A Novel Lift Adjustment Methodology for Improving Association Rule Interpretation

Association rules can offer a human-interpretable insight extracted from data. The lift measures used for evaluating association rules in classical Association Rule Mining (ARM) contexts are mainly based on traditional and well-known ones but suffer from interpretation inadequacy when dealing with skewed distributions or low support. This study introduces a new lift adjustment approach with four methods to overcome traditional lift measures and identify the best rules in association rule mining. More concretely, our main objective is to improve the interpretability of association rules to make them more practically relevant for decision-making. We propose an approach incorporating four novel lift adjustment methods (smoothed, weighted, log, and threshold-adjusted lift) to achieve this. We introduce a flexible, dynamic approach combined with four new lift adjustment methods: smoothed, weighted, logarithm, and threshold-adjusted lift. Each technique addresses specific limitations of the traditional lift measure and better captures the reliable representation of item associations by exaggerating stronger relationships or smoothing weaker ones. The proposed methods applied context-aware rule evaluation and adjustment based on measures of relative significance (e.g., Jaccard similarity). The experimental results involving real-world data and synthetic datasets reveal new methods’ effectiveness and robustness in understanding the strengths of association rules and provide a comprehensive view that considers item importance. We evaluate the performance stability of our proposed methods using statistical analysis, including ANOVA, chi-squared, t-tests, and effect size metrics

Comparing Colonialisms in Dan Simmons's The Terror and its AMC Adaptation

While the AMC broadcast adaptation of Dan Simmons’ horror novel The Terror is largely faithful to the book, key differences in the portrayal of the Inuit, the British expedition members and the supernatural Tuunbaq creature, as well as in the fates of certain characters, lead to contrasting messages about colonialism and resistance from each text. Broadly speaking, the book has a less sympathetic and nuanced portrayal of native people and their resistance to colonialism, but ultimately a more optimistic view of the sustainability of their relationship with the environment; the broadcast series, in contrast, provides ample space for the native perspective on colonisation and a more complex exploration of the relationship between colonizer and colonized, but is ultimately pessimistic about the outcomes of resistance against colonialism. This paper will analyse the source work and adaptation in comparison with each other, and, finally, will explore what the differences say about the authors’ contrasting perspectives on the subject of colonialism and resistance, and about changes in the social environment between the writing of the book and the production of the broadcast series. <br/

Using Bottom-Quark Hadrons from Top-Quark Decays at the ATLAS Detector to Measure Charge Parity Violation and Explore Lepton Flavour Universality Violation

Charge and CP-violation asymmetries are measured in lepton+jets $t\overline{t}$ events using \mbox{$\sqrt{s}=$\SI{13}{\tera\electronvolt}} centre-of-mass energy proton-proton collisions from Run 2 of the ATLAS detector at the LHC, with an integrated luminosity of \SI{140}{\per\femto\barn}. These charge asymmetries are extracted using soft muons from the semileptonic decays of $b$-hadrons and prompt leptons from top-quark decays. Using $b$-hadron decay chain fractions, these charge asymmetries are linked to four CP-violation asymmetries, which are compared with results from other experiments and the Standard Model predictions. Alongside this measurement, a feasibility study is presented, investigating the possibility of using soft muons to make a measurement of Lepton Flavour Universality Violation

French Nineteenth-Century Art Writing as Audio Description: the case of Edouard Manet

This chapter compares the ‘traditional’ audio description of Edouard Manet’s 1863 masterpiece Olympia with descriptions of the painting by 19th-century French critics made when it was first put on public display in Paris in 1865. This comparison suggests that descriptions that include references to artistic techniques, personal opinion, and the various ways a beholder looks at and responds to a work of art produce a more engaging and evocative audio description than the supposedly objective and neutral texts that are recommended by best practice guides. By embracing the plurality of responses to a painting, and acknowledging that different people view paintings in different ways, this chapter advocates for a more creative approach to audio description that might better capture the experience of being moved by a work of art

Contrastive Translation With Dynamical Temperature for Sequential Recommendation

Contrastive learning is a promising solution to the problem of data sparsity in the field of recommendation system since it is able to extract self-supervised signals from raw data. The traditional contrastive learning-based sequential recommendation algorithms generate augmentations of original item sequences by utilizing crop, mask and reorder operations. However, those augmentation schemes destroy the underlying semantics of item sequences, resulting in difficulty in accurately defining positive and negative samples. To address this issue, we propose a contrastive translation based sequential recommendation algorithm, namely, CT4Rec. Specifically, CT4Rec generates augmented views of item sequences by injecting noises into embeddings of users and items, which is able to guarantee that the underlying semantics of augmented views are consistent with those of original item sequence. Hence, CT4Rec is able to effectively learn the invariances among the augmented views. In addition, the personalized translation operations are utilized to model the third-order relationships among entities. Moreover, it is difficult for contrastive learning-based recommendation algorithms with static temperature to simultaneously capture the differences among individual users/items and among the clusters of users/items. Hence, we utilize a dynamic temperature strategy to enhance CT4Rec, which endows CT4Rec with the capabilities of group-wise discrimination and instance discrimination. Our validation on five benchmark datasets shows that CT4Rec outperforms SOTA sequential recommendation methods. Our code is released at https://github.com/zar123123/CT4Rec

Responsible Digital:Co-Creating Safe, Wise and Secure Digital Interventions with Vulnerable Groups

The notion of “Responsible Digital” emphasises the ethical and responsible design and use of digital technologies. Having the knowledge and skills to navigate the digital world safely, wisely and securely becomes critical when digital literacy and access to technologies are limited and livelihood possibilities are precarious such as in the context of vulnerable migrants. We use the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) framework in its operationalised version called AREA Plus as a lens to reflect on our research-practice in relation to two projects in sensitive contexts that were designed with vulnerable groups to co-create digital interventions aimed at improving their lives. In so doing, we introduce a new ‘sustainability’ dimension to AREA Plus to develop what we term the AREAS framework. We contribute to knowledge by using the AREA Plus framework in the context of Africa, South East Asia and South America migration and by further enhancing it; to methodology by highlighting the procedures followed when working with vulnerable groups; and to practice through the promotion of responsible digital practices

Understanding the Neutron Star Population with the SKAO telescopes

The known population of non-accreting neutron stars is ever growing and currently consists of more than 3500 sources. Pulsar surveys with the SKAO telescopes will greatly increase the known population, adding radio pulsars to every subgroup in the radio-loud neutron star family. These discoveries will not only add to the current understanding of neutron star physics by increasing the sample of sources that can be studied, but will undoubtedly also uncover previously unknown types of sources that will challenge our theories of a wide range of physical phenomena. A broad variety of scientific studies will be made possible by a significantly increased known population of neutron stars, unravelling questions such as: How do isolated pulsars evolve with time; What is the connection between magnetars, high B-field pulsars, and the newly discovered long-period pulsars; How is a pulsar's spin-down related to its radio emission; What is the nuclear equation of state? Increasing the known numbers of pulsars in binary or triple systems may enable both larger numbers and higher precision tests of gravitational theories and general relativity, as well as probing the neutron star mass distribution. The excellent sensitivity of the SKAO telescopes combined with the wide field of view, large numbers of simultaneous tied-array beams that will be searched in real time, wide range of observing frequencies, and the ability to form multiple sub-arrays will make the SKAO an excellent facility to undertake a wide range of neutron star research. In this paper, we give an overview of different types of neutron stars and discuss how the SKAO telescopes will aid in our understanding of the neutron star population