Abstract

“Rare item problem” is a fundamental problem in pattern mining. It represents the inability of a pattern mining model to discover the knowledge about frequent and rare items in a database. In the literature, researchers advocated the usage of null-invariant measures as they disclose genuine correlations without being influenced by the object co-absence in the database. Since the existing null-invariant measures consider only an item’s frequency and disregard its temporal occurrence information, they are inadequate to address the rare item problem faced by the partial periodic pattern model. This paper proposes a novel null-invariant measure, called relative periodic-support, to find the patterns containing both frequent and rare items in non-uniform temporal databases. We also introduce an efficient pattern-growth algorithm to find all desired patterns in a database. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm is efficient.

Abstract

Exposure to ambient Particulate Matter (PM) of air pollution is a leading risk factor for morbidity and mortality. The most common approach for air quality monitoring is to rely on environmental monitoring stations, which are expensive to acquire as well as to maintain. Moreover, such stations are typically sparsely deployed, thereby resulting in limited spatial resolution for measurements. Recently, low-cost air quality sensors have emerged as an alternative for improving the granularity of monitoring. We are making an effort to explore the framework for air quality data collection by employing low-cost sensors. In this paper, we have reported our initial experiences and observations concerning PM data collection for four months starting from October 2021 in the city of Hyderabad in India.

Abstract

Air pollution is a major threat to human health in India. More than three-quarters of the people in India are exposed to pollution levels higher than the limits recommended by the National Ambient Air Quality Standards in India and significantly higher than those recommended by the World Health Organization. Despite the poor air quality, the monitoring of air pollution levels is limited even in large urban areas in India and virtually absent in small towns and rural areas. The lack of data results in a minimal understanding of spatial and temporal patterns of air pollutants at local and regional levels. This paper is the second in a planned series of papers presenting particulate air pollution trends monitored in small cities and towns in India. The findings presented here are important for framing state and regional level policies for addressing air pollution problems in urban areas, and achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) linked to public health, reduction in the adverse environmental impact of cities, and adaptation to climate change, as indicated by SDGs 3.9, 11.6 and 11.b.

Abstract

It is a well-established fact in the retail industry that the placement of products on the shelves of the retail store has a significant impact on the revenue of the retailer. Given that customers tend to purchase sets of items together (i.e., itemsets) instead of individual items, it becomes a necessity to strategically place itemsets on the shelves of the retail store for improving retailer revenue. Furthermore, in practice, customers belong to different market segments based on factors such as purchasing power, demographics and customer behaviour. Existing research efforts do not address the issue of market segmentation w.r.t. itemset placement in retail stores. Consequently, they fail to efficiently index, retrieve and place high-utility itemsets in the retail slots in a market segmentation aware manner. In this work, we introduce the problem of market segmentation aware itemset placement for retail stores. Moreover, we propose a market segmentation aware retail itemset placement framework, which takes high-utility itemsets as input. Our performance evaluation with two real datasets demonstrates that our proposed framework is indeed effective in improving retailer revenue w.r.t. existing schemes.

Abstract

Given a coarse satellite image and a fine satellite image of a particular location taken at the same time, the high-resolution spatiotemporal image fusion technique involves understanding the spatial correlation between the pixels of both images and using it to generate a finer image for a given coarse (or test) image taken at a later time. This technique is extensively used for monitoring agricultural land cover, forest cover, etc. The two key issues in this technique are: (i) handling missing pixel data and (ii) improving the prediction accuracy of the fine image generated from the given test coarse image. This paper tackles these two issues by proposing an efficient method consisting of the following three basic steps: (i) imputation of missing pixels using neighborhood information, (ii) cross-scale matching to adjust both the Point Spread Functions Effect (PSF) and geo-registration errors between the course and high-resolution images, and (iii) error-based modulation, which uses pixel-based multiplicative factors and residuals to fix the error caused due to modulation of temporal changes. The experimental results on the real-world satellite imagery datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-art by accurately producing the high-resolution satellite images closer to the ground truth.

