Artigos

2019
NP-Hardness of minimum expected coverage
PATTERN RECOGNITION LETTERS, v. 117, p. 45-51, 2019
Pesquisadores: Lucas Henrique Sousa Mello, Flávio M. Varejão, Alexandre L. Rodrigues, Thomas W. Rauber

In multi-label learning a single object can be associated with multiple labels simultaneously. In a context where labels follow a random distribution, every labelling has a probability of occurrence. Thus, any prediction is associated with an expected error measured by a predefined loss function. From an exponential number of possible labellings, an algorithm should choose the prediction that minimizes the expected error. This is known as loss minimization. This work shows a proof of the NP-completeness, with respect to the number of labels, of a specific case of the loss minimization of the Coverage loss function, which allows to conclude that the general case is NP-hard.

Reducing power companies billing costs via empirical bayes and seasonality remover
ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, v. 81, p. 387-396, 2019.
Pesquisadores: Alexandre Loureiros Rodrigues, Lucas Martinuzzo, Flávio Miguel Varejão, Vítor E. Silva Souza, Thiago de Oliveira Santos

Billing errors increase the costs of power companies and lower their reliability as perceived by customers. The majority of these errors are due to wrong readings that occur when employees of power companies visit the customers to read electrical meters and issue the bills. To prevent such errors, prediction techniques calculate a predicted value for each customer based on the values of their previous readings, plus a tolerance around this value, sending bills to be inspected by analysts if the reading extrapolates the established range. However, such analysis increases the personnel cost of the power company. In addition, wrongly printed bills lead to possible lawsuits and fines that might also affect the costs and reliability of the power company. The main focus of this work is to minimize personnel cost by reducing the number of correct readings sent to unnecessary analysis, while protecting the power company credibility by not increasing the number of bills with wrong values sent to clients in the process. The proposed solution uses Empirical Bayes methods along with a method to consider seasonal behavior of customers. The methodology was applied to a dataset comprising 35,704,489 measurements from 1,330,989 different customers of a Brazilian power company. The results show that the new methodology was able to decrease the number of correct bills sent to analysis without lowering the reputation of the company.

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