Multilevel Determinants of Overweight and Obesity Among U.S. Children Aged 10-17: Comparative Evaluation of Statistical and Machine Learning Approaches Using the 2021 National Survey of Children's Health

Background: Childhood and adolescent overweight and obesity remain major public health concerns in the United States and are shaped by behavioral, household, and community factors. Their joint predictive structure at the population level remains incompletely characterized. Objectives: The study aims to identify multilevel predictors of overweight and obesity among U.S. adolescents and compare the predictive performance, calibration, and subgroup equity of statistical, machine-learning, and deep-learning models. Data and Methods: We analyze 18,792 children aged 10-17 years from the 2021 National Survey of Children's Health. Overweight/obesity is defined using BMI categories. Predictors included diet, physical activity, sleep, parental stress, socioeconomic conditions, adverse experiences, and neighborhood characteristics. Models include logistic regression, random forest, gradient boosting, XGBoost, LightGBM, multilayer perceptron, and TabNet. Performance is evaluated using AUC, accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and Brier score. Results: Discrimination range from 0.66 to 0.79. Logistic regression, gradient boosting, and MLP showed the most stable balance of discrimination and calibration. Boosting and deep learning modestly improve recall and F1 score. No model was uniformly superior. Performance disparities across race and poverty groups persist across algorithms. Conclusion: Increased model complexity yields limited gains over logistic regression. Predictors consistently span behavioral, household, and neighborhood domains. Persistent subgroup disparities indicate the need for improved data quality and equity-focused surveillance rather than greater algorithmic complexity.

TWIG: Two-Step Image Generation using Segmentation Masks in Diffusion Models

In today's age of social media and marketing, copyright issues can be a major roadblock to the free sharing of images. Generative AI models have made it possible to create high-quality images, but concerns about copyright infringement are a hindrance to their abundant use. As these models use data from training images to generate new ones, it is often a daunting task to ensure they do not violate intellectual property rights. Some AI models have even been noted to directly copy copyrighted images, a problem often referred to as source copying. Traditional copyright protection measures such as watermarks and metadata have also proven to be futile in this regard. To address this issue, we propose a novel two-step image generation model inspired by the conditional diffusion model. The first step involves creating an image segmentation mask for some prompt-based generated images. This mask embodies the shape of the image. Thereafter, the diffusion model is asked to generate the image anew while avoiding the shape in question. This approach shows a decrease in structural similarity from the training image, i.e. we are able to avoid the source copying problem using this approach without expensive retraining of the model or user-centered prompt generation techniques. This makes our approach the most computationally inexpensive approach to avoiding both copyright infringement and source copying for diffusion model-based image generation.

Aerial Flood Scene Classification Using Fine-Tuned Attention-based Architecture for Flood-Prone Countries in South Asia

Countries in South Asia experience many catastrophic flooding events regularly. Through image classification, it is possible to expedite search and rescue initiatives by classifying flood zones, including houses and humans. We create a new dataset collecting aerial imagery of flooding events across South Asian countries. For the classification, we propose a fine-tuned Compact Convolutional Transformer (CCT) based approach and some other cutting-edge transformer-based and Convolutional Neural Network-based architectures (CNN). We also implement the YOLOv8 object detection model and detect houses and humans within the imagery of our proposed dataset, and then compare the performance with our classification-based approach. Since the countries in South Asia have similar topography, housing structure, the color of flood water, and vegetation, this work can be more applicable to such a region as opposed to the rest of the world. The images are divided evenly into four classes: 'flood', 'flood with domicile', 'flood with humans', and 'no flood'. After experimenting with our proposed dataset on our fine-tuned CCT model, which has a comparatively lower number of weight parameters than many other transformer-based architectures designed for computer vision, it exhibits an accuracy and macro average precision of 98.62% and 98.50%. The other transformer-based architectures that we implement are the Vision Transformer (ViT), Swin Transformer, and External Attention Transformer (EANet), which give an accuracy of 88.66%, 84.74%, and 66.56% respectively. We also implement DCECNN (Deep Custom Ensembled Convolutional Neural Network), which is a custom ensemble model that we create by combining MobileNet, InceptionV3, and EfficientNetB0, and we obtain an accuracy of 98.78%. The architectures we implement are fine-tuned to achieve optimal performance on our dataset.