Abstract

Billboard advertisement is one of the dominant modes of traditional outdoor advertisements. A billboard operator manages the ad slots of a set of billboards. Normally, a user traversal is exposed to multiple billboards. Given a set of billboards, there is an opportunity to improve the revenue of the billboard operator by satisfying the advertising demands of an increased number of clients and ensuring that a user gets exposed to different ads on the billboards during the traversal. In this paper, we propose a framework to improve the revenue of the billboard operator by employing transactional modeling in conjunction with pattern mining. Our main contributions are three-fold. First, we introduce the problem of billboard advertisement allocation for improving the billboard operator revenue. Second, we propose an efficient user trajectory-based transactional framework using coverage pattern mining for improving the revenue of the billboard operator. Third, we conduct a performance study with a real dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Abstract

Melanin is a major contributor to the intensity and width of the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) on optical coherence tomography (OCT). It is hypothesized, high melanin concentrations cause scattering making the RPE appear as a thick band and obscures adjacent layers. A split band appearance of the outermost hyperreflective band has been demonstrated in Albinism, meaning the RPE and Bruch’s Membrane appear as two separate bands. We performed a cross-sectional observational study to test the hypothesis that a reduction in melanin causes an increased ability to differentiate the hyperreflective bands seen on OCT images of the outer retina.

Abstract

When the Indian government declared the frst lockdown on 25 March 2020 to control the increasing number of COVID-19 cases, people were forced to stay and work from home. The aim of this study is to quantify the impact of stay-at-home orders on residential Air Conditioning (AC) energy and household electricity consumption (excluding AC energy). This was done using monitored data from 380 homes in a group of fve buildings in Hyderabad, India. We gathered AC energy and household electricity consumption data at a 30-min interval for each home individually in April 2019 and April 2020. Descriptive and inferential statistical analysis was done on this data. To ofset the diference in temperatures for the month of April in 2019 and 2020, only those weekdays were selected where the average temperature in 2019 was same as the average temperature in 2020. The study establishes that the average number of hours the AC was used per day in each home increased in the range 4.90–7.45% depending on the temperature for the year 2020. Correspondingly, the overall AC consumption increased in the range 3.60–4.5%, however the daytime (8:00 AM to 8:00 PM) AC energy consumption increased in the range 22–26% and nighttime (8:00 PM to 8:00 AM) AC energy consumption decreased by 5–7% in the year 2020. The study showed a rise in household electricity consumption of about 15% for the entire day in the year 2020. The household electricity consumption increased during daytime by 22- 27.50% and 1.90- 6.6% during the nighttime. It was observed that the morning household electricity peak demand shifted from 7:00 AM in 2019 to 9:00 AM in 2020. Conversely, the evening peak demand shifted from 9:00 PM in 2019 to 7:00 PM in 2020. An additional peak was observed during afternoon hours in the lockdown. Keywords: COVID-19, Residential energy consumption, Air conditioning energy consumption, Household electricity consumption, Case study, Data monitoring, India

Abstract

Binarization is an essential pre-processing step for many document image analysis tasks. Binarization of handwritten documents is more challenging than printed documents because of the non-uniform density of ink and the variable thickness of strokes. Instead of traditional scanners, people nowadays use the mobile camera to capture documents, including text written on white and glass boards. The quality of the camera-captured document images is often poor when compared with scanned document images. This impacts binarization accuracy. This paper presents a deep learning-based binarization framework called Deep Semantic Binarization (DSB) to binarize various document images. We pose document image binarization problem as a pixel-wise two-class classification task. Deep networks (including DSB) require many training images during training. However, the benchmark datasets with a limited number of training images are publicly available in the literature. We explore various training strategies, including transfer learning, to handle the data scarcity during training. Due to the unavailability of mobile-captured whiteboard and glass board images, we created two datasets, namely WBIDS-IIIT and GBIDS-IIIT, with associated ground truths. We validate DSBN on the public benchmark DIBCO dataset and WBIDS-IIIT and GBIDS-IIIT datasets. We empirically demonstrate that the DSB outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques for WBIDS-IIIT, GBIDS-IIIT and public datasets.

Abstract

witter played a dominant role during the 2014 general elections in India, ushering a right-wing party into power. Political leaders employed Twitter to augment their public image and push right-wing campaign agendas to millions of followers. A prominent and strategic use of Twitter was credited to Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, portrayed as a visionary leader supporting economic development, social empowerment and good governance. Within this narrative, women's empowerment debates underwent multiple transformations. Through this article, we aim to establish the nature of discussions lying at the intersections of feminist thinking and internet technology. We study the discursive trajectory of women's empowerment against the backdrop of a right-wing political (Hindutva) ideology playing out on Twitter. Utilising the qualitative methods of Thematic Analysis and Feminist Relational Discourse …