Data Science and Big Data in Energy Forecasting

This editorial summarizes the performance of the special issue entitled Data Science and Big Data in Energy Forecasting, which was published at MDPI’s Energies journal. The special issue took place in 2017 and accepted a total of 13 papers from 7 different countries. Electrical, solar and wind energy forecasting were the most analyzed topics, introducing new methods with applications of utmost relevance.Ministerio de Competitividad TIN2014-55894-C2-RMinisterio de Competitividad TIN2017-88209-C2-

Improving Time Series Forecasting by Discovering Frequent Episodes in Sequences

This work aims to improve an existing time series forecasting algorithm –LBF– by the application of frequent episodes techniques as a complementary step to the model. When real-world time series are forecasted, there exist many samples whose values may be specially unexpected. By the combination of frequent episodes and the LBF algorithm, the new procedure does not make better predictions over these outliers but, on the contrary, it is able to predict the apparition of such atypical samples with a great accuracy. In short, this work shows how to detect the occurrence of anomalous samples in time series improving, thus, the general forecasting scheme. Moreover, this hybrid approach has been successfully tested on electricity-related time series

Estudio neuropsicológico de la funcionalidad visual, las estrategias de aprendizaje y la ansiedad en el rendimiento académico

En el contexto educativo actual, los aspectos neurosicológicos cobran gran importancia dada su repercusión en el rendimiento académico. Partiendo de esta premisa, el objetivo de esta investigación es el estudio de la relación entre los movimientos oculares sacádicos, las estrategias de aprendizaje y el nivel de ansiedad, así como su influencia sobre el rendimiento en Lengua. La muestra estaba formada por 69 alumnos de 12-15 años, agrupados en función de su rendimiento. Se trata de un estudio no experimental, descriptivo, de tipo correlacional y comparación de grupos. Por un lado, se ha encontrado una relación inversa entre la lentitud en la lectura (prueba de movimientos sacádicos de King-Devick (1976)) y las estrategias de apoyo al aprendizaje medidas con la Escala ACRA (Román y Gallego, 2008) y entre las estrategias de apoyo y el nivel de ansiedad-estado, medida con el STAIC (Spielberger, Gorsuch y Lushene, 1970). Por otro lado, los alumnos con un rendimiento elevado presentan niveles inferiores de ansiedad-rasgo. Por todo ello, este estudio pone de manifiesto la importancia de intervenciones, que integren la perspectiva neuropsicológica y educativa, centradas en la mejora de las estrategias de aprendizaje y la funcionalidad visual con el fin de promover una disminución de la ansiedad y una mejora en el rendimiento académico del alumnado.2017-1

Recent Advances in Energy Time Series Forecasting

This editorial summarizes the performance of the special issue entitled Energy Time Series Forecasting, which was published in MDPI’s Energies journal. The special issue took place in 2016 and accepted a total of 21 papers from twelve different countries. Electrical, solar, or wind energy forecasting were the most analyzed topics, introducing brand new methods with very sound results.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2014-55894-C2-

An evolutionary algorithm to discover quantitative association rules in multidimensional time series

An evolutionary approach for finding existing relationships among several variables of a multidimensional time series is presented in this work. The proposed model to discover these relationships is based on quantitative association rules. This algorithm, called QARGA (Quantitative Association Rules by Genetic Algorithm), uses a particular codification of the individuals that allows solving two basic problems. First, it does not perform a previous attribute discretization and, second, it is not necessary to set which variables belong to the antecedent or consequent. Therefore, it may discover all underlying dependencies among different variables. To evaluate the proposed algorithm three experiments have been carried out. As initial step, several public datasets have been analyzed with the purpose of comparing with other existing evolutionary approaches. Also, the algorithm has been applied to synthetic time series (where the relationships are known) to analyze its potential for discovering rules in time series. Finally, a real-world multidimensional time series composed by several climatological variables has been considered. All the results show a remarkable performance of QARGA.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2007- 68084-C02-02Junta de Andalucia P07-TIC- 0261

Screening prenatal de las cardiopatías congénitas: la tecnología STIC.

Introducción: las cardiopatías congénitas son las malformaciones congénitas severas más frecuentes en nuestro medio y aparecen en la mayoría de los casos, en pacientes sin antecedentes o factores de riesgo. Por ello, el screening ecográfico prenatal es fundamental para su diagnóstico precoz, pudiendo así realizar un seguimiento exhaustivo durante el embarazo, un control del parto y una planificación del tratamiento tras este. Objetivo: investigación sobre nueva tecnología STIC en el screening prenatal de cardiopatías congénitas, cómo funciona y sus principales ventajas e inconvenientes con los métodos ecocardiográficos actuales. Material y métodos: se ha realizado una revisión bibliográfica de artículos científicos, buscados en las bases de datos Pubmed, Jourland of Ultrasound in Medicine, Wiley Online Library, Academic Google y en varios libros. Resultados: la modalidad 4D-STIC es una nueva tecnología que permite la adquisición del volumen del corazón fetal y de sus conexiones, durante un ciclo cardíaco completo, permitiendo reconstruir y analizar la anatomía cardiaca en movimiento. Gracias a ello, tenemos una menor dependencia del operador, menor tiempo de examen, se puede analizar sin la presencia del paciente, y puede ser compartido vía Internet. Además, proporciona una visión anatómica más precisa, pudiendo visualizar mejor las patologías de pequeños vasos (coronarias), las anomalías del arco aórtico y cono-truncales, las conexiones venosas pulmonares, hipocinesias musculares y patologías septales. Peso a ello, debemos tener en cuenta que ofrece otras desventajas, que se esperan ser superadas con un mayor desarrollo de esta nueva tecnología, como el alto coste de los equipos utilizados, la necesidad de realización de cursos para su nuevo aprendizaje, la reducción de la precisión por los movimientos fetales y los cambios espacio-temporales del corazón fetal a lo largo de su desarrollo. Conclusiones: debido a la gran importancia de un diagnóstico prenatal de las cardiopatías congénitas para reducir la morbimortalidad fetal, han surgido nuevas tecnologías para mejorar la precisión diagnóstica: la modalidad 4D-STIC. Ésta nueva tecnología, que aún no se utiliza en la práctica clínica diaria, ofrece grandes ventajas sobre las tecnologías anteriores

