This paper proposes a method for conducting quantitative inductive research on survey data when the variable of interest follows an ordinal distribution. A methodology based on novel and traditional penalising models is described. The main aim of this study is to pedagogically present the method utilising the new penalising methods in a new application. A case was employed to outline the methodology. The case aims to select explanatory variables correlated with the target debt level in Swedish listed companies. The survey respondents were matched with accounting information from the companies’ annual reports. However, missing data were present: to fully utilise penalising models, we employed classification and regression tree (CART)-based imputations by multiple imputations chained equations (MICEs) to address this problem. The imputed data were subjected to six penalising models: grouped multinomial lasso, ungrouped multinomial lasso, parallel element linked multinomial-ordinal (ELMO), semi-parallel ELMO, nonparallel ELMO, and cumulative generalised monotone incremental forward stagewise (GMIFS). While the older models yielded several explanatory variables for the hypothesis formation process, the new models (ELMO and GMIFS) identified only one quick asset ratio. Subsequent testing revealed that this variable was the only statistically significant variable that affected the target debt level.

Mental illness (MI) is a leading cause of workplace absenteeism that often goes unrecognized and untreated. This paper presents a machine learning algorithm for predicting MI at workplace. The dataset consisted of responses from 1259 subjects collected through an online survey using a self-assessed questionnaire on the workplace environment. The responses were used as features for training a support vector machine to predict MI. Statistical analysis using the Guttmann correlation and the analysis of variance was done to determine feature significance. Results using 10-fold cross-validation showed that the model predicted MI with good accuracy. Findings support the feasibility of this approach for MI monitoring at the workplace as it offers an advantage over other technologies e.g., MRI scans, and EEG analysis, previously developed for the objective assessment of MI.

Smart Cities have been around as a concept for quite some time. However, most examples of Smart Cities (SCs) originate from megacities (MCs), despite the fact that most people live in Small and Medium-sized Cities (SMCs). This paper addresses the contextual setting for smart cities from the perspective of such small and medium-sized cities. It starts with an overview of the current trends in the research and development of SCs, highlighting the current bias and the challenges it brings. We follow with a few concrete examples of projects which introduced some form of “smartness” in the small and medium cities context, explaining what influence said context had and what specific effects did it lead to. Building on those experiences, we summarise the current understanding of Smart Cities, with a focus on its multi-faceted (e.g., smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment and smart living) nature; we describe mainstream publications and highlight the bias towards large and very large cities (sometimes even subconscious); give examples of (often implicit) assumptions deriving from this bias; finally, we define the need of contextualising SCs also for small and medium-sized cities. The aim of this paper is to establish and strengthen the discourse on the need for SMCs perspective in Smart Cities literature. We hope to provide an initial formulation of the problem, mainly focusing on the unique needs and the specific requirements. We expect that the three example cases describing the effects of applying new solutions and studying SC on small and medium-sized cities, together with the lessons learnt from these experiences, will encourage more research to consider SMCs perspective. To this end, the current paper aims to justify the need for this under-studied perspective, as well as to propose interesting challenges faced by SMCs that can serve as initial directions of such research.

Road condition evaluation is a critical part of gravel road maintenance. One of the assessed parameters is the amount of loose gravel, as this determines the driving quality and safety. Loose gravel can cause tires to slip and the driver to lose control. An expert assesses the road conditions subjectively by looking at images and notes. This method is labor-intensive and subject to error in judgment; therefore, its reliability is questionable. Road management agencies look for automated and objective measurement systems. In this study, acoustic data on gravel hitting the bottom of a car was used. The connection between the acoustics and the condition of loose gravel on gravel roads was assessed. Traditional supervised learning algorithms and convolution neural network (CNN) were applied, and their performances are compared for the classification of loose gravel acoustics. The advantage of using a pre-trained CNN is that it selects relevant features for training. In addition, pre-trained networks offer the advantage of not requiring days of training or colossal training data. In supervised learning, the accuracy of the ensemble bagged tree algorithm for gravel and non-gravel sound classification was found to be 97.5%, whereas, in the case of deep learning, pre-trained network GoogLeNet accuracy was 97.91% for classifying spectrogram images of the gravel sounds.

