Journal of Data Science

The exploration of whether artificial intelligence (AI) can evolve to possess consciousness is an intensely debated and researched topic within the fields of philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Understanding this complex phenomenon hinges on integrating two complementary perspectives of consciousness: the objective and the subjective. Objective perspectives involve quantifiable measures and observable phenomena, offering a more scientific and empirical approach. This includes the use of neuroimaging technologies such as electrocorticography (ECoG), EEG, and fMRI to study brain activities and patterns. These methods allow for the mapping and understanding of neural representations related to language, visual, acoustic, emotional, and semantic information. However, the objective approach may miss the nuances of personal experience and introspection. On the other hand, subjective perspectives focus on personal experiences, thoughts, and feelings. This introspective view provides insights into the individual nature of consciousness, which cannot be directly measured or observed by others. Yet, the subjective approach is often criticized for its lack of empirical evidence and its reliance on personal interpretation, which may not be universally applicable or reliable. Integrating these two perspectives is essential for a comprehensive understanding of consciousness. By combining objective measures with subjective reports, we can develop a more holistic understanding of the mind.

Deep residual networks (ResNets) have shown state-of-the-art performance in various real-world applications. Recently, the ResNets model was reparameterized and interpreted as solutions to a continuous ordinary differential equation or Neural-ODE model. In this study, we propose a neural generalized ordinary differential equation (Neural-GODE) model with layer-varying parameters to further extend the Neural-ODE to approximate the discrete ResNets. Specifically, we use nonparametric B-spline functions to parameterize the Neural-GODE so that the trade-off between the model complexity and computational efficiency can be easily balanced. It is demonstrated that ResNets and Neural-ODE models are special cases of the proposed Neural-GODE model. Based on two benchmark datasets, MNIST and CIFAR-10, we show that the layer-varying Neural-GODE is more flexible and general than the standard Neural-ODE. Furthermore, the Neural-GODE enjoys the computational and memory benefits while performing comparably to ResNets in prediction accuracy.

The least squares (LS) estimator of the autoregressive coefficient in the bifurcating autoregressive (BAR) model was recently shown to suffer from substantial bias, especially for small to moderate samples. This study investigates the impact of the bias in the LS estimator on the behavior of various types of bootstrap confidence intervals for the autoregressive coefficient and introduces methods for constructing bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals. We first describe several bootstrap confidence interval procedures for the autoregressive coefficient of the BAR model and present their bias-corrected versions. The behavior of uncorrected and corrected confidence interval procedures is studied empirically through extensive Monte Carlo simulations and two real cell lineage data applications. The empirical results show that the bias in the LS estimator can have a significant negative impact on the behavior of bootstrap confidence intervals and that bias correction can significantly improve the performance of bootstrap confidence intervals in terms of coverage, width, and symmetry.

Vaccine efficacy is a key index to evaluate vaccines in initial clinical trials during the development of vaccines. In particular, it plays a crucial role in authorizing Covid-19 vaccines. It has been reported that Covid-19 vaccine efficacy varies with a number of factors, including demographics of population, time after vaccine administration, and virus strains. By examining clinical trial data of three Covid-19 vaccine studies, we find that current approach to evaluating vaccines with an overall efficacy does not provide desired accuracy. It requires no time frame during which a candidate vaccine is evaluated, and is subject to misuse, resulting in potential misleading information and interpretation. In particular, we illustrate with clinical trial data that the variability of vaccine efficacy is underestimated. We demonstrate that a new method may help to address these caveats. It leads to accurate estimation of the variation of efficacy, provides useful information to define a reasonable time frame to evaluate vaccines, and avoids misuse of vaccine efficacy and misleading information.

Multi-touch attribution (MTA) estimates the relative contributions of the multiple ads a user may see prior to any observed conversions. Increasingly, advertisers also want to base budget and bidding decisions on these attributions, spending more on ads that drive more conversions. We describe two requirements for an MTA system to be suitable for this application: First, it must be able to handle continuously updated and incomplete data. Second, it must be sufficiently flexible to capture that an ad’s effect will change over time. We describe an MTA system, consisting of a model for user conversion behavior and a credit assignment algorithm, that satisfies these requirements. Our model for user conversion behavior treats conversions as occurrences in an inhomogeneous Poisson process, while our attribution algorithm is based on iteratively removing the last ad in the path.

Research has continued to shed light on the extent and significance of gender disparity in social, cultural and economic spheres. More recently, computational tools from the data science and Natural Language Processing (NLP) communities have been proposed for measuring such disparity at scale using empirically rigorous methodologies. In this article, we contribute to this line of research by studying gender disparity in 2,443 copyright-expired literary texts published in the pre-modern period, defined in this work as the period ranging from the beginning of the nineteenth through the early twentieth century. Using a replicable data science methodology relying on publicly available and established NLP components, we extract three different gendered character prevalence measures within these texts. We use an extensive set of statistical tests to robustly demonstrate a significant disparity between the prevalence of female characters and male characters in pre-modern literature. We also show that the proportion of female characters in literary texts significantly increases in female-authored texts compared to the same proportion in male-authored texts. However, regression-based analysis shows that, over the 120 year period covered by the corpus, female character prevalence does not change significantly over time, and remains below the parity level of 50%, regardless of the gender of the author. Qualitative analyses further show that descriptions associated with female characters across the corpus are markedly different (and stereotypical) from the descriptions associated with male characters.

