Large language models for sentiment analysis of newspaper articles during COVID-19: The Guardian

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the news media coverage encompassed a wide range of topics that includes viral transmission, allocation of medical resources, and government response measures. There have been studies on sentiment analysis of social media platforms during COVID-19 to understand the public response given the rise of cases and government strategies implemented to control the spread of the virus. Sentiment analysis can provide a better understanding of changes in societal opinions and emotional trends during the pandemic. Apart from social media, newspapers have played a vital role in the dissemination of information, including information from the government, experts, and also the public about various topics. A study of sentiment analysis of newspaper sources during COVID-19 for selected countries can give an overview of how the media covered the pandemic. In this study, we select The Guardian newspaper and provide a sentiment analysis during various stages of COVID-19 that includes initial transmission, lockdowns and vaccination. We employ novel large language models (LLMs) and refine them with expert-labelled sentiment analysis data. We also provide an analysis of sentiments experienced pre-pandemic for comparison. The results indicate that during the early pandemic stages, public sentiment prioritised urgent crisis response, later shifting focus to addressing the impact on health and the economy. In comparison with related studies about social media sentiment analyses, we found a discrepancy between The Guardian with dominance of negative sentiments (sad, annoyed, anxious and denial), suggesting that social media offers a more diversified emotional reflection. We found a grim narrative in The Guardian with overall dominance of negative sentiments, pre and during COVID-19 across news sections including Australia, UK, World News, and Opinion

Remote sensing framework for geological mapping via stacked autoencoders and clustering

Supervised learning methods for geological mapping via remote sensing face limitations due to the scarcity of accurately labelled training data. In contrast, unsupervised learning methods, such as dimensionality reduction and clustering have the ability to uncover patterns and structures in remote sensing data without relying on predefined labels. Dimensionality reduction methods have the potential to play a crucial role in improving the accuracy of geological maps. Although conventional dimensionality reduction methods may struggle with nonlinear data, unsupervised deep learning models such as autoencoders have the ability to model nonlinear relationship in data. Stacked autoencoders feature multiple interconnected layers to capture hierarchical data representations that can be useful for remote sensing data. In this study, we present an unsupervised machine learning framework for processing remote sensing data by utilizing stacked autoencoders for dimensionality reduction and k-means clustering for mapping geological units. We use the Landsat-8, ASTER, and Sentinel-2 datasets of the Mutawintji region in Western New South Wales, Australia to evaluate the framework for geological mapping. We also provide a comparison of stacked autoencoders with principal component analysis and canonical autoencoders. Our results reveal that the framework produces accurate and interpretable geological maps, efficiently discriminating rock units. We find that the stacked autoencoders provide better accuracy when compared to the counterparts. We also find that the generated maps align with prior geological knowledge of the study area while providing novel insights into geological structures.

Self-supervised learning for skin cancer diagnosis with limited training data

Cancer diagnosis is a well-studied problem in machine learning since early detection of cancer is often the determining factor in prognosis. Supervised deep learning achieves excellent results in cancer image classification, usually through transfer learning. However, these models require large amounts of labelled data and for several types of cancer, large labelled datasets do not exist. In this paper, we demonstrate that a model pre-trained using a self-supervised learning algorithm known as Barlow Twins can outperform the conventional supervised transfer learning pipeline. We juxtapose two base models: i) pretrained in a supervised fashion on ImageNet; ii) pretrained in a self-supervised fashion on ImageNet. Both are subsequently fine tuned on a small labelled skin lesion dataset and evaluated on a large test set. We achieve a mean test accuracy of 70\% for self-supervised transfer in comparison to 66\% for supervised transfer. Interestingly, boosting performance further is possible by self-supervised pretraining a second time (on unlabelled skin lesion images) before subsequent fine tuning. This hints at an alternative path to collecting more labelled data in settings where this is challenging - namely just collecting more unlabelled images. Our framework is applicable to cancer image classification models in the low-labelled data regime.

Large language model for Bible sentiment analysis: Sermon on the Mount

The revolution of natural language processing via large language models has motivated its use in multidisciplinary areas that include social sciences and humanities and more specifically, comparative religion. Sentiment analysis provides a mechanism to study the emotions expressed in text. Recently, sentiment analysis has been used to study and compare translations of the Bhagavad Gita, which is a fundamental and sacred Hindu text. In this study, we use sentiment analysis for studying selected chapters of the Bible. These chapters are known as the Sermon on the Mount. We utilize a pre-trained language model for sentiment analysis by reviewing five translations of the Sermon on the Mount, which include the King James version, the New International Version, the New Revised Standard Version, the Lamsa Version, and the Basic English Version. We provide a chapter-by-chapter and verse-by-verse comparison using sentiment and semantic analysis and review the major sentiments expressed. Our results highlight the varying sentiments across the chapters and verses. We found that the vocabulary of the respective translations is significantly different. We detected different levels of humour, optimism, and empathy in the respective chapters that were used by Jesus to deliver his message.

Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction Using Dynamics-based Deep Learning

Pedestrian trajectory prediction plays an important role in autonomous driving systems and robotics. Recent work utilising prominent deep learning models for pedestrian motion prediction makes limited a priori assumptions about human movements, resulting in a lack of explainability and explicit constraints enforced on predicted trajectories. This paper presents a dynamics-based deep learning framework where a novel asymptotically stable dynamical system is integrated into a deep learning model. Our novel asymptotically stable dynamical system is used to model human goal-targeted motion by enforcing the human walking trajectory converges to a predicted goal position and provides a deep learning model with prior knowledge and explainability. Our deep learning model utilises recent innovations from transformer networks and is used to learn some features of human motion, such as collision avoidance, for our proposed dynamical system. The experimental results show that our framework outperforms recent prominent models in pedestrian trajectory prediction on five benchmark human motion datasets.

