Uncertainty-Aware Longitudinal Forecasting of Alzheimer's Disease Progression Using Deep Learning

Longitudinal modelling of Alzheimer's disease progression is clinically useful only if it can describe not just the most likely next diagnosis, but how a patient may evolve over time and how reliable that forecast is. Most deep learning approaches reduce this problem to single-step classification, treating cognitively normal, mild cognitive impairment, and dementia as flat categories while providing limited insight into how uncertainty accumulates across future visits. We propose a probabilistic framework that combines ordinal diagnosis prediction, multi-horizon trajectory generation, and decomposed uncertainty estimation. A Temporal Fusion Transformer encoder is adapted with a CORAL ordinal output layer, asymmetric loss weighting, and converter oversampling to respect disease-stage ordering and improve sensitivity to MCI-to-dementia transitions. Conditioned on the learned patient-context representation, an autoregressive Mixture Density Network generates five-year probabilistic trajectories for diagnosis state, CDR Sum of Boxes, MMSE orientation, and hippocampal volume. On ADNI, the model outperforms linear, recurrent, and transformer baselines for next-visit diagnosis prediction, with the strongest gains on MCI-versus-dementia discrimination. Generated trajectories achieve near-nominal 90% credible interval coverage, widening uncertainty across the forecast horizon, and biomarker dynamics consistent with expected Alzheimer's disease progression. We further separate aleatoric from epistemic uncertainty using analytic mixture variance and a five-member bootstrap ensemble, which provides the strongest encoder diversity and output-level epistemic signal. Epistemic uncertainty is higher for rare progression archetypes, MCI and dementia patients, and under external evaluation on OASIS-3, where it increases alongside prediction error.

Multimodality in Online Education: A Comparative Study

The commencement of the decade brought along with it a grave pandemic and in response the movement of education forums predominantly into the online world. With a surge in the usage of online video conferencing platforms and tools to better gauge student understanding, there needs to be a mechanism to assess whether instructors can grasp the extent to which students understand the subject and their response to the educational stimuli. The current systems consider only a single cue with a lack of focus in the educational domain. Thus, there is a necessity for the measurement of an all-encompassing holistic overview of the students' reaction to the subject matter. This paper highlights the need for a multimodal approach to affect recognition and its deployment in the online classroom while considering four cues, posture and gesture, facial, eye tracking and verbal recognition. It compares the various machine learning models available for each cue and provides the most suitable approach given the available dataset and parameters of classroom footage. A multimodal approach derived from weighted majority voting is proposed by combining the most fitting models from this analysis of individual cues based on accuracy, ease of procuring data corpus, sensitivity and any major drawbacks.