Based on 46 in-depth interviews with scientists, engineers, and CEOs, this document presents a list of concrete machine research problems, progress on which would directly benefit tech ventures in East Africa.
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48 results for “East Africa”
A statistical analysis of financial, economic, and demographic indicators performed by the authors demonstrates (1) that the main countries of East Africa (Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania) have not escaped the Malthusian Trap yet; (2) that this countries are not likely to follow the "North African path" and to achieve this…
Machine learning predicts seasonal precipitation for East Africa.
problem Predicting seasonal precipitation for East Africa using machine learning.
method Dimension reduction via EOFs, large-scale climate variability indices as features, interpretable ML algorithm.
result The ML approach shows significant positive skill in predicting precipitation for OND season, comparable to ECMWF forecasts.
What are East Africa's industrial opportunities? In this article we explore this question by using the Product Space to study the productive structure of five south-east African countries: Kenya, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia. The Product Space is a network connecting products that tend to be exported by the …
Model predicts unseen climate extremes to inform risk planning.
problem Missing unseen climate extremes in historical records.
method DeepX-GAN model capturing spatial dependence.
result Unseen heat extremes disproportionately threaten vulnerable regions.
New method estimates active subspaces for jump-discontinuous functions.
problem Estimating active subspaces for discontinuous functions like ABMs.
method Extending active subspaces to discontinuous functions, using Gaussian process.
result Identifies important parameters in ABM simulations of refugee movement.
Proposes a stochastic model for South African actuarial use.
problem Long-term forecasting for South African institutions.
method Modeling economic series, estimating parameters, testing stability.
result Validated model for long-term forecasts.
EAST compresses deep ConvNets for tiny memory nodes.
problem Memory constraints in tiny devices for deep ConvNets.
method Encoding-Aware Sparse Training (EAST) with adaptive group pruning and LZ4 weight encoding.
result EAST achieves deep memory compression with lower sparsity and higher accuracy.
EcoCast predicts biodiversity risks using satellite data and citizen science records.
problem Unprecedented shifts in species distributions due to climate change and habitat loss.
method Spatio-temporal model using sequence-based transformers and continual learning.
result Promising improvements in forecasting bird species distributions compared to Random Forest.
One of the fundamental postulates of the Unified Growth Theory is the claimed existence of three distinctly different regimes of economic growth governed by three distinctly different mechanisms of growth. However, Galor also proposed that the timing of these regimes is different for developed countries and for less-de…
Droughts, with their increasing frequency of occurrence, continue to negatively affect livelihoods and elements at risk. For example, the 2011 in drought in east Africa has caused massive losses document to have cost the Kenyan economy over $12bn. With the foregoing, the demand for ex-ante drought monitoring systems is…
The study revises GDPpc trends and redistributes economic power among countries.
problem Analyzing global economic power shifts over time.
method Modeling GDPpc as a trend and fluctuations, analyzing historical data.
result Revised GDPpc trends show significant shifts in global economic power.
Transformer model outperforms classical methods in childhood anemia prediction across diverse countries.
problem Generalizing childhood anemia prediction models across different countries and data scarcity.
method Transformer-based tabular foundation model compared to classical supervised methods using DHS data.
result Transformer model achieves lower Brier score and ECE in low-data settings, outperforming classical models.
New method for selecting clusters in residential electricity data.
problem Selecting useful clusters in electricity consumption data.
method Formalizing expert knowledge as external validation measures.
result Successfully reconstructed customer archetypes.
New model forecasts power consumption with high accuracy over months to years.
problem Probabilistic forecasting of power consumption in a middle-term horizon.
method Combines traditional time-series analysis with weather conditions using Gaussian Process.
result Promising results in Out-of-Sample density forecasts up to one year.
EAST aligns neural network classifiers with user-defined evaluation metrics.
problem Mismatch between neural network training and evaluation metrics leads to suboptimal performance.
method EAST uses dynamic thresholding, soft-set confusion matrix, and annealing to align neural network predictions with target evaluation metrics.
result EAST improves alignment between training objectives and evaluation metrics, outperforming existing methods.