A clustering and graph deep learning-based framework for COVID-19 drug repurposing

Drug repurposing (or repositioning) is the process of finding new therapeutic uses for drugs already approved by drug regulatory authorities (e.g., the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)) for other diseases. This involves analyzing the interactions between different biological entities, such as drug targets (genes/proteins and biological pathways) and drug properties, to discover novel drug-target or drug-disease relations. Artificial intelligence methods such as machine learning and deep learning have successfully analyzed complex heterogeneous data in the biomedical domain and have also been used for drug repurposing. This study presents a novel unsupervised machine learning framework that utilizes a graph-based autoencoder for multi-feature type clustering on heterogeneous drug data. The dataset consists of 438 drugs, of which 224 are under clinical trials for COVID-19 (category A). The rest are systematically filtered to ensure the safety and efficacy of the treatment (category B). The framework solely relies on reported drug data, including its pharmacological properties, chemical/physical properties, interaction with the host, and efficacy in different publicly available COVID-19 assays. Our machine-learning framework reveals three clusters of interest and provides recommendations featuring the top 15 drugs for COVID-19 drug repurposing, which were shortlisted based on the predicted clusters that were dominated by category A drugs. The anti-COVID efficacy of the drugs should be verified by experimental studies. Our framework can be extended to support other datasets and drug repurposing studies, given open-source code and data availability.

An analysis of vaccine-related sentiments from development to deployment of COVID-19 vaccines

Anti-vaccine sentiments have been well-known and reported throughout the history of viral outbreaks and vaccination programmes. The COVID-19 pandemic had fear and uncertainty about vaccines which has been well expressed on social media platforms such as Twitter. We analyse Twitter sentiments from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and study the public behaviour during the planning, development and deployment of vaccines expressed in tweets worldwide using a sentiment analysis framework via deep learning models. In this way, we provide visualisation and analysis of anti-vaccine sentiments over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results show a link between the number of tweets, the number of cases, and the change in sentiment polarity scores during major waves of COVID-19 cases. We also found that the first half of the pandemic had drastic changes in the sentiment polarity scores that later stabilised which implies that the vaccine rollout had an impact on the nature of discussions on social media.

Multi-Modal Deep Learning for Credit Rating Prediction Using Text and Numerical Data Streams

Knowing which factors are significant in credit rating assignment leads to better decision-making. However, the focus of the literature thus far has been mostly on structured data, and fewer studies have addressed unstructured or multi-modal datasets. In this paper, we present an analysis of the most effective architectures for the fusion of deep learning models for the prediction of company credit rating classes, by using structured and unstructured datasets of different types. In these models, we tested different combinations of fusion strategies with different deep learning models, including CNN, LSTM, GRU, and BERT. We studied data fusion strategies in terms of level (including early and intermediate fusion) and techniques (including concatenation and cross-attention). Our results show that a CNN-based multi-modal model with two fusion strategies outperformed other multi-modal techniques. In addition, by comparing simple architectures with more complex ones, we found that more sophisticated deep learning models do not necessarily produce the highest performance; however, if attention-based models are producing the best results, cross-attention is necessary as a fusion strategy. Finally, our comparison of rating agencies on short-, medium-, and long-term performance shows that Moody's credit ratings outperform those of other agencies like Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings.

A review of ensemble learning and data augmentation models for class imbalanced problems: combination, implementation and evaluation

Class imbalance (CI) in classification problems arises when the number of observations belonging to one class is lower than the other classes. Ensemble learning that combines multiple models to obtain a robust model has been prominently used with data augmentation methods to address class imbalance problems. In the last decade, a number of strategies have been added to enhance ensemble learning and data augmentation methods, along with new methods such as generative adversarial networks (GANs). A combination of these has been applied in many studies, but the true rank of different combinations would require a computational review. In this paper, we present a computational review to evaluate data augmentation and ensemble learning methods used to address prominent benchmark CI problems. We propose a general framework that evaluates 10 data augmentation and 10 ensemble learning methods for CI problems. Our objective was to identify the most effective combination for improving classification performance on imbalanced datasets. The results indicate that combinations of data augmentation methods with ensemble learning can significantly improve classification performance on imbalanced datasets. These findings have important implications for the development of more effective approaches for handling imbalanced datasets in machine learning applications.

Bayesian neural networks via MCMC: a Python-based tutorial

Bayesian inference provides a methodology for parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification in machine learning and deep learning methods. Variational inference and Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) sampling techniques are used to implement Bayesian inference. In the past three decades, MCMC methods have faced a number of challenges in being adapted to larger models (such as in deep learning) and big data problems. Advanced proposals that incorporate gradients, such as a Langevin proposal distribution, provide a means to address some of the limitations of MCMC sampling for Bayesian neural networks. Furthermore, MCMC methods have typically been constrained to use by statisticians and are still not prominent among deep learning researchers. We present a tutorial for MCMC methods that covers simple Bayesian linear and logistic models, and Bayesian neural networks. The aim of this tutorial is to bridge the gap between theory and implementation via coding, given a general sparsity of libraries and tutorials to this end. This tutorial provides code in Python with data and instructions that enable their use and extension. We provide results for some benchmark problems showing the strengths and weaknesses of implementing the respective Bayesian models via MCMC. We highlight the challenges in sampling multi-modal posterior distributions in particular for the case of Bayesian neural networks, and the need for further improvement of convergence diagnosis.