Nearly half of global anthropogenic N2O emissions are accounted for by nitrogen fertiliser application. Therefore, accurate prediction of fertiliser-induced N2O fluxes is crucial for optimising fertiliser strategies and mitigating climate change. In this work, we introduce DA-Mamba: a data augmentation-enhanced state space model that can capture long-range N2O flux dynamics and their interactions with agri-environmental variables, even when data is limited. Using a publicly available dataset of fertiliser-induced N2O emissions, DA-Mamba achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming six baseline models. Additionally, we have integrated DA-Mamba as a containerised microservice within ParallelFarm, our cloud-based precision fertilisation and farm management system. The service uses real-time weather, soil and management data to generate optimised fertiliser plans and field-level N2O–yield predictions, thereby supporting sustainable agricultural decision-making.

The prediction of fertilization rates is a critical area of research in the agricultural field and is essential for ensuring global food security. With the ongoing expansion of the global population and the escalating repercussions of climate change, precise crop fertilization rate predictions have become paramount. This is because accurate predictions can optimize resource allocation and improve agricultural productivity. Moreover, they can provide scientific support for policy-making and agricultural input management, thereby promoting sustainable agricultural development. Despite its importance, the complexity of agricultural systems, which is influenced by multiple factors including climate, geography, soil conditions, and management practices, poses significant challenges to prediction accuracy. In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that effectively incorporates geographical knowledge and multi-dimensional feature information. By modeling spatial relationships through graph structures (nodes and edges), our framework enhances fertilization rate prediction accuracy. We validate the model using two datasets of different scales. The results demonstrate excellent predictive performance across all datasets and strong scalability, highlighting its potential for agricultural fertilization rate prediction.

As the population rapidly ages, Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the most common form of dementia, urgently requires the identification of reliable structural brain biomarkers and the development of effective therapeutic strategies. Multiple multi-task learning (MTL) paradigms have been developed to enhance model generalization by sharing information between tasks to predict AD progression and accurately identify MRI-associated biomarkers. Unlike previous MTL approaches that consider only a single kind of cognitive score to predict the complicated AD progression over time, we have developed an innovative MTL method to deal with various cognitive scores simultaneously, with each focusing on different aspects of patient cognition. To effectively capture the intricate associations among different cognitive scores at multiple time points, we first propose an Adaptive Multiple Cognitive Objective Temporal (AMCOT) task-relationship binding penalty mechanism. This mechanism adaptively reveals temporal correlations between various cognitive scores at different time points and uses these relationships to predict cumulative disease progression accurately. To select the most informative MRI features in AD progression, we consider integrating the sparse group Lasso into our model. Our algorithms are designed to handle large datasets efficiently. Empirical evaluation on the Alzheimer’s disease dataset shows that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms in both overall and individual task performance. Additionally, we applied stability selection techniques to identify stable MRI biomarkers and analyzed their temporal patterns to gain insights into AD progression. The implementation source can be found at https://github.com/XuanhanFan/MTL-AMCOT-BB.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the leading cause of dementia worldwide, characterized by its gradual progression and the subtle variations across disease stages, which pose significant challenges for accurate diagnosis. While deep representation learning algorithms have shown promise in the early detection of AD using MRI data, existing approaches often overlook the meaningful relationships between continuous labels in AD progression, and the learned representations frequently lack interpretability due to the black-box nature of deep learning models. To address these limitations, we propose ICReL (Interpretable Continuous Representation Learning), a novel concept based on coding rate principles that captures continuous representations across AD stages while maintaining a high degree of interpretability. Extensive experimental results on the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset demonstrate that ICReL not only outperforms multiple baseline methods using 2D slice or 3D MRI in terms of learning continuous representations, but also exhibits enhanced robustness to label corruption and superior predictive performance. This work offers a new, interpretable approach to representation learning for computer-aided diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases.

