Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Data-Driven Decision Support Tool Co-Development With A Primary Health Care Practice Based Learning Network, Jacqueline K. Kueper, Jennifer Rayner, Sara Bhatti, Kelly Angevaare, Sandra Fitzpatrick, Paulino Lucamba, Eric Sutherland, Daniel J. Lizotte

Epidemiology and Biostatistics Publications

Background: The Alliance for Healthier Communities is a learning health system that supports Community Health Centres (CHCs) across Ontario, Canada to provide team-based primary health care to people who otherwise experience barriers to care. This case study describes the ongoing process and lessons learned from the first Alliance for Healthier Communities’ Practice Based Learning Network (PBLN) data-driven decision support tool co-development project.

Methods: We employ an iterative approach to problem identification and methods development for the decision support tool, moving between discussion sessions and case studies with CHC electronic health record (EHR) data. We summarize our work to date in …

Search-Based Fairness Testing: An Overview, Hussaini Mamman, Shuib Basri, Abdullateef Balogun, Abdullahi Abubakar Imam, Ganesh Kumar, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in domains such as recruitment, finance, healthcare, and the judiciary. However, biases in AI systems raise ethical and societal concerns, emphasizing the need for effective fairness testing methods. This paper reviews current research on fairness testing, particularly its application through search-based testing. Our analysis highlights progress and identifies areas of improvement in addressing AI systems’ biases. Future research should focus on leveraging established search-based testing methodologies for fairness testing.

Investigating Continual Learning Strategies In Neural Networks, Christopher Tam, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

This paper explores the role of continual learning strategies when neural networks are confronted with learning tasks sequentially. We analyze the stability-plasticity dilemma with three factors in mind: the type of network architecture used, the continual learning scenario defined and the continual learning strategy implemented. Our results show that complementary learning systems and neural volume significantly contribute towards memory retrieval and consolidation in neural networks. Finally, we demonstrate how regularization strategies such as elastic weight consolidation are more well-suited for larger neural networks whereas rehearsal strategies such as gradient episodic memory are better suited for smaller neural networks.

Inaugural Artificial Intelligence For Public Health Practice (Ai4php) Retreat: Ontario, Canada, Jacqueline K. Kueper, Laura C. Rosella, Richard G. Booth, Brent D. Davis, Sarah Nayani, Maxwell J. Smith, Dan Lizotte

Computer Science Publications

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Public Health Practice Retreat was a hybrid event held in October 2022 in London, Ontario to achieve three main goals: 1) Identify both the goals of public health practitioners and the tasks that they undertake as part of their practice to achieve those goals that could be supported by AI, 2) Learn from existing examples and the experience of others about facilitators and barriers to AI for public health, and 3) Support new and strengthen existing connections between public health practitioners and AI researchers. The retreat included a keynote presentation, group brainstorming exercises, breakout group …

Scheduling Electric Vehicle Charging For Grid Load Balancing, Zhixin Han, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam Capretz, Syed Mir

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

In recent years, electric vehicles (EVs) have been widely adopted because of their environmental benefits. However, the increasing volume of EVs poses capacity issues for grid operators as simultaneously charging many EVs may result in grid instabilities. Scheduling EV charging for grid load balancing has a potential to prevent load peaks caused by simultaneous EV charging and contribute to balance of supply and demand. This paper proposes a user-preference-based scheduling approach to minimize costs for the user while balancing grid loads. The EV owners benefit by charging when the electricity cost is lower, but still within the user-defined preferred charging …

Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering With Dynamic Time Warping For Household Load Curve Clustering, Fadi Almahamid, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Energy companies often implement various demand response (DR) programs to better match electricity demand and supply by offering the consumers incentives to reduce their demand during critical periods. Classifying clients according to their consumption patterns enables targeting specific groups of consumers for DR. Traditional clustering algorithms use standard distance measurement to find the distance between two points. The results produced by clustering algorithms such as K-means, K-medoids, and Gaussian Mixture Models depend on the clustering parameters or initial clusters. In contrast, our methodology uses a shape-based approach that combines Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (AHC) with Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) to classify …