BACKGROUND: Gait impairment is an essential symptom of Parkinson's disease (PD). OBJECTIVE: This paper introduces a novel computer-vision framework for automatic classification of the severity of gait impairment using front-view motion analysis. METHODS: Four hundred and fifty-six videos were recorded from 19 PD patients using an RGB camera during clinical gait assessment. Gait performance in each video was rated by a neurologist using the unified Parkinson's disease rating scale for gait examination (UPDRS-gait). The proposed algorithm detects and tracks the silhouette of the test subject in the video to generate a height signal. Gait features were extracted from the height signal. Feature analysis was performed using the Kruskal-Wallis rank test. A support vector machine was trained using the features to classify the severity levels according to UPDRS-gait in 10-fold cross-validation. RESULTS: Features significantly (p<0.05) differentiated between median-ranks of UPDRS-gait levels. The SVM classified the levels with a promising area under the ROC of 80.88%. CONCLUSION: Findings support the feasibility of this model for Parkinson's gait assessment in the home environment.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of using the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) method to measure motor states in advanced Parkinson's disease (PD). Data were collected from 19 PD patients who experimented leg agility motor tests with motion sensors on their ankles once before and multiple times after an administration of 150% of their normal daily dose of medication. Experiments of 22 healthy controls were included. Three movement disorder specialists rated the motor states of the patients according to Treatment Response Scale (TRS) using recorded videos of the experiments. A DTW-based motor state distance score (DDS) was constructed using the acceleration and gyroscope signals collected during leg agility motor tests. Mean DDS showed similar trends to mean TRS scores across the test occasions. Mean DDS was able to differentiate between PD patients at Off and On motor states. DDS was able to classify the motor state changes with good accuracy (82%). The PD patients who showed more response to medication were selected using the TRS scale, and the most related DTW-based features to their TRS scores were investigated. There were individual DTW-based features identified for each patient. In conclusion, the DTW method can provide information about motor states of advanced PD patients which can be used in the development of methods for automatic motor scoring of PD.

Conventional road condition evaluation is an expensive and time-consuming task. Therefore data collection from indirect economical methods is desired by road monitoring agencies. Recently . intelligent road condition monitoring has become popular. More studies have focused on automated paved road condition monitoring, and minimal research is available to date on automating gravel road condition assessment. Road roughness information gives an overall picture of the road but does not help in identifying the type of defect; therefore, it cannot be helpful in the more specific road maintenance plan. Road monitoring can be automated using data from conventional sensors, vehicles' onboard devices, and audio and video streams from cost-effective devices. This paper reviews classical and intelligent methods for road condition evaluation in general and, more specifically, reviews studies proposing automated solutions targeting gravel or unpaved roads.

Road condition evaluation is a critical part of gravel road maintenance. One of the parameters that are assessed is loose Gravel. An expert does this evaluation by subjectively looking at images taken and written text for deciding on the road condition. This method is labor-intensive and subjected to an error of judgment; therefore, it is not reliable. Road management agencies are looking for more efficient and automated objective measurement methods. In this study, acoustic data of gravel hitting the bottom of the car is used, and the relation between these acoustics and the condition of loose gravel on gravel roads is seen. A novel acoustic classification method based on Ensemble bagged tree (EBT) algorithm is proposed in this study for the classification of loose gravel sounds. The accuracy of the EBT algorithm for Gravel and Nongravel sound classification is found to be 97.5. The detection of the negative classes, i.e., non- gravel detection, is preeminent, which is considerably higher than Boosted Trees, RUSBoosted Tree, Support vector machines (SVM), and decision trees.

