, and red boxes are also visible if social distancing is violated. When empirically tested over real-time data, proposed method is established to be efficacious than the existing approaches in terms of inference time and frame rate.

Extraction of Data on Parent Compounds and Their Metabolites from Texts of Scientific Abstracts

The growing amount of experimental data on chemical objects includes properties of small molecules, results of studies of their interaction with human and animal proteins, and methods of synthesis of organic compounds (OCs). The data obtained can be used to identify the names of OCs automatically, including all possible synonyms and relevant data on the molecular properties and biological activity. Utilization of different synonymic names of chemical compounds allows researchers to increase the completeness of data on their properties available from publications. Enrichment of the data on the names of chemical compounds by information about their possible metabolites can help estimate the biological effects of parent compounds and their metabolites more thoroughly. Therefore, an attempt at automated extraction of the names of parent compounds and their metabolites from the texts is a rather important task. In our study, we aimed at developing a method that provides the extraction of the named entities (NEs) of parent compounds and their metabolites from abstracts of scientific publications. Based on the application of the conditional random fields' algorithm, we extracted the NEs of chemical compounds. We developed a set of rules allowing identification of parent compound NEs and their metabolites in the texts. We evaluated the possibility of extracting the names of potential metabolites based on cosine similarity between strings representing names of parent compounds and all other chemical NEs found in the text. Additionally, we used conditional random fields to fetch the names of parent compounds and their metabolites from the texts based on the corpus of texts labeled manually. Our computational experiments showed that usage of rules in combination with cosine similarity could increase the accuracy of recognition of the names of metabolites compared to the rule-based algorithm and application of a machine-learning algorithm (conditional random fields).

Classification of covid related articles using machine learning

Covid 19 pandemic has placed the entire world in a precarious condition. Earlier it was a serious issue in china whereas now it is being witnessed by citizens all over the world. Scientists are working hard to find treatment and vaccines for the coronavirus, also termed as covid. With the growing literature, it has become a major challenge for the medical community to find answers to questions related to covid-19. We have proposed a machine learning-based system that uses text classification applications of NLP to extract information from the scientific literature. Classification of large textual data makes the searching process easier thus useful for scientists. The main aim of our system is to classify the abstracts related to covid with their respective journals so that a researcher can refer to articles of his interest from the required journals instead of searching all the articles. In this paper, we describe our methodology needed to build such a system. Our system experiments on the COVID-19 open research dataset and the performance is evaluated using classifiers like KNN, MLP, etc. An explainer was also built using XGBoost to show the model predictions.

Implementing a real-time, AI-based, people detection and social distancing measuring system for Covid-19

COVID-19 is a disease caused by a severe respiratory syndrome coronavirus. It was identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. It has resulted in an ongoing pandemic that caused infected cases including many deaths. Coronavirus is primarily spread between people during close contact. Motivating to this notion, this research proposes an artificial intelligence system for social distancing classification of persons using thermal images. By exploiting YOLOv2 (you look at once) approach, a novel deep learning detection technique is developed for detecting and tracking people in indoor and outdoor scenarios. An algorithm is also implemented for measuring and classifying the distance between persons and to automatically check if social distancing rules are respected or not. Hence, this work aims at minimizing the spread of the COVID-19 virus by evaluating if and how persons comply with social distancing rules. The proposed approach is applied to images acquired through thermal cameras, to establish a complete AI system for people tracking, social distancing classification, and body temperature monitoring. The training phase is done with two datasets captured from different thermal cameras. Ground Truth Labeler app is used for labeling the persons in the images. The proposed technique has been deployed in a low-cost embedded system (Jetson Nano) which is composed of a fixed camera. The proposed approach is implemented in a distributed surveillance video system to visualize people from several cameras in one centralized monitoring system. The achieved results show that the proposed method is suitable to set up a surveillance system in smart cities for people detection, social distancing classification, and body temperature analysis.

Implementing a real-time, AI-based, people detection and social distancing measuring system for Covid-19

COVID-19 is a disease caused by a severe respiratory syndrome coronavirus. It was identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. It has resulted in an ongoing pandemic that caused infected cases including many deaths. Coronavirus is primarily spread between people during close contact. Motivating to this notion, this research proposes an artificial intelligence system for social distancing classification of persons using thermal images. By exploiting YOLOv2 (you look at once) approach, a novel deep learning detection technique is developed for detecting and tracking people in indoor and outdoor scenarios. An algorithm is also implemented for measuring and classifying the distance between persons and to automatically check if social distancing rules are respected or not. Hence, this work aims at minimizing the spread of the COVID-19 virus by evaluating if and how persons comply with social distancing rules. The proposed approach is applied to images acquired through thermal cameras, to establish a complete AI system for people tracking, social distancing classification, and body temperature monitoring. The training phase is done with two datasets captured from different thermal cameras. Ground Truth Labeler app is used for labeling the persons in the images. The proposed technique has been deployed in a low-cost embedded system (Jetson Nano) which is composed of a fixed camera. The proposed approach is implemented in a distributed surveillance video system to visualize people from several cameras in one centralized monitoring system. The achieved results show that the proposed method is suitable to set up a surveillance system in smart cities for people detection, social distancing classification, and body temperature analysis.