Optimized Quality of Service prediction in FSO Links over South Africa using Ensemble Learningstat.ML
Optimizes QoS in FSO links over South Africa using ensemble learning.
problem Impact of weather on QoS in FSO links.
method Ensemble learning models (Random Forest, ADaBoost Regression, Stacking Regression, Gradient Boost Regression, Multilayer Neural Network) applied to meteorological data.
result Significant enhancement in QoS with RMSE and R-squared values of 0.0032 and 0.9906 respectively at George.
SAGDA generates synthetic agricultural datasets to improve ML in African farming.
problem Data scarcity in African agriculture limits machine learning innovations.
method SAGDA is an open-source Python toolkit that generates, augments, and validates synthetic agricultural datasets.
result SAGDA enhances ML applications in agriculture, such as yield prediction and fertilizer recommendation.
Plasmodium falciparum malaria still poses one of the greatest threats to human life with over 200 million cases globally leading to half-million deaths annually. Of these, 90% of cases and of the mortality occurs in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly among children. Although malaria prediction systems are central to the 2016-2…
The UN Sustainable Development Goals allude to the importance of infrastructure quality in three of its seventeen goals. However, monitoring infrastructure quality in developing regions remains prohibitively expensive and impedes efforts to measure progress toward these goals. To this end, we investigate the use of wid…
Correlation Networks Among Currenciesphysics.soc-ph
By analyzing the foreign exchange market data of various currencies, we derive a hierarchical taxonomy of currencies constructing minimal-spanning trees. Clustered structure of the currencies and the key currency in each cluster are found. The clusters match nicely with the geographical regions of corresponding countri…
There is a small number of case studies of automatic land cover classification on the coastal area. Here, I test extraction of seagrass beds, sandy area, oyster farming rafts at Mangoku-ura Lagoon, Miyagi, Japan by comparing manual tracing, simple image segmentation, and image transformation using deep learning. The re…
There certainly is little or no doubt that politicians, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, exert a significant impact on stock markets. The evolving volatility over the Republican Donald Trump's surprise victory in the US presidential election is a perfect example when politicians, through announced policies, sen…
Satellite imagery helps adjust for unobserved confounders in observational studies.
problem Adjusting for confounding factors in observational studies with non-tabular data like satellite imagery.
method Formalizing conditions for causal effect identification, estimation, and sensitivity analysis.
result Demonstrated the use of satellite imagery as a proxy for unobserved confounders in anti-poverty aid programs.
This is a write-up of the author's talk in the conference "Algebraic Geometry in East Asia 2016" held at the University of Tokyo in January 2016. We give a survey on a series of papers of the author and his collaborators Daniel Pomerleano and Kazushi Ueda where we show how Strominger-Yau-Zaslow (SYZ) transforms can be …
A Deep Zero-Inflated Model for Detecting North Atlantic Right Whale Presence
problem Balancing marine conservation and blue economy management
method Deep Zero-Inflated Bernoulli model
result Improved model adequacy and predictive performance
These notes were prepared to supplement the talk that I gave on Feb 19, 2004, at the First East Asian School of Knots and Related Topics, Seoul, South Korea. In this article I review aspects of the interconnections between braids, knots and contact structures on Euclidean 3-space. I discuss my recent work with William …
Frolicher spaces and smooth mappings form a cartesian closed category. It was shown in our previous paper [Far East Journal of Mathematical Sciences, 35 (2009), 211-233] that its full subcategory of Weil exponentiable Frolicher spaces is cartesian closed. By emancipating microlinearity from within a well-adapted model …
Mobile apps and machine learning improve malaria prevention and treatment.
problem High malaria cases and deaths in low-income countries.
method Adaptive interventions using mobile health apps and machine learning.
result Increased malaria testing, adherence, and provider skills.