Med-IC: Fusing a Single Layer Involution with Convolutions for Enhanced Medical Image Classification and Segmentation

The majority of medical images, especially those that resemble cells, have similar characteristics. These images, which occur in a variety of shapes, often show abnormalities in the organ or cell region. The convolution operation possesses a restricted capability to extract visual patterns across several spatial regions of an image. The involution process, which is the inverse operation of convolution, complements this inherent lack of spatial information extraction present in convolutions. In this study, we investigate how applying a single layer of involution prior to a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture can significantly improve classification and segmentation performance, with a comparatively negligible amount of weight parameters. The study additionally shows how excessive use of involution layers might result in inaccurate predictions in a particular type of medical image. According to our findings from experiments, the strategy of adding only a single involution layer before a CNN-based model outperforms most of the previous works.

Involution Fused ConvNet for Classifying Eye-Tracking Patterns of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complicated neurological condition which is challenging to diagnose. Numerous studies demonstrate that children diagnosed with autism struggle with maintaining attention spans and have less focused vision. The eye-tracking technology has drawn special attention in the context of ASD since anomalies in gaze have long been acknowledged as a defining feature of autism in general. Deep Learning (DL) approaches coupled with eye-tracking sensors are exploiting additional capabilities to advance the diagnostic and its applications. By learning intricate nonlinear input-output relations, DL can accurately recognize the various gaze and eye-tracking patterns and adjust to the data. Convolutions alone are insufficient to capture the important spatial information in gaze patterns or eye tracking. The dynamic kernel-based process known as involutions can improve the efficiency of classifying gaze patterns or eye tracking data. In this paper, we utilise two different image-processing operations to see how these processes learn eye-tracking patterns. Since these patterns are primarily based on spatial information, we use involution with convolution making it a hybrid, which adds location-specific capability to a deep learning model. Our proposed model is implemented in a simple yet effective approach, which makes it easier for applying in real life. We investigate the reasons why our approach works well for classifying eye-tracking patterns. For comparative analysis, we experiment with two separate datasets as well as a combined version of both. The results show that IC with three involution layers outperforms the previous approaches.

Tailoring Adversarial Attacks on Deep Neural Networks for Targeted Class Manipulation Using DeepFool Algorithm

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have significantly advanced various domains, but their vulnerability to adversarial attacks poses serious concerns. Understanding these vulnerabilities and developing effective defense mechanisms is crucial. DeepFool, an algorithm proposed by Moosavi-Dezfooli et al. (2016), finds minimal perturbations to misclassify input images. However, DeepFool lacks a targeted approach, making it less effective in specific attack scenarios. Also, in previous related works, researchers primarily focus on success, not considering how much an image is getting distorted; the integrity of the image quality, and the confidence level to misclassifying. So, in this paper, we propose Targeted DeepFool, an augmented version of DeepFool that allows targeting specific classes for misclassification. We also introduce a minimum confidence score requirement hyperparameter to enhance flexibility. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method across different deep neural network architectures while preserving image integrity as much as possible. Results show that one of the deep convolutional neural network architectures, AlexNet, and one of the state-of-the-art model Vision Transformer exhibit high robustness to getting fooled. Our code will be made public when publishing the paper.

Unmasking the Invisible: Finding Location-Specific Aggregated Air Quality Index with Smartphone-Captured Images

The prevalence and mobility of smartphones make these a widely used tool for environmental health research. However, their potential for determining aggregated air quality index (AQI) based on PM2.5 concentration in specific locations remains largely unexplored in the existing literature. In this paper, we thoroughly examine the challenges associated with predicting location-specific PM2.5 concentration using images taken with smartphone cameras. The focus of our study is on Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, due to its significant air pollution levels and the large population exposed to it. Our research involves the development of a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN), which we train using over a thousand outdoor images taken and annotated. These photos are captured at various locations in Dhaka, and their labels are based on PM2.5 concentration data obtained from the local US consulate, calculated using the NowCast algorithm. Through supervised learning, our model establishes a correlation index during training, enhancing its ability to function as a Picture-based Predictor of PM2.5 Concentration (PPPC). This enables the algorithm to calculate an equivalent daily averaged AQI index from a smartphone image. Unlike, popular overly parameterized models, our model shows resource efficiency since it uses fewer parameters. Furthermore, test results indicate that our model outperforms popular models like ViT and INN, as well as popular CNN-based models such as VGG19, ResNet50, and MobileNetV2, in predicting location-specific PM2.5 concentration. Our dataset is the first publicly available collection that includes atmospheric images and corresponding PM2.5 measurements from Dhaka. Our code and dataset will be made public when publishing the paper.