Intervenciones para disminuir el consumo de alcohol en adolescentes: una revisión sistemática

Objective: To synthesize and evaluate the scientific evidence available during the 2006-2016 period regarding interventions that have been made to reduce alcohol consumption among adolescents.Materials and methods: a search was conducted in EBSCO, PubMed, Science Direct, Scielo Redalyc and Google academic, delineated to ten years, 61 articles were included that met the inclusion criteria. DeCS and mesh descriptors were used, using words keys for the search of the studies in Spanish and English and the bolean operators AND and OR.Results: the level of evidence found was 2 (3%), 3 (3%), 4 (34.4%) and 5 (55.7%). 8.1% of the RCTs adhered to the CONSORT, 60.6% of the interventions were directed only to adolescents, the application scenario was 59% in school, while 34.4% received the intervention through multimedia elements and / or the Internet, at 74.1 % were given general knowledge about alcohol consumption, 18% mentioned having performed the intervention between 2 and 20 sessions, 31% followed up between 1 and 8 months after giving the treatment; 16.3% gave reinforcements and 95% of the studies showed decreased alcohol consumption among adolescents.Conclusions: Interventions in adolescents regarding alcohol consumption are complex, due to the stage in which the study subject is. Analyzing the general panorama of the interventions over time allows to show the evolution of the approach to this phenomenon of interest for science.Objetivo: Sintetizar y valorar la evidencia científica disponible durante el período 2006-2016 respecto a las intervenciones que se han realizado para disminuir el consumo de alcohol en adolescentes.  Materiales y métodos: Se realizó búsqueda en EBSCO, PubMed, Science Direct, Scielo Redalyc y Google académico, delimitada a diez años, se incluyeron 61 artículos que cumplieron con los criterios de inclusión. Se utilizaron descriptores DeCS y mesh, a partir del uso de palabras claves para la búsqueda de los estudios en español e inglés y los operadores boléanos AND y OR.Resultados: El nivel de evidencia encontrado fue 2 (3%), 3 (3%), 4 (34.4%) y 5 (55.7%). El 8.1% de los ECA se apegaron al CONSORT, 60.6% de las intervenciones estuvieron dirigidas solo a adolescentes, el escenario de aplicación fue la escuela en un 59%, mientras que 34.4% recibió la intervención mediante elementos multimedia y/o internet, al 74.1% se le dio conocimientos generales acerca del consumo de alcohol, 18% mencionó haber realizado la intervención entre 2 y 20 sesiones, 31% dio seguimiento entre 1 y 8 meses después de entregar el tratamiento; 16.3% dio refuerzos y el 95% de los estudios arrojaron disminuir con sus intervenciones el consumo de alcohol en los adolescentes. Conclusiones: Las intervenciones en adolescentes respecto al consumo de alcohol son complejas, por la etapa en la que se encuentra el sujeto de estudio. Analizar el panorama general de las intervenciones a través del tiempo permite evidenciar la evolución del abordaje a este fenómeno de interés para la ciencia

Quantitative Association Rules Applied to Climatological Time Series Forecasting

This work presents the discovering of association rules based on evolutionary techniques in order to obtain relationships among correlated time series. For this purpose, a genetic algorithm has been proposed to determine the intervals that form the rules without discretizing the attributes and allowing the overlapping of the regions covered by the rules. In addition, the algorithm has been tested on real-world climatological time series such as temperature, wind and ozone and results are reported and compared to that of the well-known Apriori algorithm

Obtaining optimal quality measures for quantitative association rules

There exist several works in the literature in which fitness functions based on a combination of weighted measures for the discovery of association rules have been proposed. Nevertheless, some differences in the measures used to assess the quality of association rules could be obtained according to the values of the weights of the measures included in the fitness function. Therefore, user's decision is very important in order to specify the weights of the measures involved in the optimization process. This paper presents a study of well-known quality measures with regard to the weights of the measures that appear in a fitness function. In particular, the fitness function of an existing evolutionary algorithm called QARGA has been considered with the purpose of suggesting the values that should be assigned to the weights, depending on the set of measures to be optimized. As initial step, several experiments have been carried out from 35 public datasets in order to show how the weights for confidence, support, amplitude and number of attributes measures included in the fitness function have an influence on different quality measures according to several minimum support thresholds. Second, statistical tests have been conducted for evaluating when the differences in measures of the rules obtained by QARGA are significative, and thus, to provide the best weights to be considered depending on the group of measures to be optimized. Finally, the results obtained when using the recommended weights for two real-world applications related to ozone and earthquakes are reported.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2011-28956-C02Junta de Andalucía P12- TIC-1728Universidad Pablo de Olavide APPB81309