Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects approximately 0.2% of the population having motor disabilities as its most prominent feature. A symptom of the disease is lowered dopamine levels which often is countered by oral intake of a medication called Levodopa. However, for the dopamine levels to be steady, a patient would need to regularly take the medication throughout the day. As the disease and the treatment progresses, the correct medicine prescription becomes more difficult. This project is the continuation of a previous project done by students at Uppsala University, in which a Machine Learning model with the help of Support Vector Machine could classify data collected from a handheld accelerometer as the user being either under or overdosed for Parkinson’s Disease. The goal of this project was to achieve a similar result by developing a mobile app. The mobile app was supposed to allow the user to follow a path displayed on the screen with their finger, meanwhile the app would collect touch data in the form of coordinates and timestamp these. The app development proved to be successful, and the collected data was sent to a database hosted on the Google cloud service Firebase for storage. From there, the data could be downloaded and imported to MATLAB where an SVM model was set up and trained. Once trained using data collected from healthy individuals as well as patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease, the SVM could accurately differentiate between Parkinson’s disease data and healthy data with a success rate of 91.7%.

In this thesis we consider the application of Fenchel's duality theory and gradient-based methods for the training and hyperparameter optimization of Support Vector Machines. We show that the dualization of convex training problems is possible theoretically in a rather general formulation. For training problems following a special structure (for instance, standard training problems) we find that the resulting optimality conditions can be interpreted concretely. This approach immediately leads to the well-known notion of support vectors and a formulation of the Representer Theorem. The proposed theory is applied to several examples such that dual formulations of training problems and associated optimality conditions can be derived straightforwardly. Furthermore, we consider different formulations of the primal training problem which are equivalent under certain conditions. We also argue that the relation of the corresponding solutions to the solution of the dual training problem is not always intuitive. Based on the previous findings, we consider the application of customized optimization methods to the primal and dual training problems. A particular realization of Newton's method is derived which could be used to solve the primal training problem accurately. Moreover, we introduce a general convergence framework covering different types of decomposition methods for the solution of the dual training problem. In doing so, we are able to generalize well-known convergence results for the SMO method. Additionally, a discussion of the complexity of the SMO method and a motivation for a shrinking strategy reducing the computational effort is provided. In a last theoretical part, we consider the problem of hyperparameter optimization. We argue that this problem can be handled efficiently by means of gradient-based methods if the training problems are formulated appropriately. Finally, we evaluate the theoretical results concerning the training and hyperparameter optimization approaches practically by means of several example training problems.

A kayak is a small watercraft that moves over the water. The kayak is propelled by a person sitting inside of the hull and paddling using a double-bladed paddle. While kayaking can be casual, it is used as a competitive sport in races and even the Olympic games. Therefore, it is important to be able to analyse athletes’ performance during the race. To study the race better, some kayaking teams and organizations have attached sensors to their kayaks. These sensors record various data, which is later used to generate performance reports. However, to generate such reports, the coach must manually pinpoint the beginning of the race because the sensors collect data before the actual race begins, which may include practice runs, warming-up sessions, or just standing and waiting position. The identification of the race start and the race sequence in the data is tedious and time-consuming work and could be automated. This project proposes an approach to identify kayak races from velocity signal data with the help of a machine learning algorithm. The proposed approach is a combination of several techniques: signal preprocessing, a machine learning algorithm, and a programmatic approach. Three machine learning algorithms were evaluated to detect the race sequence, which are Support Vector Machine (SVM), k-Nearest Neighbour (kNN), and Random Forest (RF). SVM outperformed other algorithms with an accuracy of 95%. Programmatic approach was proposed to identify the start time of the race. The average error of the proposed approach is 0.24 seconds. The proposed approach was utilized in the implemented web-based application with a user interface for coaches to automatically detect the beginning of a kayak race and race signal sequence.