Promoting sustainable agriculture plays a crucial role in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, lowering the carbon footprint, and improving farm resilience. Three challenges must be overcome to achieve sustainable agriculture management. Firstly, there is a lack of reliable and sustainable fertiliser solutions to improve fertiliser use efficiency, reduce GHG emissions while maintaining crop production. In addition, how to cost-effectively quantify the response of soil carbon and GHG fluxes to different fertilisation practices. Thirdly, there is a requirement to integrate multi-source farming data and AI models into a farm management information system (FMIS) to support intelligent decisions for farmers. To address these challenges, we developed the ParellelFarm, an AI-enabled sustainable farming management system that integrates multi-source farming data and AI-driven fertiliser and soil carbon models into a multi-tenant cloud platform, to support sustainable farming. It also provides remote field visualisation and management as well as instant messaging via web and mobile clients, supporting fast and accurate labour allocation with fewer resources. It is a potential solution for a cost-effective, highly productive and sustainable modern net-zero farm.

Multi-task learning models based on temporal smoothness assumption, in which each time point of a sequence of time points concerns a task of prediction, assume the adjacent tasks are similar to each other. However, the effect of outliers is not taken into account. In this paper, we show that even only one outlier task will destroy the performance of the entire model. To solve this problem, we propose two Robust Temporal Smoothness (RoTS) frameworks. Compared with the existing models based on temporal relation, our methods not only chase the temporal smoothness information but identify outlier tasks, however, without increasing the computational complexity. Detailed theoretical analyses are presented to evaluate the performance of our methods. Experimental results on synthetic and real-life datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our frameworks. We also discuss several potential specific applications and extensions of our RoTS frameworks.

Identifying and utilising various biomarkers for tracking Alzheimer’s disease (AD) progression have received many recent attentions and enable helping clinicians make the prompt decisions. Traditional progression models focus on extracting morphological biomarkers in regions of interest (ROIs) from MRI/PET images, such as regional average cortical thickness and regional volume. They are effective but ignore the relationships between brain ROIs over time, which would lead to synergistic deterioration. For exploring the synergistic deteriorating relationship between these biomarkers, in this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal similarity measure based multi-task learning approach for effectively predicting AD progression and sensitively capturing the critical relationships between biomarkers. Specifically, we firstly define a temporal measure for estimating the magnitude and velocity of biomarker change over time, which indicate a changing trend(temporal). Converting this trend into the vector, we then compare this variability between biomarkers in a unified vector space(spatial). The experimental results show that compared with directly ROI based learning, our proposed method is more effective in predicting disease progression. Our method also enables performing longitudinal stability selection to identify the changing relationships between biomarkers, which play a key role in disease progression. We prove that the synergistic deteriorating biomarkers between cortical volumes or surface areas have a significant effect on the cognitive prediction.

Recently, there have been a wide spectrum of multitask learning (MTL) methods developed to model Alzheimer’s disease (AD) progression. Typical MTL studies related cognitive ability prediction focus on modeling AD progression using high-quality clinical data such as MRI and cognitive scores. These studies follow a unified regularised MTL framework to process each follow-up data from patients over time. Beginning at baseline, the framework regards cognitive ability at each followup as a task and organise task relationship through temporal smoothness in cognitive ability. There is little attention on how to design feasible experimental protocols and normalisation for reliably evaluating those regularised MTL models. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis for investigate above issues. Four typical structural regularization approaches are revisited. Four issues affecting evaluation process of regularised MTL models are evaluated by experiments: 1) evaluation indicators, 2) repeated experimental times, 3) training data size and 4) number of tasks in MTL. The results demonstrate that regularised MTL models are capable of predicting AD progression with effectiveness, in many challenging cases of curse of dimensionality, data insufficiency or single MRI data input. One important finding is that MTL can effectively reduce the over-fitting risk of model, even with limited sample size. We also discover that the temporal smoothness assumption instead limits the performance of later tasks. It encourages us to revisit the relationship between patients’ cognitive ability changes between 2 and 3 years when using MTL to model AD progression.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the most prevalent dementia, gradually reduces the cognitive abilities of patients while also posing a significant financial burden on the healthcare system. A variety of multi-task learning methods have recently been proposed to identify potential MRI-related biomarkers and accurately predict the progression of AD. These methods, however, all use a predefined task relation structure that is rigid and insufficient to adequately capture the intricate temporal relations among tasks. Instead, we propose a novel mechanism for directly and automatically learning the temporal relation and constructing it as an Automatic Temporal relation Graph (AutoTG). We use the sparse group Lasso to select a universal MRI feature set for all tasks and particular sets for various tasks in order to find biomarkers that are useful for predicting the progression of AD. To solve the biconvex and nonsmooth objective function, we adopt the alternating optimization and show that the two related suboptimization problems are amenable to closed-form solution of the proximal operator. To solve the two problems efficiently, the accelerated proximal gradient method is used, which has the fastest convergence rate of first-order method. We have preprocessed two latest AD datasets, and the experimental results verify our proposed novel multi-task approach outperforms several baseline methods. To demonstrate the high interpretability of our approach, we visualize the automatically learned temporal relation graph and investigate the temporal patterns of the important MRI features. The implementation source is at https://github.com/menghui-zhou/MAGPP.