Monofacial Vs Bifacial Solar Photovoltaic Systems In Snowy Environments, Koami Soulemane Hayibo, Aliaksei Petsiuk, Pierce Mayville, Laura Brown, Joshua M. Pearce

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

There has been a recent surge in interest in the more accurate snow loss estimates for solar photovoltaic (PV) systems as large-scale deployments move into northern latitudes. Preliminary results show bifacial modules may clear snow faster than monofacial PV. This study analyzes snow losses on these two types of systems using empirical hourly data including energy, solar irradiation and albedo, and open-source image processing methods from images of the arrays in a northern environment in the winter. Projection transformations based on reference anchor points and snowless ground truth images provide reliable masking and optical distortion correction with fixed surveillance cameras. …

Reinforcement Learning Algorithms: An Overview And Classification, Fadi Almahamid, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The desire to make applications and machines more intelligent and the aspiration to enable their operation without human interaction have been driving innovations in neural networks, deep learning, and other machine learning techniques. Although reinforcement learning has been primarily used in video games, recent advancements and the development of diverse and powerful reinforcement algorithms have enabled the reinforcement learning community to move from playing video games to solving complex real-life problems in autonomous systems such as self-driving cars, delivery drones, and automated robotics. Understanding the environment of an application and the algorithms’ limitations plays a vital role in selecting the …

Deep Learning For High-Impedance Fault Detection: Convolutional Autoencoders, Khushwant Rai, Firouz Badrkhani Ajaei, Farnam Hojatpanah, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

High-impedance faults (HIF) are difficult to detect because of their low current amplitude and highly diverse characteristics. In recent years, machine learning (ML) has been gaining popularity in HIF detection because ML techniques learn patterns from data and successfully detect HIFs. However, as these methods are based on supervised learning, they fail to reliably detect any scenario, fault or non-fault, not present in the training data. Consequently, this paper takes advantage of unsupervised learning and proposes a convolutional autoencoder framework for HIF detection (CAE-HIFD). Contrary to the conventional autoencoders that learn from normal behavior, the convolutional autoencoder (CAE) in CAE-HIFD …

Deep Learning For Load Forecasting With Smart Meter Data: Online Adaptive Recurrent Neural Network, Mohammad Navid Fekri, Harsh Patel, Katarina Grolinger, Vinay Sharma

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

No abstract provided.

Edge-Cloud Computing For Iot Data Analytics: Embedding Intelligence In The Edge With Deep Learning, Ananda Mohon M. Ghosh, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Rapid growth in numbers of connected devices including sensors, mobile, wearable, and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices, is creating an explosion of data that are moving across the network. To carry out machine learning (ML), IoT data are typically transferred to the cloud or another centralized system for storage and processing; however, this causes latencies and increases network traffic. Edge computing has the potential to remedy those issues by moving computation closer to the network edge and data sources. On the other hand, edge computing is limited in terms of computational power and thus is not well suited for …

Generating Energy Data For Machine Learning With Recurrent Generative Adversarial Networks, Mohammad Navid Fekri, Ananda M. Ghosh, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The smart grid employs computing and communication technologies to embed intelligence into the power grid and, consequently, make the grid more efficient. Machine learning (ML) has been applied for tasks that are important for smart grid operation including energy consumption and generation forecasting, anomaly detection, and state estimation. These ML solutions commonly require sufficient historical data; however, this data is often not readily available because of reasons such as data collection costs and concerns regarding security and privacy. This paper introduces a recurrent generative adversarial network (R-GAN) for generating realistic energy consumption data by learning from real data. Generativea adversarial …

Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning For Energy Forecasting With Big Data, Yifang Tian, Ljubisa Sehovac, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Smart meter popularity has resulted in the ability to collect big energy data and has created opportunities for large-scale energy forecasting. Machine Learning (ML) techniques commonly used for forecasting, such as neural networks, involve computationally intensive training typically with data from a single building or a single aggregated load to predict future consumption for that same building or aggregated load. With hundreds of thousands of meters, it becomes impractical or even infeasible to individually train a model for each meter. Consequently, this paper proposes Similarity-Based Chained Transfer Learning (SBCTL), an approach for building neural network-based models for many meters by …

Forecasting Building Energy Consumption With Deep Learning: A Sequence To Sequence Approach, Ljubisa Sehovac, Cornelius Nesen, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Energy Consumption has been continuously increasing due to the rapid expansion of high-density cities, and growth in the industrial and commercial sectors. To reduce the negative impact on the environment and improve sustainability, it is crucial to efficiently manage energy consumption. Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including widely used smart meters, have created possibilities for energy monitoring as well as for sensor based energy forecasting. Machine learning algorithms commonly used for energy forecasting such as feedforward neural networks are not well-suited for interpreting the time dimensionality of a signal. Consequently, this paper uses Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to capture time …

Deep Learning: Edge-Cloud Data Analytics For Iot, Katarina Grolinger, Ananda M. Ghosh

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Sensors, wearables, mobile and other Internet of Thing (IoT) devices are becoming increasingly integrated in all aspects of our lives. They are capable of collecting massive quantities of data that are typically transmitted to the cloud for processing. However, this results in increased network traffic and latencies. Edge computing has a potential to remedy these challenges by moving computation physically closer to the network edge where data are generated. However, edge computing does not have sufficient resources for complex data analytics tasks. Consequently, this paper investigates merging cloud and edge computing for IoT data analytics and presents a deep learning-based …

Energy Slices: Benchmarking With Time Slicing, Katarina Grolinger, Hany F. Elyamany, Wilson Higashino, Miriam Am Capretz, Luke Seewald

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Benchmarking makes it possible to identify low-performing buildings, establishes a baseline for measuring performance improvements, enables setting of energy conservation targets, and encourages energy savings by creating a competitive environment. Statistical approaches evaluate building energy efficiency by comparing measured energy consumption to other similar buildings typically using annual measurements. However, it is important to consider different time periods in benchmarking because of differences in their consumption patterns. For example, an office can be efficient during the night, but inefficient during operating hours due to occupants’ wasteful behavior. Moreover, benchmarking studies often use a single regression model for different building categories. …

Directed Acyclic Graph Continuous Max-Flow Image Segmentation For Unconstrained Label Orderings, John Sh Baxter, Martin Rajchl, A. Jonathan Mcleod, Jing Yuan, Terry M. Peters

Robarts Imaging Publications

Label ordering, the specification of subset–superset relationships for segmentation labels, has been of increasing interest in image segmentation as they allow for complex regions to be represented as a collection of simple parts. Recent advances in continuous max-flow segmentation have widely expanded the possible label orderings from binary background/foreground problems to extendable frameworks in which the label ordering can be specified. This article presents Directed Acyclic Graph Max-Flow image segmentation which is flexible enough to incorporate any label ordering without constraints. This framework uses augmented Lagrangian multipliers and primal–dual optimization to develop a highly parallelized solver implemented using GPGPU. This …

An Ensemble Learning Framework For Anomaly Detection In Building Energy Consumption, Daniel B. Araya, Katarina Grolinger, Hany F. Elyamany, Miriam Am Capretz, Girma T. Bitsuamlak

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

During building operation, a significant amount of energy is wasted due to equipment and human-related faults. To reduce waste, today's smart buildings monitor energy usage with the aim of identifying abnormal consumption behaviour and notifying the building manager to implement appropriate energy-saving procedures. To this end, this research proposes a new pattern-based anomaly classifier, the collective contextual anomaly detection using sliding window (CCAD-SW) framework. The CCAD-SW framework identifies anomalous consumption patterns using overlapping sliding windows. To enhance the anomaly detection capacity of the CCAD-SW, this research also proposes the ensemble anomaly detection (EAD) framework. The EAD is a generic framework …

