Maritime transport is a pivotal logistics mode for the long-distance and bulk transportation of goods. However, the intricate planning involved in this mode is often hindered by uncertainties, including weather conditions, cargo diversity, and port dynamics, leading to increased costs. Consequently, accurately estimating vessel total (stay) time at port and potential delays becomes imperative for effective planning and scheduling in port operations. This study aims to develop a port operation solution with competitive prediction and classification capabilities for estimating vessel Total and Delay times. This research addresses a significant gap in port analysis models for vessel Stay and Delay times, offering a valuable contribution to the field of maritime logistics. The proposed solution is designed to assist decision-making in port environments and predict service delays. This is demonstrated through a case study on Brazil ports. Additionally, feature analysis is used to understand the key factors impacting maritime logistics, enhancing the overall understanding of the complexities involved in port operations.
The designing of efficient signal detectors is important and yet challenge for orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) systems in high-mobility scenarios. In this letter, we develop an efficient message feedback interference cancellation aided unitary approximate message passing (denoted as UAMPMFIC) iterative detector, where the latest feedback messages from variable nodes are utilized for more reliable interference cancellation and performance improvement. A fast recursive scheme is leveraged in the proposed UAMP-MFIC detector to prevent complexity increasing. To further alleviate the error-propagation and improve the receiver performance, we also develop the bidirectional symbol detection structures, where Turbo UAMP-MFIC detector and iterative weight UAMP-MFIC detector are proposed to efficiently fuse the estimation results of forward and backward UAMP-MFIC detectors. The simulation results are finally provided to demonstrate performance improvement of our proposed detectors over existing detectors.
Problem definition: Supply chains are constantly evolving networks. Reinforcement learning is increasingly proposed as a solution to provide optimal control of these networks. Academic/practical: However, learning in continuously varying environments remains a challenge in the reinforcement learning literature.Methodology: This paper therefore seeks to address whether agents can control varying supply chain problems, transferring learning between environments that require different strategies and avoiding catastrophic forgetting of tasks that have not been seen in a while. To evaluate this approach, two state-of-the-art Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are compared: an actor-critic learner, Proximal Policy Optimisation(PPO), and a Recurrent Proximal Policy Optimisation (RPPO), PPO with a Long Short-Term Memory(LSTM) layer, which is showing popularity in online learning environments. Results: First these methods are compared on six sets of environments with varying degrees of stochasticity. The results show that more lean strategies adopted in Batch environments are different from those adopted in Stochastic environments with varying products. The methods are also compared on various continuous supply chain scenarios, where the PPO agents are shown to be able to adapt through continuous learning when the tasks are similar but show more volatile performance when changing between the extreme tasks. However, the RPPO, with an ability to remember histories, is able to overcome this to some extent and takes on a more realistic strategy. Managerial implications: Our results provide a new perspective on the continuously varying supply chain, the cooperation and coordination of agents are crucial for improving the overall performance in uncertain and semi-continuous non-stationary supply chain environments without the need to retrain the environment as the demand changes.
Feature selection is critical in machine learning to reduce dimensionality and improve model accuracy and efficiency. The exponential growth in feature space dimensionality for modern datasets directly results in ambiguous samples and redundant features, which can severely degrade classification accuracy. Quantum machine learning offers potential advantages for addressing this challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel method, quantum support vector machine feature selection (QSVMF), integrating quantum support vector machines with multi-objective genetic algorithm. QSVMF optimizes multiple simultaneous objectives: maximizing classification accuracy, minimizing selected features and quantum circuit costs, and reducing feature covariance. We apply QSVMF for feature selection on a breast cancer dataset, comparing the performance of QSVMF against classical approaches with the selected features. Experimental results show that QSVMF achieves superior performance. Furthermore, The Pareto front solutions of QSVMF enable analysis of accuracy versus feature set size trade-offs, identifying extremely sparse yet accurate feature subsets. We contextualize the biological relevance of the selected features in terms of known breast cancer biomarkers. This work highlights the potential of quantum-based feature selection to enhance machine learning efficiency and performance on complex real-world data.