In this paper, we propose a novel efficient multi-task learning formulation for the class of progression problems in which its state will continuously change over time. To use the shared knowledge information between multiple tasks to improve performance, existing multi-task learning methods mainly focus on feature selection or optimizing the task relation structure. The feature selection methods usually fail to explore the complex relationship between tasks and thus have limited performance. The methods centring on optimizing the relation structure of tasks are not capable of selecting meaningful features and have a bi-convex objective function which results in high computation complexity of the associated optimization algorithm. Unlike these multi-task learning methods, motivated by a simple and direct idea that the state of a system at the current time point should be related to all previous time points, we first propose a novel relation structure, termed adaptive global temporal relation structure (AGTS). Then we integrate the widely used sparse group Lasso, fused Lasso with AGTS to propose a novel convex multi-task learning formulation that not only performs feature selection but also adaptively captures the global temporal task relatedness. Since the existence of three non-smooth penalties, the objective function is challenging to solve. We first design an optimization algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Considering that the worst-case convergence rate of ADMM is only sub-linear, we then devise an efficient algorithm based on the accelerated gradient method which has the optimal convergence rate among first-order methods. We show the proximal operator of several non-smooth penalties can be solved efficiently due to the special structure of our formulation. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms multiple baseline MTL methods in terms of effectiveness but also has high efficiency.

Machine learning (ML) techniques for predicting the progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) can greatly assist researchers and clinicians in establishing effective AD prevention and treatment strategies. The problems of monotonicity of data forms and scarcity of medical data are the main reasons that currently limit the performance of ML approaches. In this research, we propose a novel similarity-based quantification approach that simultaneously considers the magnitude and direction relationships of structural variations among brain biomarkers, and encodes quantified data as third-order tensors to solve problem of data form monotonicity, then combining tensor multi-tasking learning model to predict AD progression. In this model, the prediction of each patient is considered as a task, and each task shares a set of latent factors obtained by tensor decomposition, knowledge sharing between tasks can improve the generalization of the model and solve the problem of scarcity of medical data. The model can be utilised to efficiently predict the progression of AD integrating magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data and cognitive scores of AD patients at different stages. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conducted extensive experiments utilising MRI data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). The results reveal that the proposed model predicts AD progression more accurately and consistently than single-task and state-of-the-art multi-task regression approaches on various cognitive scores. The proposed approach can recognize brain structural variation in patients and apply it to reliably predict and diagnose AD progression.

In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning approach for predicting the progression of Alzheimer's disease (AD), known as the most common form of dementia. The vital challenge is to identify how the tasks are related and build learning models to capture such task relatedness. Unlike previous methods that assume low-rank structure, chase the predefined local temporal relatedness or utilize local approximation, we propose a novel penalty termed L ongitudinal S tability A djustment (LSA) to adaptively capture the intrinsic global temporal correlation among multiple time points and thus utilize the accumulated disease progression information. We combine LSA with sparse group Lasso to present a novel multi-task learning formulation to identify biomarkers closely related to cognitive measurement and predict AD progression. Two efficient algorithms are designed for large-scale dataset. Experimental results conducted on two AD data sets demonstrate our framework outperforms competing methods in terms of overall and each task performances. We also perform stability selection to identify stable biomarkers from the MRI feature set and analyze their temporal patterns in disease progression.