Background: Cyberbullying involves the use of digital technologies to harass, humiliate, or threaten individuals or groups. This form of bullying can occur on various platforms such as social media, messaging apps, gaming platforms, and mobile phones. With the outbreak of covid-19, there was a drastic increase in utilization of social media. And this upsurge was coupled with cyberbullying, making it a pressing issue that needs to be addressed. Sentiment analysis involves identifying and categorizing emotions and opinions expressed in text data using natural language processing and machine learning techniques. SVM is a machine learning algorithm that has been widely used for sentiment analysis due to its accuracy and efficiency. Objectives: The main objective of this study is to use SVM for sentiment analysis of cyberbullying tweets and evaluate its performance. The study aimed to determine the feasibility of using SVM for sentiment analysis and to assess its accuracy in detecting cyberbullying. Methods: The quantitative research method is used in this thesis, and data is analyzed using statistical analysis. The data set is from Kaggle and includes data about cyberbullying tweets. The collected data is preprocessed and used to train and test an SVM model. The created model will be evaluated on the test set using evaluation accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score to determine the performance of the SVM model developed to detect cyberbullying. Results: The results showed that SVM is a suitable technique for sentiment analysis of cyberbullying tweets. The model had an accuracy of 82.3% in detecting cyberbullying, with a precision of 0.82, recall of 0.82, and F1-score of 0.83. Conclusions: The study demonstrates the feasibility of using SVM for sentimental analysis of cyberbullying tweets. The high accuracy of the SVM model suggests that it can be used to build automated systems for detecting cyberbullying. The findings highlight the importance of developing tools to detect and address cyberbullying in the online world. The use of sentimental analysis and SVM has the potential to make a significant contribution to the fight against cyberbullying.

I detta arbete har en fallstudie utförts på Volvo Group i Köping. I takt med ¨övergången till industri 4.0, ökar möjligheterna att använda maskininlärning som ett verktyg i analysen av industriell data och vidareutvecklingen av industriproduktionen. Detta arbete syftar till att undersöka möjligheten att förutspå kvalitetsutfall vid sammanpressning av nav och huvudaxel. Metoden innefattar implementering av tre maskininlärningsmodeller samt evaluering av dess prestation i förhållande till varandra. Vid applicering av modellerna på monteringsdata från fabriken erhölls ett bristfälligt resultat, vilket indikerar att det utifrån de inkluderade variablerna inte är möjligt att förutspå kvalitetsutfallet. Orsakerna som låg till grund för resultatet granskades, och det resulterade i att det förmodligen berodde på att modellerna var oförmögna att finna samband i datan eller att det inte fanns något samband i datasetet. För att avgöra vilken av dessa två faktorer som var avgörande skapades ett fabricerat dataset där tre nya variabler introducerades. De fabricerade värdena på dessa variabler skapades på sådant sätt att det fanns syntetisk kausalitet mellan två av variablerna och kvalitetsutfallet. Vid applicering av modellerna på den fabricerade datan, lyckades samtliga modeller identifiera det syntetiska sambandet. Utifrån det drogs slutsatsen att det bristfälliga resultatet inte berodde på modellernas prestation utan att det inte fanns något samband i datasetet bestående av verklig monteringsdata. Det här bidrog till bedömningen att om spårbarheten på komponenterna hade ökat i framtiden, i kombination med att fler maskiner i produktionslinjen genererade data till ett sammankopplat system, skulle denna studie kunna utföras igen, men med fler variabler och ett större dataset. Support vector machine var den modell som presterade bäst, givet de prestationsmått som användes i denna studie. Det faktum att modellerna som inkluderats i den här studien lyckades identifiera sambandet i datan, när det fanns vetskap om att sambandet existerade, motiverar användandet av dessa modeller i framtida studier. Avslutningsvis kan det konstateras att med förbättrad spårbarhet och en allt mer uppkopplad fabrik, finns det möjlighet att använda maskininlärningsmodeller som komponenter i större system för att kunna uppnå effektiviseringar. / As the adaptation towards Industry 4.0 proceeds, the possibility of using machine learning as a tool for further development of industrial production, becomes increasingly profound. In this paper, a case study has been conducted at Volvo Group in Köping, in order to investigate the wherewithals of predicting quality outcomes in the compression of hub and mainshaft. In the conduction of this study, three different machine learning models were implemented and compared amongst each other. A dataset containing data from Volvo’s production site in Köping was utilized when training and evaluating the models. However, the low evaluation scores acquired from this, indicate that the quality outcome of the compression could not be predicted given solely the variables included in that dataset. Therefore, a dataset containing three additional variables consisting of fabricated values and a known causality between two of the variables and the quality outcome, was also utilized. The purpose of this was to investigate whether the poor evaluation metrics resulted from a non-existent pattern between the included variables and the quality outcome, or from the models not being able to find the pattern. The performance of the models, when trained and evaluated on the fabricated dataset, indicate that the models were in fact able to find the pattern that was known to exist. Support vector machine was the model that performed best, given the evaluation metrics that were chosen in this study. Consequently, if the traceability of the components were to be enhanced in the future and an additional number of machines in the production line would transmit production data to a connected system, it would be possible to conduct the study again with additional variables and a larger data set. The fact that the models included in this study succeeded in finding patterns in the dataset when such patterns were known to exist, motivates the use of the same models. Furthermore, it can be concluded that with enhanced traceability of the components and a larger amount of machines transmitting production data to a connected system, there is a possibility that machine learning models could be utilized as components in larger business monitoring systems, in order to achieve efficiencies.