Background: Speech disorder is a common manifestation of Parkinson's disease with two main symptoms, dysprosody and dysphonia. Previous research studying objective measures of speech symptoms involved patients and examiners who were native language speakers. Measures such as cepstral separation difference (CSD) features to quantify dysphonia and dysprosody accurately distinguish the severity of speech impairment. Importantly CSD, together with other speech features, including Mel-frequency coefficients, fundamental-frequency variation, and spectral dynamics, characterize speech intelligibility in PD. However, non-native language speakers transfer phonological rules of their mother language that tamper speech assessment. Objectives: This paper explores CSD's capability: first, to quantify dysprosody and dysphonia of non-native language speakers, Parkinson patients and controls, and secondly, to characterize the severity of speech impairment when Parkinson's dysprosody accompanies non-native linguistic dysprosody. Methods: CSD features were extracted from 168 speech samples recorded from 19 healthy controls, 15 rehabilitated and 23 not-rehabilitated Parkinson patients in three different clinical speech tests based on Unified Parkinson's disease rating scale motor-speech examination. Statistical analyses were performed to compare groups using analysis of variance, intraclass correlation, and Guttman correlation coefficient mu(2). Random forests were trained to classify the severity of speech impairment using CSD and the other speech features. Feature importance in classification was determined using permutation importance score. Results: Results showed that the CSD feature describing dysphonia was uninfluenced by non-native accents, strongly correlated with the clinical examination (mu(2)>0.5), and significantly discriminated between the healthy, rehabilitated, and not-rehabilitated patient groups based on the severity of speech symptoms. However, the feature describing dysprosody did not correlate with the clinical examination but significantly distinguished the groups. The classification model based on random forests and selected features characterized the severity of speech impairment of non-native language speakers with high accuracy. Importantly, the permutation importance score of the CSD feature representing dysphonia was the highest compared to other features. Results showed a strong negative correlation (mu(2)<-0.5) between L-dopa administration and the CSD features. Conclusions: Although non-native accents reduce speech intelligibility, the CSD features can accurately characterize speech impairment, which is not always possible in the clinical examination. Findings support using CSD for monitoring Parkinson's disease. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This paper discusses the common theme of using neural networks, coupled with a technique of elasticity analysis, in order to reach a better understanding of transportation related problems. Elasticity analysis is defined as the systematic exploration of an input-output process by observing how the output changes with respect to the input. The work described concentrates on backpropagation neural networks which have been found to be a particularly suitable and widely used paradigm in transportation.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive movement disorder caused by the death of dopamine-producing cells in the midbrain. There is a need for frequent symptom assessment, since the treatment needs to be individualized as the disease progresses. The aim of this paper was to verify and further investigate the clinimetric properties of an entropy-based method for measuring PD-related upper limb temporal irregularities during spiral drawing tasks. More specifically, properties of a temporal irregularity score (TIS) for patients at different stages of PD, and medication time points were investigated. Nineteen PD patients and 22 healthy controls performed repeated spiral drawing tasks on a smartphone. Patients performed the tests before a single levodopa dose and at specific time intervals after the dose was given. Three movement disorder specialists rated videos of the patients based on the unified PD rating scale (UPDRS) and the Dyskinesia scale. Differences in mean TIS between the groups of patients and healthy subjects were assessed. Test-retest reliability of the TIS was measured. The ability of TIS to detect changes from baseline (before medication) to later time points was investigated. Correlations between TIS and clinical rating scores were assessed. The mean TIS was significantly different between healthy subjects and patients in advanced groups (p-value = 0.02). Test-retest reliability of TIS was good with Intra-class Correlation Coefficient of 0.81. When assessing changes in relation to treatment, TIS contained some information to capture changes from Off to On and wearing off effects. However, the correlations between TIS and clinical scores (UPDRS and Dyskinesia) were weak. TIS was able to differentiate spiral drawings drawn by patients in an advanced stage from those drawn by healthy subjects, and TIS had good test-retest reliability. TIS was somewhat responsive to single-dose levodopa treatment. Since TIS is an upper limb high-frequency-based measure, it cannot be detected during clinical assessment.

Vehicle activated signs and Speed indicator devices are safety signs used to warn and remind drivers that they are exceeding the speed limit on a particular road segment. This article has analysed and compared such signs with the aim of reporting the most suitable sign for relevant situations. Vehicle speeds were recorded at different test sites and the effects of the signs were studied by analyzing the mean and standard deviation. Preliminary results from the work indicate that both types of signs have variable effects on the mean and standard deviation of speed on a given road segment. Speed indicator devices were relatively more effective than vehicle activated signs on local roads; in contrast their effectivity was only comparable when tested on highways.

In a global economy, manufacturers mainly compete with cost efficiency of production, as the price of raw materials are similar worldwide. Heavy industry has two big issues to deal with. On the one hand there is lots of data which needs to be analyzed in an effective manner, and on the other hand making big improvements via investments in cooperate structure or new machinery is neither economically nor physically viable. Machine learning offers a promising way for manufacturers to address both these problems as they are in an excellent position to employ learning techniques with their massive resource of historical production data. However, choosing modelling a strategy in this setting is far from trivial and this is the objective of this article. The article investigates characteristics of the most popular classifiers used in industry today. Support Vector Machines, Multilayer Perceptron, Decision Trees, Random Forests, and the meta-algorithms Bagging and Boosting are mainly investigated in this work. Lessons from real-world implementations of these learners are also provided together with future directions when different learners are expected to perform well. The importance of feature selection and relevant selection methods in an industrial setting are further investigated. Performance metrics have also been discussed for the sake of completion.