Precision fertilisation is the application of target variable fertilisation techniques based on soil fertility variations in specific regions. Precise fertilisation can help to balance soil nutrients, conserve fertiliser, prevent pollution, and boost crop yields. The lack of agricultural data is a key reason limiting the application of machine learning methods in agriculture. Due to the low-level network technology in farms, it is difficult to obtain diverse and complete agricultural data. The existing agricultural data is typically unstructured and difficult to mine. In this article, we extracted real-world agricultural dataset from four real farms with winter wheat and it includes different types of factors describing agriculture, such as climate, soil nutrients, crop yield information. Moreover, we present a novel multi-task learning (MTL) approach based on a tensor built of farm data to efficiently prediction both the amount and time of base fertiliser and topdressing. Specifically, real-world agricultural measurements (such as climate data, soil nutrients, etc.) are encoded into a three-dimensional tensor, and a set of interpretable temporal and spatial latent factors is extracted from the raw data through tensor decomposition. The latent factors are then utilised to train the spatio-temporal tensor prediction model. We have conducted extensive experiments utilising the real-world agricultural dataset. The experimental results show that our proposed methods have superior accuracy and stability in fertilisation prediction compared to state-of-the-art regression methods.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a typical progressive neurodegenerative disease with insidious onset. Utilising various biomarkers to track and predict AD progression for supporting clinic decisions has recently received wide attentions. Accurate prediction of disease progression will help clinicians and patients make the best decisions on disease prevention and treatment. Typical prediction models focus on extracting biomarker morphological information of different regions of interest (ROIs) from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or positron emission tomography (PET), such as the average regional cortical thickness and regional volume. They are effective in modeling AD progression and understanding AD biomarkers, but cannot make full utilise of the internal temporal and spatial relationships between these biomarkers to improve the accuracy and stability of AD prediction. In this paper, we propose a new multi-task learning (MTL) method based on the tensor composed of the spatio-temporal similarity measure between brain biomarkers, using MRI data and cognitive scores of AD patients in different stages can effectively predict the progression of AD. Specifically, we define a temporal and spatial feature similarity measure to calculate the rate of change and velocity of each biomarker in MRI to form a vector, which represents the morphological changing trend of the biomarker, then we calculate the similarity of the changing trend between two biomarkers and encode the data to the third-order tensor, and extract interpretable biomarker latent factors from the original data. The prediction of each patient sample in the tensor is a task and all prediction tasks share a set of latent factors obtained from tensor decomposition to train the AD progression prediction model, which learns task correlation from the spatiotemporal tensor itself. We conducted extensive experiments utilising the data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). Experimental results show that compared with ROI-based traditional single feature regression methods, our proposed method has better accuracy and stability in disease progression prediction in terms of root mean square error exhibiting an average of 4.10 decrease compared to Ridge regression, 0.19 decrease compared to Lasso regression and 0.18 decrease compared to Temporal Group Lasso (TGL) in the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) questionnaire.

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the most common dementia characterized by loss of brain function. Multi-tasking learning methods have been widely used to predict cognitive performance and select important imaging biomarkers in AD research. The temporal smoothness assumption, prevalent for modeling AD progression, means the difference between cognitive scores at two consecutive time points is relatively small. However, it’s not appropriate due to the presence of sample disturbance and the effectiveness of drug therapy. In addition, many multi-task learning methods select discriminative feature subset from MRI features, assuming that correlations between tasks are consistent, which ignores the complex intrinsic correlation structure of tasks. In this paper, we present a multi-task learning framework which utilizes generalized fused Lasso and generalized group Lasso (GFGGL for abbreviation) to model the disease progression with the complex intrinsic nonlinear structures of disease. The proposed framework is more flexible to utilize the inherent nonlinear relation of AD than existing methods for the reason of we represent the intrinsic structure as three correlation matrices which are functions of super parameters. The framework involves (1) two nonlinear structures of disease progression and (2) one nonlinear structure among tasks. An efficient optimization method is designed for the difficult optimization problem due to the presence of three nonsmooth penalties. Extensive experimental results using dataset from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.