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Analyzing market dynamics and optimizing sales performance with machine learning

Kamat et al. | May 31, 2025

Analyzing market dynamics and optimizing sales performance with machine learning

This study uses interpretable machine learning models, lasso and ridge regression with Shapley analysis, to identify key sales drivers for Corporación Favorita, Ecuador’s largest grocery chain. The results show that macroeconomic factors, especially labor force size, have the greatest impact on sales, though geographic and seasonal variables like city altitude and holiday proximity also play important roles. These insights can help businesses focus on the most influential market conditions to enhance competitiveness and profitability.

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Early detection of student burnout using data science: a study of behavioral and psychological indicators

Baber et al. | Jul 13, 2026

Early detection of student burnout using data science: a study of behavioral and psychological indicators

This study examined behavioral and psychological predictors of burnout among high school and university students in Pakistan using survey data and machine-learning models. Shorter sleep and greater mental fatigue—especially fatigue—were associated with higher burnout risk, while a Random Forest model successfully identified students at risk of burnout.

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Mitigating skin color bias in dermatology AI using CycleGAN-based data augmentation

Kannan et al. | Jun 24, 2026

Mitigating skin color bias in dermatology AI using CycleGAN-based data augmentation
Image credit: Kannan and Ramasamy

This study investigates skin tone bias in artificial intelligence models used for dermatological disease classification and evaluates a CycleGAN-based data augmentation approach to improve diagnostic performance on darker skin types. We generated synthetic dark-skinned images to enhance dataset diversity and compared model performance before and after augmentation. The results demonstrate that augmentation with synthetic dermatological images can help reduce disparities in diagnostic performance across skin tones, highlighting a practical strategy for improving fairness in dermatology AI systems.

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Collaboration beats heterogeneity: Improving federated learning-based waste classification

Chong et al. | Jul 18, 2023

Collaboration beats heterogeneity: Improving federated learning-based waste classification

Based on the success of deep learning, recent works have attempted to develop a waste classification model using deep neural networks. This work presents federated learning (FL) for a solution, as it allows participants to aid in training the model using their own data. Results showed that with less clients, having a higher participation ratio resulted in less accuracy degradation by the data heterogeneity.

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Differential privacy in machine learning for traffic forecasting

Vinay et al. | Dec 21, 2022

Differential privacy in machine learning for traffic forecasting

In this paper, we measured the privacy budgets and utilities of different differentially private mechanisms combined with different machine learning models that forecast traffic congestion at future timestamps. We expected the ANNs combined with the Staircase mechanism to perform the best with every value in the privacy budget range, especially with the medium high values of the privacy budget. In this study, we used the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and neural network models to forecast and then added differentially private Laplacian, Gaussian, and Staircase noise to our datasets. We tested two real traffic congestion datasets, experimented with the different models, and examined their utility for different privacy budgets. We found that a favorable combination for this application was neural networks with the Staircase mechanism. Our findings identify the optimal models when dealing with tricky time series forecasting and can be used in non-traffic applications like disease tracking and population growth.

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Simulating single versus cocktail antibiotic effects on the human gut microbiome

Patel et al. | Jul 19, 2026

Simulating single versus cocktail antibiotic effects on the human gut microbiome
Image credit: Volodymyr Hryshchenko

This study, uses SimulATe to model changes in microbial diversity and community structure upon administering a cocktail of antibiotics versus a single antibiotic. The authors hypothesized that antibiotic cocktails, particularly those combining broad-spectrum drugs like tetracyclines and trimethoprims, would cause a more significant reduction in gut microbial diversity compared to single-drug treatments. The findings confirmed a greater loss of microbial diversity with combinatorial treatments compared to single-drug treatments. While individual antibiotics dynamically reshaped the surviving species of the microbiome, antibiotic cocktails frequently cleared all species of the gut microbiome.

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