Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications

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    Modeling of microalgal shear-induced flocculation and sedimentation using a coupled CFD-population balance approach.
    Golzarijalal, M ; Zokaee Ashtiani, F ; Dabir, B (Wiley, 2018)
    In this study, shear-induced flocculation modeling of Chlorella sp. microalgae was conducted by combination of population balance modeling and CFD. The inhomogeneous Multiple Size Group (MUSIG) and the Euler-Euler two fluid models were coupled via Ansys-CFX-15 software package to achieve both fluid and particle dynamics during the flocculation. For the first time, a detailed model was proposed to calculate the collision frequency and breakage rate during the microalgae flocculation by means of the response surface methodology as a tool for optimization. The particle size distribution resulted from the model was in good agreement with that of the jar test experiment. Furthermore, the subsequent sedimentation step was also examined by removing the shear rate in both simulations and experiments. Consequently, variation in the shear rate and its effects on the flocculation behavior, sedimentation rate and recovery efficiency were evaluated. Results indicate that flocculation of Chlorella sp. microalgae under shear rates of 37, 182, and 387 s-1 is a promising method of pre-concentration which guarantees the cost efficiency of the subsequent harvesting process by recovering more than 90% of the biomass.
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    Nye tray vs sieve tray: A comparison based on computational fluid dynamics and tray efficiency
    Abbasnia, S ; Nasri, Z ; Shafieyoun, V ; Golzarijalal, M (Wiley, 2021-10)
    Nye and sieve trays were hydrodynamically simulated and compared. The simulations were performed in a Eulerian‐Eulerian framework under unsteady (transient) conditions at industrial scale. Conducted on an air‐water system, the simulations included three dimensions and two phases. The velocity distribution across the tray, the height of clear liquid, the froth height, and the pressure drop were investigated and compared with experimental data. Péclet number was calculated using hydrodynamic and geometric parameters. The tray efficiencies were also predicted to further compare the two trays. The results showed that the liquid flow was steadier on the Nye tray rather than the sieve tray, possibly because of the special structure of the liquid and gas inlets for the Nye tray.
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    Computational Fluid Dynamics versus Experiment: An Investigation on Liquid Weeping of Nye Trays
    Abbasnia, S ; Shafieyoun, V ; Golzarijalal, M ; Nasri, Z (Wiley, 2021-01)
    The weeping phenomenon was investigated using some experimental tests and a numerical model. The tests were performed within a 1.22‐m‐diameter pilot‐scale column including two chimney trays and two Nye test trays with an air‐water system. The rates of weeping were measured in the Nye trays with two heights of the weir and a hole area of 5 %. Moreover, the weeping rates in the outlet and inlet halves of the Nye tray and the total weeping rate were calculated. In the next step, an Eulerian‐Eulerian computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique was used. The results show good agreement between the attained CFD findings and the experimental data.
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    A Transferable Technique for Detecting and Localising Segments of Repeating Patterns in Time series
    Mirmomeni, M ; Kulik, L ; Bailey, J (IEEE, 2021)
    In time series data, consecutively repeated patterns occur in many applications, including activity recognition from wearable sensors. Repeating patterns may vary over time and present in various shapes and sizes, which makes their detection a challenging problem. We develop a novel technique, RP-Mask, that can detect and localise segments of consecutively repeated patterns, without prior knowledge about the shape and length of the repeats. Our technique represents time series using recurrence plots (RP), a method for visualising repetition in time series. We identify two key features of recurrence plots-checkerboard patterns and vertical/horizontal lines marking the start and end of checkerboard patterns. We use object recognition on RP images to detect and localise the checkerboard patterns, which are mapped to the segments of consecutively repeating patterns on the underlying time series. Since the collection and labeling of a real world dataset that exhibits all possible variations of a repetition is prohibitive, we demonstrate that our model is able to effectively learn from synthetically curated data and perform equally effective on a real world dataset, while it is noise tolerant. We compare our method to a number of state-of-the-art techniques and show that our method outperforms the state of the art both when trained using real activity recognition and synthetic data.
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    An effective and versatile distance measure for spatiotemporal trajectories
    Naderivesal, S ; Kulik, L ; Bailey, J (SPRINGER, 2019-05)
    The analysis of large-scale trajectory data has tremendous benefits for applications ranging from transportation planning to traffic management. A fundamental building block for the analysis of such data is the computation of similarity between trajectories. Existing work for similarity computation focuses mainly on the spatial aspects of trajectories, but more rarely takes into account time in conjunction with space. A key challenge when considering time is how to handle trajectories that are sampled asynchronously or at variable rates, which can lead to uncertainty. To tackle this problem, we quantify trajectory similarity as an interval, rather than a single value, to capture the uncertainty that can result from different sampling rates and asynchronous sampling. Based on this perspective, we develop a new trajectory similarity measure, Trajectory Interval Distance Estimation, which models similarity computation as a convex optimisation problem. Using two real datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed measure is extremely effective for assessing similarity in comparison to existing state of the art measures.