Excessive or inappropriate speeds are a key factor in traffic fatalities and crashes. Vehicle-activated signs (VASs) are therefore being extensively used to reduce speeding to increase traffic safety. A VAS is triggered by an individual vehicle when the driver exceeds a speed threshold, otherwise known as trigger speed (TS). The TS is usually set to a constant, normally proportional to the speed limit on the particular segment of road. Decisions concerning the TS largely depend on the local traffic authorities. The primary objective of this article is to help authorities determine the TS that gives an optimal effect on the Mean and Standard Deviation of speed. The data were systematically collected using radar technology whilst varying the TS. The results show that when the applied TS was set near the speed limit, the standard deviation was high. However, the Standard Deviation decreased substantially when the threshold was set to the 85th percentile. This decrease occurred without a significant increase in the mean speed. It is concluded that the optimal threshold speed should approximate the 85th percentile, though VASs should ideally be individually calibrated to the traffic conditions at each site.

Corrigendum to A computer vision framework for finger-tapping evaluation in Parkinson's disease

Bin planning (arrangements) is a key factor in the timber industry. Improper planning of the storage bins may lead to inefficient transportation of resources, which threaten the overall efficiency and thereby limit the profit margins of sawmills. To address this challenge, a simulation model has been developed. However, as numerous alternatives are available for arranging bins, simulating all possibilities will take an enormous amount of time and it is computationally infeasible. A discrete-event simulation model incorporating meta-heuristic algorithms has therefore been investigated in this study. Preliminary investigations indicate that the results achieved by GA based simulation model are promising and better than the other meta-heuristic algorithm. Further, a sensitivity analysis has been done on the GA based optimal arrangement which contributes to gaining insights and knowledge about the real system that ultimately leads to improved and enhanced efficiency in sawmill yards. It is expected that the results achieved in the work will support timber industries in making optimal decisions with respect to arrangement of storage bins in a sawmill yard.

Vegetation growing on railway trackbeds and embankments can present several potential problems. Consequently, such vegetation is controlled through various maintenance procedures. In order to investigate the extent of maintenance needed, one of the first steps in any maintenance procedure is to monitor or inspect the railway section in question. Monitoring is often carried out manually by sending out inspectors or by watching recorded video clips of the section in question. To facilitate maintenance planning, the ability to assess the extent of vegetation becomes important. This paper investigates the reliability of human assessments of vegetation on railway trackbeds. In this study, five maintenance engineers made independent visual estimates of vegetation cover and counted the number of plant clusters from images. The test results showed an inconsistency between the raters when it came to visually estimating plant cover and counting plant clusters. The results showed that caution should be exercised when interpreting individual raters' assessments of vegetation.

Current day vegetation assessments within railway maintenance are (to a large extent) carried out manually. This study has investigated the reliability of such manual assessments by taking three non-domain experts into account. Thirty-five track images under different conditions were acquired for the purpose. For each image, the raters’ were asked to estimate the cover of woody plants, herbs and grass separately (in

Automatic trigger speed for vehicle activated signs using Adaptive Neuro fuzzy system and Random Forest

National Railway Administrations in Northern Europe do not employ systematic procedures in monitoring the current state of vegetation to form the basis of maintenance decision making. Current day vegetation maintenance is largely based on human visual estimates. This paper investigates a machine vision (MV) approach to be able to automatically quantify the amount of vegetation on a given railway section. An investigation assessing the reliability of human estimates is also conducted along the same railway section.A machine vision algorithm was developed and implemented. Initially, the algorithm determines a region of interest (ROI), i.e. the desired monitored area in each collected image. This ROI is dependent on fixed objects in the image, namely the two rails. When the rails are found the algorithm will compute the ROI, which is predetermined by e.g. the railway administrator. After this, a perspective projection correction will be made, and the vegetation will be segmented. Cover is reported as a percentage of the total ROI for each image. Results: The machine vision algorithm is capable of processing 98% of the images. Failure in the remaining 2% of cases is attributed to the algorithms' inability in find the rails within the image. Analysis of variance tests were conducted to compare the observers cover assessments in sample plots. Upon comparing the observers plot wise mean estimates with the machine vision output, results show that the human visual estimates do not correlate with the results reported by the machine vision output. As such, the result indicates that it is very hard to fit human estimates by regression with the machine vision result. Additionally the results show that humans are not in agreement with each other, and often are exaggerating the extent of vegetation cover compared to the machine vision output.The investigation shows that one should be very careful when trusting/interpreting human visual estimates. In conclusion, based on the resu- ts, the automated machine vision solution is proposed as complementing, or replacing, manual human inspections serving as a base for vegetation control decisions. Impact: By objectively measuring the quantity of vegetation, the maintenance planning and procurement can be effectively improved over time. A machine vision approach for condition monitoring of vegetation will enable condition based maintenance with prior consideration on issues mainly relevant to vegetation type, quantity and biodiversity.