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    Supervised Machine Learning to Assess Methane Emissions of a Dairy Building with Natural Ventilation
    (Basel : MDPI, 2020) Hempel, Sabrina; Adolphs, Julian; Landwehr, Niels; Willink, Dilya; Janke, David; Amon, Thomas
    A reliable quantification of greenhouse gas emissions is a basis for the development of adequate mitigation measures. Protocols for emission measurements and data analysis approaches to extrapolate to accurate annual emission values are a substantial prerequisite in this context. We systematically analyzed the benefit of supervised machine learning methods to project methane emissions from a naturally ventilated cattle building with a concrete solid floor and manure scraper located in Northern Germany. We took into account approximately 40 weeks of hourly emission measurements and compared model predictions using eight regression approaches, 27 different sampling scenarios and four measures of model accuracy. Data normalization was applied based on median and quartile range. A correlation analysis was performed to evaluate the influence of individual features. This indicated only a very weak linear relation between the methane emission and features that are typically used to predict methane emission values of naturally ventilated barns. It further highlighted the added value of including day-time and squared ambient temperature as features. The error of the predicted emission values was in general below 10%. The results from Gaussian processes, ordinary multilinear regression and neural networks were least robust. More robust results were obtained with multilinear regression with regularization, support vector machines and particularly the ensemble methods gradient boosting and random forest. The latter had the added value to be rather insensitive against the normalization procedure. In the case of multilinear regression, also the removal of not significantly linearly related variables (i.e., keeping only the day-time component) led to robust modeling results. We concluded that measurement protocols with 7 days and six measurement periods can be considered sufficient to model methane emissions from the dairy barn with solid floor with manure scraper, particularly when periods are distributed over the year with a preference for transition periods. Features should be normalized according to median and quartile range and must be carefully selected depending on the modeling approach.
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    Calibrating mini-mental state examination scores to predict misdiagnosed dementia patients
    (Basel : MDPI, 2021) Vyas, Akhilesh; Aisopos, Fotis; Vidal, Maria-Esther; Garrard, Peter; Paliouras, George
    Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) is used as a diagnostic test for dementia to screen a patient’s cognitive assessment and disease severity. However, these examinations are often inaccurate and unreliable either due to human error or due to patients’ physical disability to correctly interpret the questions as well as motor deficit. Erroneous data may lead to a wrong assessment of a specific patient. Therefore, other clinical factors (e.g., gender and comorbidities) existing in electronic health records, can also play a significant role, while reporting her examination results. This work considers various clinical attributes of dementia patients to accurately determine their cognitive status in terms of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) Score. We employ machine learning models to calibrate MMSE score and classify the correctness of diagnosis among patients, in order to assist clinicians in a better understanding of the progression of cognitive impairment and subsequent treatment. For this purpose, we utilize a curated real-world ageing study data. A random forest prediction model is employed to estimate the Mini-Mental State Examination score, related to the diagnostic classification of patients.This model uses various clinical attributes to provide accurate MMSE predictions, succeeding in correcting an important percentage of cases that contain previously identified miscalculated scores in our dataset. Furthermore, we provide an effective classification mechanism for automatically identifying patient episodes with inaccurate MMSE values with high confidence. These tools can be combined to assist clinicians in automatically finding episodes within patient medical records where the MMSE score is probably miscalculated and estimating what the correct value should be. This provides valuable support in the decision making process for diagnosing potential dementia patients.