Deep Neural Networks With Confidence Sampling For Electrical Anomaly Detection, Norman L. Tasfi, Wilson A. Higashino, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam A. M. Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The increase in electrical metering has created tremendous quantities of data and, as a result, possibilities for deep insights into energy usage, better energy management, and new ways of energy conservation. As buildings are responsible for a significant portion of overall energy consumption, conservation efforts targeting buildings can provide tremendous effect on energy savings. Building energy monitoring enables identification of anomalous or unexpected behaviors which, when corrected, can lead to energy savings. Although the available data is large, the limited availability of labels makes anomaly detection difficult. This research proposes a deep semi-supervised convolutional neural network with confidence sampling for …

Energy Consumption Prediction With Big Data: Balancing Prediction Accuracy And Computational Resources, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam Am Capretz, Luke Seewald

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

In recent years, advances in sensor technologies and expansion of smart meters have resulted in massive growth of energy data sets. These Big Data have created new opportunities for energy prediction, but at the same time, they impose new challenges for traditional technologies. On the other hand, new approaches for handling and processing these Big Data have emerged, such as MapReduce, Spark, Storm, and Oxdata H2O. This paper explores how findings from machine learning with Big Data can benefit energy consumption prediction. An approach based on local learning with support vector regression (SVR) is presented. Although local learning itself is …

Predicting Energy Demand Peak Using M5 Model Trees, Sara S. Abdelkader, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam Am Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Predicting energy demand peak is a key factor for reducing energy demand and electricity bills for commercial customers. Features influencing energy demand are many and complex, such as occupant behaviours and temperature. Feature selection can decrease prediction model complexity without sacrificing performance. In this paper, features were selected based on their multiple linear regression correlation coefficients. This paper discusses the capabilities of M5 model trees in energy demand prediction for commercial buildings. M5 model trees are similar to regression trees; however they are more suitable for continuous prediction problems. The M5 model tree prediction was developed based on a selected …

Energy Forecasting For Event Venues: Big Data And Prediction Accuracy, Katarina Grolinger, Alexandra L'Heureux, Miriam Am Capretz, Luke Seewald

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Advances in sensor technologies and the proliferation of smart meters have resulted in an explosion of energy-related data sets. These Big Data have created opportunities for development of new energy services and a promise of better energy management and conservation. Sensor-based energy forecasting has been researched in the context of office buildings, schools, and residential buildings. This paper investigates sensor-based forecasting in the context of event-organizing venues, which present an especially difficult scenario due to large variations in consumption caused by the hosted events. Moreover, the significance of the data set size, specifically the impact of temporal granularity, on energy …

Mlaas: Machine Learning As A Service, Mauro Ribeiro, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam Am Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The demand for knowledge extraction has been increasing. With the growing amount of data being generated by global data sources (e.g., social media and mobile apps) and the popularization of context-specific data (e.g., the Internet of Things), companies and researchers need to connect all these data and extract valuable information. Machine learning has been gaining much attention in data mining, leveraging the birth of new solutions. This paper proposes an architecture to create a flexible and scalable machine learning as a service. An open source solution was implemented and presented. As a case study, a forecast of electricity demand was …

Energy Cost Forecasting For Event Venues, Katarina Grolinger, Andrea Zagar, Miriam Am Capretz, Luke Seewald

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Electricity price, consumption, and demand forecasting has been a topic of research interest for a long time. The proliferation of smart meters has created new opportunities in energy prediction. This paper investigates energy cost forecasting in the context of entertainment event-organizing venues, which poses significant difficulty due to fluctuations in energy demand and wholesale electricity prices. The objective is to predict the overall cost of energy consumed during an entertainment event. Predictions are carried out separately for each event category and feature selection is used to select the most effective combination of event attributes for each category. Three machine learning …