Quantum machine learning (QML) represents a promising frontier in the realm of quantum technologies. In this pursuit of quantum advantage, the quantum kernel method for support vector machine has emerged as a powerful approach. Entanglement, a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics, assumes a central role in quantum computing. In this paper, we study the necessities of entanglement gates in the quantum kernel methods. We present several fitness functions for a multi-objective genetic algorithm that simultaneously maximizes classification accuracy while minimizing both the local and non-local gate costs of the quantum feature map's circuit. We conduct comparisons with classical classifiers to gain insights into the benefits of employing entanglement gates. Surprisingly, our experiments reveal that the optimal configuration of quantum circuits for the quantum kernel method incorporates a proportional number of non-local gates for entanglement, contrary to previous literature where non-local gates were largely suppressed. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the separability indexes of data can be effectively leveraged to determine the number of non-local gates required for the quantum support vector machine's feature maps. This insight can significantly aid in selecting appropriate parameters, such as the entanglement parameter, in various quantum programming packages like https://qiskit.org/ based on data analysis. Our findings offer valuable guidance for enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of quantum machine learning algorithm
We present a novel approach for efficiently generating quantum feature maps for quantum-enhanced support vector machines, a kernel-based classifier, enabling access to high-dimensional Hilbert space. Our method employs a multi-objective genetic algorithm that simultaneously maximizes classification accuracy while minimizing both the local and non-local gate costs of the quantum feature map's circuit. To achieve this, we define distinct fitness functions for local gates and entanglement gates. Comparisons with classical classifiers are given in order to understand the advantages of using quantum machine learning. Surprisingly, our experiments reveal that the optimal configuration of quantum circuits for the quantum kernel method incorporates a proportional number of non-local gates for entanglement, contrary to previous literature where non-local gates were largely suppressed. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the separability indexes of data can be effectively leveraged to determine the number of non-local gates required for the quantum support vector machine's feature maps. This insight can significantly aid in selecting appropriate parameters, such as the entanglement parameter, in various quantum programming packages like quiskit.org based on data analysis. Our findings offer valuable guidance for enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of quantum machine learning algorithms.
The rise in data has led to the need for dimension reduction techniques, especially in the area of non-scalar variables, including time series, natural language processing, and computer vision. In this paper, we specifically investigate dimension reduction for time series through functional data analysis. Current methods for dimension reduction in functional data are functional principal component analysis and functional autoencoders, which are limited to linear mappings or scalar representations for the time series, which is inefficient. In real data applications, the nature of the data is much more complex. We propose a non-linear function-on-function approach, which consists of a functional encoder and a functional decoder, that uses continuous hidden layers consisting of continuous neurons to learn the structure inherent in functional data, which addresses the aforementioned concerns in the existing approaches. Our approach gives a low dimension latent representation by reducing the number of functional features as well as the timepoints at which the functions are observed. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated through multiple simulations and real data examples.
Achieving accurate and automated tumor segmentation plays an important role in both clinical practice and radiomics research. Segmentation in medicine is now often performed manually by experts, which is a laborious, expensive and error-prone task. Manual annotation relies heavily on the experience and knowledge of these experts. In addition, there is much intra- and interobserver variation. Therefore, it is of great significance to develop a method that can automatically segment tumor target regions. In this paper, we propose a deep learning segmentation method based on multimodal positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT), which combines the high sensitivity of PET and the precise anatomical information of CT. We design an improved spatial attention network(ISA-Net) to increase the accuracy of PET or CT in detecting tumors, which uses multi-scale convolution operation to extract feature information and can highlight the tumor region location information and suppress the non-tumor region location information. In addition, our network uses dual-channel inputs in the coding stage and fuses them in the decoding stage, which can take advantage of the differences and complementarities between PET and CT. We validated the proposed ISA-Net method on two clinical datasets, a soft tissue sarcoma(STS) and a head and neck tumor(HECKTOR) dataset, and compared with other attention methods for tumor segmentation. The DSC score of 0.8378 on STS dataset and 0.8076 on HECKTOR dataset show that ISA-Net method achieves better segmentation performance and has better generalization. Conclusions: The method proposed in this paper is based on multi-modal medical image tumor segmentation, which can effectively utilize the difference and complementarity of different modes. The method can also be applied to other multi-modal data or single-modal data by proper adjustment.
Uncertainty quantification is one of the central challenges for machine learning in real-world applications. In reinforcement learning, an agent confronts two kinds of uncertainty, called epistemic uncertainty and aleatoric uncertainty. Disentangling and evaluating these uncertainties simultaneously stands a chance of improving the agent's final performance, accelerating training, and facilitating quality assurance after deployment. In this work, we propose an uncertainty-aware reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous control tasks that extends the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm (DDPG). It exploits epistemic uncertainty to accelerate exploration and aleatoric uncertainty to learn a risk-sensitive policy. We conduct numerical experiments showing that our variant of DDPG outperforms vanilla DDPG without uncertainty estimation in benchmark tasks on robotic control and power-grid optimization.
The recent proposed orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation shows signifcant advantages than conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for high mobility wireless communications. However, a challenging problem is the development of effcient receivers for practical OTFS systems with low complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel delay-Doppler reversal (DDR) technology for OTFS system with desired performance and low complexity. We present the DDR technology from a perspective of two-dimensional cascaded channel model, analyze its computational complexity and also analyze its performance gain compared to the direct processing (DP) receiver without DDR. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed DDR receiver outperforms traditional receivers in doubly-selective fading channels.