Near infrared spectroscopy (NIR) has become increasingly widespread throughout various fields as an alternative method for efficiently phenotyping crops and plants at rates unparalleled by conventional means. With growing reliability, the convergence of NIR spectroscopy and modern machine learning represent a promising methodology offering unprecedented access to rapid, high throughput phenotyping at negligible costs, representing prospects that excite agronomists and plant physiologists alike. However, as is true of all emergent methodologies, progressive refinement towards optimization exposes potential flaws and raises questions, one of which is the cornerstone of this study. Spectroscopic determination of plant functional traits utilizes plants' morphological and biochemical properties to make predictions, and has been validated at the community (inter-family) and individual crop (intraspecific) levels alike, yielding equally reliable predictions at both scales, yet what lies amid these poles on the spectrum of taxonomic scale remains unexplored territory. In this study, we replicated the protocol used in studies of the aforementioned taxonomic scale extremes and applied it to an intermediate scale. Interestingly, we found that predictive models built upon hyperspectral reflectance data collected across three genera of woody plants: Cornus, Rhododendron, and Salix, yielded inconsistent predictions of varying accuracy within and across taxa. Identifying the potential cause(s) underlying variability in predictive power at this intermediate taxonomic scale may reveal novel properties of the methodology, potentially permitting further optimization through careful consideration.

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Many machine learning approaches have been usedfor financial forecasting to estimate stock trends in the future. Thefocus of this project is to implement a Support Vector Machinewith price and news analysis for companies within the technologysector as inputs to predict if the price of the stock is going torise or fall in the coming days and to observe the impact on theprediction accuracy by adding news to the technical analysis.The price analysis is compiled of 9 different financial indicatorsused to indicate changes in price, and the news analysis uses thebag-of-words method to rate headlines as positive or negative.There is a slight indication of the news improving the resultsif the validation data is randomly sampled the testing accuracyincreases. When testing on the last fifth of the data of eachcompany, there was only a small difference in the results whenadding news to the calculation and such no clear correlation canbe seen. The resulting program has a mean and median testingaccuracy over 50 % for almost all settings. Complications whenusing SVM for the purpose of price forecasting in the stockmarket is also discussed. / Många metoder för maskininlärning har använts i syfte av finansiell prognos för att uppskatta aktie trender i framtiden. Fokus för detta projekt är att implementera en Support Vector Machine med pris- och nyhetsanalys för företag inom teknologisektorn som inmatning för att förutsäga om priset på aktien kommer att öka eller minska under de kommande dagarna och för att observera påverkan på förutsägelsens noggrannhet av att lägga till nyheter till den tekniska analysen. Prisanalysen består av 9 olika finansiella indikatorer som används för att indikera prisändringar, och nyhetsanalysen använder metoden bag-of-word för att betygsätta rubriker som positiva eller negativa. Det finns en liten indikation på att nyheterna förbättrar resultat där om valideringsdata stickas ur slumpmässigt provningsnoggrannheten ökar. När man testade den sista femte delen av inmatningsdatan från varje företag, fanns det bara en liten skillnad i resultaten när nyheterna beräknades vilket leder till att en tydlig korrelation kan inte ses. Det resulterande programmet har en genomsnittlig och median test nogrannhet över 50 % för nästan alla inställningar. Komplikationer när SVM används för prisprognoser på aktiemarknaden diskuteras också. / Kandidatexjobb i elektroteknik 2020, KTH, Stockholm