The global tech company Ericsson has been tracking the return rate of their products for over 30 years, using it as a key performance indicator (KPI). These KPIs play a critical role in making sound business decisions, identifying areas for improvement, and planning. To enhance the customer experience, the company highly values the ability to predict the number of returns in advance each month. However, predicting returns is a complex problem affected by multiple factors that determine when radios are returned. Analysts at the company have observed indications of a potential correlation between alarm data and the number of returns. This paper aims to address the need for better prediction models to improve return rate forecasting for radios, utilizing alarm data. The alarm data, which is stored in an internal database, includes logs of activated alarms at various sites, along with technical and logistical information about the products, as well as the historical records of returns. The problem is approached as a classification task, where radios are classified as either "return" or "no return" for a specific month, using the alarm dataset as input. However, due to the significantly smaller number of returned radios compared to the distributed ones, the dataset suffers from a heavy class imbalance. The imbalance class problem has garnered considerable attention in the field of machine learning in recent years, as traditional classification models struggle to identify patterns in the minority class of imbalanced datasets. Therefore, a specific method that addresses the imbalanced class problem was required to construct an effective prediction model for returns. Therefore, this paper has adopted a systematic approach inspired by similar problems. It applies the feature selection methods LASSO and Boruta, along with the resampling technique SMOTE, and evaluates various classifiers including the Support vector machine (SVM), Random Forest classifier (RFC), Decision tree (DT), and a Neural network (NN) with weights to identify the best-performing model. As accuracy is not suitable as an evaluation metric for imbalanced datasets, the AUC and AUPRC values were calculated for all models to assess the impact of feature selection, weights, resampling techniques, and the choice of classifier. The best model was determined to be the NN with weights, achieving a median AUC value of 0.93 and a median AUPRC value of 0.043. Likewise, both the LASSO+SVM+SMOTE and LASSO+RFC+SMOTE models demonstrated similar performance with median AUC values of 0.92 and 0.93, and median AUPRC values of 0.038 and 0.041, respectively. The baseline for the AUPRC value for this data set was 0.005. Furthermore, the results indicated that resampling techniques are necessary for successful classification of the minority class. Thorough pre-processing and a balanced split between the test and training sets are crucial before applying resampling, as this technique is sensitive to noisy data. While feature selection improved performance to some extent, it could also lead to unreadable results due to noise. The choice of classifier did not have an equal impact on model performance compared to the effects of resampling and feature selection.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of death in all age groups, causing society to be concerned. However, TBI diagnostics and patient outcomes prediction are still lacking in medical science. In this thesis, I used a subset of TBIcare data from Turku University Hospital in Finland to classify the severity, patient outcomes, and CT (computerized tomography) as positive/negative. The dataset was derived from the comprehensive metabolic profiling of serum samples from TBI patients. The study included 96 TBI patients who were diagnosed as 7 severe (sTBI=7), 10 moderate (moTBI=10), and 79 mild (mTBI=79). Among them, there were 85 good recoveries (Good_Recovery=85) and 11 bad recoveries (Bad_Recovery=11), as well as 49 CT positive (CT. Positive=49) and 47 CT negative (CT. Negative=47). There was a total of 455 metabolites (features), excluding three response variables. Feature selection techniques were applied to retain the most important features while discarding the rest. Subsequently, four classifications were used for classification: Ridge regression, Lasso regression, Neural network, and Deep learning. Ridge regression yielded the best results for binary classifications such as patient outcomes and CT positive/negative. The accuracy of CT positive/negative was 74% (AUC of 0.74), while the accuracy of patient outcomes was 91% (AUC of 0.91). For severity classification (multi-class classification), neural networks performed well, with a total accuracy of 90%. Despite the limited number of data points, the overall result was satisfactory.