This paper presents a comprehensive empirical investigation into the interactions between various randomization techniques in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and their impact on learning performance. It is well-established that injecting randomness into the training process of DNNs, through various approaches, at different stages, is often beneficial for reducing overfitting and improving generalization. Nonetheless, the interactions between randomness techniques such as weight noise, dropout, and many others remain poorly understood. Consequently, it is challenging to determine which methods can be effectively combined to optimize DNN performance. To address this issue, we categorize the existing randomness techniques into four key types: injection of noise/randomness at the data, model structure, optimization or learning stage. We use this classification to identify gaps in the current coverage of potential mechanisms for the introduction of randomness, leading to proposing two new techniques: adding noise to the loss function and random masking of the gradient updates. In our empirical study, we employ a Particle Swarm Optimizer (PSO) for hyperparameter optimization (HPO) to explore the space of possible configurations to determine where and how much randomness should be injected to maximize DNN performance. We assess the impact of various types and levels of randomness for DNN architectures across standard computer vision benchmarks: MNIST, FASHION-MNIST, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100. Across more than 30 000 evaluated configurations, we perform a detailed examination of the interactions between randomness techniques and their combined impact on DNN performance. Our findings reveal that randomness through data augmentation and in weight initialization are the main contributors to performance improvement. Additionally, correlation analysis demonstrates that different optimizers, such as Adam and Gradient Descent with Momentum, prefer distinct types of randomization during the training process. A GitHub repository with the complete implementation and generated dataset is available1.

The field of Explainable Predictive Maintenance (PM) is concerned with developing methods that can clarify how AI systems operate in the PM domain. One of the challenges of creating maintenance plans is integrating AI output with human decision-making pro- cesses and expertise. For AI to be helpful and trustworthy, fault predictions must be contextualized and easily comprehensible to humans. This involves providing tailored explanations to different actors depending on their roles and needs. For example, engineers can be connected to technical installation blueprints, while man- agers can evaluate system downtime costs, and lawyers can assess safety-threatening failures' potential liability. In many industries, black-box AI systems analyze sensor data to predict failures by detecting anomalies and deviations from typical behavior with impressive accuracy. However, PM is just one part of a broader context that aims to identify the most probable causes, develop a recovery plan, and estimate remaining useful life while providing alternative solutions. Achieving this requires complex interactions among various actors in industrial and decision-making processes. Our tutorial explores current trends, and promising research directions in Explainable AI (XAI) relevant to Explainable Predictive Maintenance (XPM), and future challenges and open issues on this topic. We will also present three case studies that highlight XPM's challenges in bus and train operations and steel factories.

Survival Analysis models usually output functions (survival or hazard functions) rather than point predictions like regression and classification models. This makes the explanations of such models a challenging task, especially using the Shapley values. We propose SurvSHAP, a new model-agnostic algorithm to explain survival models that predict survival curves. The algorithm is based on discovering patterns in the predicted survival curves that would identify significantly different survival behaviors, and utilizing a proxy model and SHAP method to explain these distinct survival behaviors. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the SurvSHAP is able to capture the underlying factors of the survival patterns. Moreover, SurvSHAP results on the Cox Proportional Hazard model are compared with the weights of the model to show that we provide faithful overall explanations, with more fine-grained explanations of the sub-populations. We also illustrate the wrong model and explanations learned by a Cox model when applied to heterogeneous sub-populations. We show that a non-linear machine learning survival model with SurvSHAP can better model the data and provide better explanations than linear models.

Batteries are a safety-critical and the most expensive component for electric vehicles (EVs). To ensure the reliability of the EVs in operation, it is crucial to monitor the state of health of those batteries. Monitoring their deterioration is also relevant to the sustainability of the transport solutions, through creating an efficient strategy for utilizing the remaining capacity of the battery and its second life. Electric buses, similar to other EVs, come in many different variants, including different configurations and operating conditions. Developing new degradation models for each existing combination of settings can become challenging from different perspectives such as unavailability of failure data for novel settings, heterogeneity in data, low amount of data available for less popular configurations, and lack of sufficient engineering knowledge. Therefore, being able to automatically transfer a machine learning model to new settings is crucial. More concretely, the aim of this work is to extract features that are invariant across different settings. In this study, we propose an evolutionary method, called genetic algorithm for domain invariant features (GADIF), that selects a set of features to be used for training machine learning models, in such a way as to maximize the invariance across different settings. A Genetic Algorithm, with each chromosome being a binary vector signaling selection of features, is equipped with a specific fitness function encompassing both the task performance and domain shift. We contrast the performance, in migrating to unseen domains, of our method against a number of classical feature selection methods without any transfer learning mechanism. Moreover, in the experimental result section, we analyze how different features are selected under different settings. The results show that using invariant features leads to a better generalization of the machine learning models to an unseen domain.

The first workshop on Interactive Data Mining is held in Melbourne, Australia, on February 15, 2019 and is co-located with 12th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2019). The goal of this workshop is to share and discuss research and projects that focus on interaction with and interactivity of data mining systems. The program includes invited speaker, presentation of research papers, and a discussion session.