Author profiling, the analysis of texts to uncover attributes such as gender and age of the author, has become essential with the widespread use of social media platforms. This paper focuses on author profiling in the Bangla language, aiming to extract valuable insights about anonymous authors based on their writing style on social media. The primary objective is to introduce and benchmark the performance of machine learning approaches on a newly created Bangla Author Profiling dataset, BN-AuthProf. The dataset comprises 30,131 social media posts from 300 authors, labeled by their age and gender. Authors' identities and sensitive information were anonymized to ensure privacy. Various classical machine learning and deep learning techniques were employed to evaluate the dataset. For gender classification, the best accuracy achieved was 80% using Support Vector Machine (SVM), while a Multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB) classifier achieved the best F1 score of 0.756. For age classification, MNB attained a maximum accuracy score of 91% with an F1 score of 0.905. This research highlights the effectiveness of machine learning in gender and age classification for Bangla author profiling, with practical implications spanning marketing, security, forensic linguistics, education, and criminal investigations, considering privacy and biases.
Human facial data hold tremendous potential to address a variety of classification problems, including face recognition, age estimation, gender identification, emotion analysis, and race classification. However, recent privacy regulations, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation and others, have restricted the ways in which human images may be collected and used for research. As a result, several previously published data sets containing human faces have been removed from the internet due to inadequate data collection methods that failed to meet privacy regulations. Data sets consisting of synthetic data have been proposed as an alternative, but they fall short of accurately representing the real data distribution. On the other hand, most available data sets are labeled for just a single task, which limits their applicability. To address these issues, we present the Multi-Task Faces (MTF) image data set, a meticulously curated collection of face images designed for various classification tasks, including face recognition, as well as race, gender, and age classification. The MTF data set has been ethically gathered by leveraging publicly available images of celebrities and strictly adhering to copyright regulations. In this paper, we present this data set and provide detailed descriptions of the followed data collection and processing procedures. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of five deep learning (DL) models on the MTF data set across the aforementioned classification tasks. Additionally, we compare the performance of DL models over the processed MTF data and over raw data crawled from the internet. The reported results constitute a baseline for further research employing these data. The MTF data set can be accessed through the following link (please cite the present paper if you use the data set): https://github.com/RamiHaf/MTF_data_set
Determining if the brain is developing normally is a key component of pediatric neuroradiology and neurology. Brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of infants demonstrates a specific pattern of development beyond simply myelination. While radiologists have used myelination patterns, brain morphology and size characteristics to determine age-adequate brain maturity, this requires years of experience in pediatric neuroradiology. With no standardized criteria, visual estimation of the structural maturity of the brain from MRI before three years of age remains dominated by inter-observer and intra-observer variability. A more objective estimation of brain developmental age could help physicians identify many neurodevelopmental conditions and diseases earlier and more reliably. Such data, however, is naturally hard to obtain, and the observer ground truth not much of a gold standard due to subjectivity of assessment. In this light, we explore the general feasibility to tackle this task, and the utility of different approaches, including two- and three-dimensional convolutional neural networks (CNN) that were trained on a fusion of T1-weighted, T2-weighted, and proton density (PD) weighted sequences from 84 individual subjects divided into four age groups from birth to 3 years of age. In the best performing approach, we achieved an accuracy of 0.90 [95% CI:0.86-0.94] using a 2D CNN on a central axial thick slab. We discuss the comparison to 3D networks and show how the performance compares to the use of only one sequence (T1w). In conclusion, despite the theoretical superiority of 3D CNN approaches, in limited-data situations, such approaches are inferior to simpler architectures. The code can be found in https://github.com/shabanian2018/Age_MRI-Classification
Machine learning models are commonly applied to human brain imaging datasets in an effort to associate function or structure with behaviour, health, or other individual phenotypes. Such models often rely on low-dimensional maps generated by complex processing pipelines. However, the numerical instabilities inherent to pipelines limit the fidelity of these maps and introduce computational bias. Monte Carlo Arithmetic, a technique for introducing controlled amounts of numerical noise, was used to perturb a structural connectome estimation pipeline, ultimately producing a range of plausible networks for each sample. The variability in the perturbed networks was captured in an augmented dataset, which was then used for an age classification task. We found that resampling brain networks across a series of such numerically perturbed outcomes led to improved performance in all tested classifiers, preprocessing strategies, and dimensionality reduction techniques. Importantly, we find that this benefit does not hinge on a large number of perturbations, suggesting that even minimally perturbing a dataset adds meaningful variance which can be captured in the subsequently designed models.
In this paper, we propose a progressive margin loss (PML) approach for unconstrained facial age classification. Conventional methods make strong assumption on that each class owns adequate instances to outline its data distribution, likely leading to bias prediction where the training samples are sparse across age classes. Instead, our PML aims to adaptively refine the age label pattern by enforcing a couple of margins, which fully takes in the in-between discrepancy of the intra-class variance, inter-class variance and class center. Our PML typically incorporates with the ordinal margin and the variational margin, simultaneously plugging in the globally-tuned deep neural network paradigm. More specifically, the ordinal margin learns to exploit the correlated relationship of the real-world age labels. Accordingly, the variational margin is leveraged to minimize the influence of head classes that misleads the prediction of tailed samples. Moreover, our optimization carefully seeks a series of indicator curricula to achieve robust and efficient model training. Extensive experimental results on three face aging datasets demonstrate that our PML achieves compelling performance compared to state of the arts. Code will be made publicly.