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    Privacy- and context-aware release of trajectory data
    Naghizade, E ; Kulik, L ; Tanin, E ; Bailey, J (ACM, 2020-03)
    The availability of large-scale spatio-temporal datasets along with the advancements in analytical models and tools have created a unique opportunity to create valuable insights into managing key areas of society from transportation and urban planning to epidemiology and natural disasters management. This has encouraged the practice of releasing/publishing trajectory datasets among data owners. However, an ill-informed publication of such rich datasets may have serious privacy implications for individuals. Balancing privacy and utility, as a major goal in the data exchange process, is challenging due to the richness of spatio-temporal datasets. In this article, we focus on an individual's stops as the most sensitive part of the trajectory and aim to preserve them through spatio-temporal perturbation. We model a trajectory as a sequence of stops and moves and propose an efficient algorithm that either substitutes sensitive stop points of a trajectory with moves from the same trajectory or introduces a minimal detour if no safe Point of Interest (POI) can be found on the same route. This hinders the amount of unnecessary distortion, since the footprint of the original trajectory is preserved as much as possible. Our experiments shows that our method balances user privacy and data utility: It protects privacy through preventing an adversary from making inferences about sensitive stops while maintaining a high level of similarity to the original dataset.
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    An automated matrix profile for mining consecutive repeats in time series
    Mirmomeni, M ; Kowsar, Y ; Kulik, L ; Bailey, J ; Geng, X ; Kang, BH (Springer Nature, 2018-01-01)
    A key application of wearable sensors is remote patient monitoring, which facilitates clinicians to observe patients non-invasively, by examining the time series of sensor readings. For analysis of such time series, a recently proposed technique is Matrix Profile (MP). While being effective for certain time series mining tasks, MP depends on a key input parameter, the length of subsequences for which to search. We demonstrate that MP’s dependency on this input parameter impacts its effectiveness for finding patterns of interest. We focus on finding consecutive repeating patterns (CRPs), which represent human activities and exercises whilst tracked using wearable sensors. We demonstrate that MP cannot detect CRPs effectively and extend it by adding a locality preserving index. Our method automates the use of MP, and reduces the need for data labeling by experts. We demonstrate our algorithm’s effectiveness in detecting regions of CRPs through a number of real and synthetic datasets.
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    Characteristics of Local Intrinsic Dimensionality (LID) in Subspaces: Local Neighbourhood Analysis
    Hashem, T ; Rashidi, L ; Bailey, J ; Kulik, L ; Amato, G ; Gennaro, C ; Oria, V ; Radovanovic, M (Springer, 2019-01-01)
    The local intrinsic dimensionality (LID) model enables assessment of the complexity of the local neighbourhood around a specific query object of interest. In this paper, we study variations in the LID of a query, with respect to different subspaces and local neighbourhoods. We illustrate the surprising phenomenon of how the LID of a query can substantially decrease as further features are included in a dataset. We identify the role of two key feature properties in influencing the LID for feature combinations: correlation and dominance. Our investigation provides new insights into the impact of different feature combinations on local regions of the data.
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    Exploiting patterns to explain individual predictions
    Jia, Y ; Bailey, J ; Ramamohanarao, K ; Leckie, C ; Ma, X (Springer London, 2020-03)
    Users need to understand the predictions of a classifier, especially when decisions based on the predictions can have severe consequences. The explanation of a prediction reveals the reason why a classifier makes a certain prediction, and it helps users to accept or reject the prediction with greater confidence. This paper proposes an explanation method called Pattern Aided Local Explanation (PALEX) to provide instance-level explanations for any classifier. PALEX takes a classifier, a test instance and a frequent pattern set summarizing the training data of the classifier as inputs, and then outputs the supporting evidence that the classifier considers important for the prediction of the instance. To study the local behavior of a classifier in the vicinity of the test instance, PALEX uses the frequent pattern set from the training data as an extra input to guide generation of new synthetic samples in the vicinity of the test instance. Contrast patterns are also used in PALEX to identify locally discriminative features in the vicinity of a test instance. PALEX is particularly effective for scenarios where there exist multiple explanations. In our experiments, we compare PALEX to several state-of-the-art explanation methods over a range of benchmark datasets and find that it can identify explanations with both high precision and high recall.
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    Improving the quality of explanations with local embedding perturbations
    Jia, Y ; Bailey, J ; Ramamohanarao, K ; Leckie, C ; Houle, ME (ACM, 2019-07-25)
    Classifier explanations have been identified as a crucial component of knowledge discovery. Local explanations evaluate the behavior of a classifier in the vicinity of a given instance. A key step in this approach is to generate synthetic neighbors of the given instance. This neighbor generation process is challenging and it has considerable impact on the quality of explanations. To assess quality of generated neighborhoods, we propose a local intrinsic dimensionality (LID) based locality constraint. Based on this, we then propose a new neighborhood generation method. Our method first fits a local embedding/subspace around a given instance using the LID of the test instance as the target dimensionality, then generates neighbors in the local embedding and projects them back to the original space. Experimental results show that our method generates more realistic neighborhoods and consequently better explanations. It can be used in combination with existing local explanation algorithms.