We present Breizhcrops, a novel benchmark dataset for the supervised classification of field crops from satellite time series. We aggregated label data and Sentinel-2 top-of-atmosphere as well as bottom-of-atmosphere time series in the region of Brittany (Breizh in local language), north-east France. We compare seven r…
A Creepy Worldphysics.soc-ph
Using the mechanics of creep in material sciences as a metaphor, we present a general framework to understand the evolution of financial, economic and social systems and to construct scenarios for the future. In a nutshell, highly non-linear out-of-equilibrium systems subjected to exogenous perturbations tend to exhibi…
This paper introduces a deep-learning based efficient classifier for common dermatological conditions, aimed at people without easy access to skin specialists. We report approximately 80% accuracy, in a situation where primary care doctors have attained 57% success rate, according to recent literature. The rationale of…
This study conducts a comprehensive analysis of time series segmentation on the Japanese stock prices listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange during the period from 4 January 2000 to 30 January 2012. A recursive segmentation procedure is used under the assumption of a Gaussian mixture. The daily number …
In our previous papers [Far East Journal of Mathematical Sciences, 35 (2009), 211-223] and [International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, 60 (2010), 15-24] we have developed the theory of Weil prolongation, Weil exponentiability and microlinearity for Frolicher spaces. In this paper we will relativize it so as…
Which area in NYC is the most similar to Lower East Side? What about the NoHo Arts District in Los Angeles? Traditionally this task utilizes information about the type of places located within the areas and some popularity/quality metric. We take a different approach. In particular, urban dwellers' time-variant mobilit…
We present our first efforts in building an automatic speech recognition system for Somali, an under-resourced language, using 1.57 hrs of annotated speech for acoustic model training. The system is part of an ongoing effort by the United Nations (UN) to implement keyword spotting systems supporting humanitarian relief…
The forecasting and reconstruction of ocean and atmosphere dynamics from satellite observation time series are key challenges. While model-driven representations remain the classic approaches, data-driven representations become more and more appealing to benefit from available large-scale observation and simulation dat…
Shaped by structural forces of change, banking in emerging markets has recently experienced a decline in its traditional activities, leading banks to diversify into new business strategies. This paper examines whether the observed shift into non-interest based activities improves financial performance. Using a sample o…
Integrating wind power into the grid is challenging because of its random nature. Integration is facilitated with accurate short-term forecasts of wind power. The paper presents a spatio-temporal wind speed forecasting algorithm that incorporates the time series data of a target station and data of surrounding stations…
Kurdistan Region is a tourist hub. This research analyzes other Non-Oil Sectors that have huge attractions of Foreign Direct Investments into the Kurdistan Region from 2005 to 2013. Comparative analysis was carried out between Iraq and the Region, and among influential Sectors of the Economy. T-test and ANOVA are stati…
The paper improves marine buoy placement to detect ships robustly against disruptions.
problem Detecting fishing vessels in the presence of natural and man-made disruptions.
method Formulated as a clustering problem, used dropout k-means and k-median to improve buoy placement robustness.
result Improved ship detection probability with dropout k-means compared to classic methods.
We consider multilingual bottleneck features (BNFs) for nearly zero-resource keyword spotting. This forms part of a United Nations effort using keyword spotting to support humanitarian relief programmes in parts of Africa where languages are severely under-resourced. We use 1920 isolated keywords (40 types, 34 minutes)…
sktime is an open source, Python based, sklearn compatible toolkit for time series analysis developed by researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA), University College London and the Alan Turing Institute. A key initial goal for sktime was to provide time series classification functionality equivalent to that a…
The paper debiases machine learning predictions to correct bias in regression coefficients.
problem Bias in regression coefficients from machine learning predictions.
method Proposes an adversarial machine learning algorithm to de-bias predictions.
result Adversarial predictions recover true coefficients, while naive predictions are biased.
We use bank-level balance sheet data from 2005 to 2010 to study interactions within the banking system of five emerging countries: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and Taiwan. For each country we construct a financial network based on the leverage ratio dependence between each pair of banks, and find results th…
Study uses sentiment analysis to predict implied volatility surface, improving prediction accuracy.
problem Improving prediction accuracy of implied volatility surface.
method Constructed daily high-frequency sentiment data, used VAR method, deep learning (BERT, LSTM), FFT, EMD for sentiment decomposition.
result High-frequency sentiment correlates with ATM options' implied volatility, low-frequency with DOTM options.
Combines TSP and SC to solve real-world vaccine distribution.
problem Combining TSP and SC for efficient vaccine distribution.
method Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) and machine learning.
result Machine learning approach improves solution efficiency.
Extends diffusion models to handle exponential family distributions for inverse problems.
problem Intractability of likelihood score for non-Gaussian observations.
method Evidence trick to approximate likelihood score for exponential family distributions.
result Effective Bayesian inference on complex Poisson processes and malaria prevalence prediction.