The COVID-19 outbreak of 2020 has required many governments to develop and adopt mathematical-statistical models of the pandemic for policy and planning purposes. To this end, this work provides a tutorial on building a compartmental model using Susceptible, Exposed, Infected, Recovered, Deaths and Vaccinated (SEIRDV) status through time. The proposed model uses interventions to quantify the impact of various government attempts made to slow the spread of the virus. Furthermore, a vaccination parameter is also incorporated in the model, which is inactive until the time the vaccine is deployed. A Bayesian framework is utilized to perform both parameter estimation and prediction. Predictions are made to determine when the peak Active Infections occur. We provide inferential frameworks for assessing the effects of government interventions on the dynamic progression of the pandemic, including the impact of vaccination. The proposed model also allows for quantification of number of excess deaths averted over the study period due to vaccination.

Obesity rates continue to exhibit an upward trajectory, particularly in the US, and is the underlying cause of several comorbidities, including but not limited to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and cancers. To monitor obesity, body mass index (BMI) and proportion body fat (PBF) are two commonly used measurements. Although BMI and PBF changes over time in an individual’s lifespan and their relationship may also change dynamically, existing work has mostly remained cross-sectional, or separately modeling BMI and PBF. A combined longitudinal assessment is expected to be more effective in unravelling their complex interplay. To mitigate this, we consider Bayesian cross-domain latent growth curve models within a structural equation modeling framework, which simultaneously handles issues such as individually varying time metrics, proportion data, and potential missing not at random data for joint assessment of the longitudinal changes of BMI and PBF. Through simulation studies, we observe that our proposed models and estimation method yielded parameter estimates with small bias and mean squared error in general, however, a mis-specified missing data mechanism may cause inaccurate and inefficient parameter estimates. Furthermore, we demonstrate application of our method to a motivating longitudinal obesity study, controlling for both time-invariant (such as, sex), and time-varying (such as diastolic and systolic blood pressure, biceps skinfold, bioelectrical impedance, and waist circumference) covariates in separate models. Under time-invariance, we observe that the initial BMI level and the rate of change in BMI influenced PBF. However, in presence of time-varying covariates, only the initial BMI level influenced the initial PBF. The added-on selection model estimation indicated that observations with higher PBF values were less likely to be missing.

Due to long-standing federal restrictions on cannabis-related research, the implications of cannabis legalization on traffic and occupational safety are understudied. Accordingly, there is a need for objective and validated measures of acute cannabis impairment that may be applied in public safety and occupational settings. Pupillary response to light may offer an avenue for detection that outperforms typical sobriety tests and tetrahydrocannabinol concentrations. We developed a video processing and analysis pipeline that extracts pupil sizes during a light stimulus test administered with goggles utilizing infrared videography. The analysis compared pupil size trajectories in response to a light for those with occasional, daily, and no cannabis use before and after smoking. Pupils were segmented using a combination of image pre-processing techniques and segmentation algorithms which were validated using manually segmented data and found to achieve 99% precision and 94% F-score. Features extracted from the pupil size trajectories captured pupil constriction and rebound dilation and were analyzed using generalized estimating equations. We find that acute cannabis use results in less pupil constriction and slower pupil rebound dilation in the light stimulus test.

Inspired by the impressive successes of compress sensing-based machine learning algorithms, data augmentation-based efficient Gibbs samplers for Bayesian high-dimensional classification models are developed by compressing the design matrix to a much lower dimension. Ardent care is exercised in the choice of the projection mechanism, and an adaptive voting rule is employed to reduce sensitivity to the random projection matrix. Focusing on the high-dimensional Probit regression model, we note that the naive implementation of the data augmentation-based Gibbs sampler is not robust to the presence of co-linearity in the design matrix – a setup ubiquitous in $n\lt p$ problems. We demonstrate that a simple fix based on joint updates of parameters in the latent space circumnavigates this issue. With a computationally efficient MCMC scheme in place, we introduce an ensemble classifier by creating R ($\sim 25$–50) projected copies of the design matrix, and subsequently running R classification models with the R projected design matrix in parallel. We combine the output from the R replications via an adaptive voting scheme. Our scheme is inherently parallelizable and capable of taking advantage of modern computing environments often equipped with multiple cores. The empirical success of our methodology is illustrated in elaborate simulations and gene expression data applications. We also extend our methodology to a high-dimensional logistic regression model and carry out numerical studies to showcase its efficacy.