Assessing countries' performances against COVID-19 via WSIDEA and machine learning algorithms

The COVID-19 pandemic, which first spread to the People of Republic of China and then to other countries in a short time, affected the whole world by infecting millions of people and have been increasing its impact day by day. Hundreds of researchers in many countries are in search of a solution to end up this pandemic. This study aims to contribute to the literature by performing detailed analyses via a new three-staged framework constructed based on data envelopment analysis and machine learning algorithms to assess the performances of 142 countries against the COVID-19 outbreak. Particularly, clustering analyses were made using k-means and hierarchic clustering methods. Subsequently, efficiency analysis of countries were performed by a novel model, the weighted stochastic imprecise data envelopment analysis. Finally, parameters were analyzed with decision tree and random forest algorithms. Results have been analyzed in detail, and the classification of countries are determined by providing the most influential parameters. The analysis showed that the optimum number of clusters for 142 countries is three. In addition, while 20 countries out of 142 countries were fully effective, 36% of them were found to be effective at a rate of 90%. Finally, it has been observed that the data such as GDP, smoking rates, and the rate of diabetes patients do not affect the effectiveness level of the countries.

DeepSOCIAL: Social Distancing Monitoring and Infection Risk Assessment in COVID-19 Pandemic

Social distancing is a recommended solution by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to minimise the spread of COVID-19 in public places. The majority of governments and national health authorities have set the 2-m physical distancing as a mandatory safety measure in shopping centres, schools and other covered areas. In this research, we develop a hybrid Computer Vision and YOLOv4-based Deep Neural Network (DNN) model for automated people detection in the crowd in indoor and outdoor environments using common CCTV security cameras. The proposed DNN model in combination with an adapted inverse perspective mapping (IPM) technique and SORT tracking algorithm leads to a robust people detection and social distancing monitoring. The model has been trained against two most comprehensive datasets by the time of the research—the Microsoft Common Objects in Context (MS COCO) and Google Open Image datasets. The system has been evaluated against the Oxford Town Centre dataset (including 150,000 instances of people detection) with superior performance compared to three state-of-the-art methods. The evaluation has been conducted in challenging conditions, including occlusion, partial visibility, and under lighting variations with the mean average precision of 99.8% and the real-time speed of 24.1 fps. We also provide an online infection risk assessment scheme by statistical analysis of the spatio-temporal data from people’s moving trajectories and the rate of social distancing violations. We identify high-risk zones with the highest possibility of virus spread and infection. This may help authorities to redesign the layout of a public place or to take precaution actions to mitigate high-risk zones. The developed model is a generic and accurate people detection and tracking solution that can be applied in many other fields such as autonomous vehicles, human action recognition, anomaly detection, sports, crowd analysis, or any other research areas where the human detection is in the centre of attention.

Role of intelligent computing in COVID-19 prognosis: A state-of-the-art review

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19), an infectious epidemic caused by SARS-CoV-2, as Pandemic in March 2020. It has affected more than 40 million people in 216 countries. Almost in all the affected countries, the number of infected and deceased patients has been enhancing at a distressing rate. As the early prediction can reduce the spread of the virus, it is highly desirable to have intelligent prediction and diagnosis tools. The inculcation of efficient forecasting and prediction models may assist the government in implementing better design strategies to prevent the spread of virus. In this paper, a state-of-the-art analysis of the ongoing machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods in the diagnosis and prediction of COVID-19 has been done. Moreover, a comparative analysis on the impact of machine learning and other competitive approaches like mathematical and statistical models on COVID-19 problem has been conducted. In this study, some factors such as type of methods(machine learning, deep learning, statistical & mathematical) and the impact of COVID research on the nature of data used for the forecasting and prediction of pandemic using computing approaches has been presented. Finally some important research directions for further research on COVID-19 are highlighted which may facilitate the researchers and technocrats to develop competent intelligent models for the prediction and forecasting of COVID-19 real time data.