2022
1.
Bensemann, Joshua; Cheena, Hasnain; Huang, David Tse Juang; Broadbendt, Elizabeth; Williams, Jonathan; Wicker, Jörg
From What You See to What We Smell: Linking Human Emotions to Biomarkers in Breath Journal Article Forthcoming
In: Forthcoming.
Abstract | BibTeX | Tags: atmospheric chemistry, breath analysis, cinema data mining, data mining, dynamic time warping, emotional response analysis, machine learning, movie analysis, smell of fear, sof, time series
@article{bensemann2022from,
title = {From What You See to What We Smell: Linking Human Emotions to Biomarkers in Breath},
author = {Joshua Bensemann and Hasnain Cheena and David Tse Juang Huang and Elizabeth Broadbendt and Jonathan Williams and J\"{o}rg Wicker},
year = {2022},
date = {2022-12-01},
abstract = {Breath collection is a non-invasive method for monitoring biological processes occurring within the human body. Prior studies have extended these methods to observe the general processes occurring in groups of humans and are able to link them to what those groups are collectively experiencing. However, previous work lacked an objective measure of emotional stimuli. In this research, we applied machine learning techniques to breath data collected from cinema audiences to find associations between the biomarkers in the crowd's breath and both the audio-visual stimuli and thematic events of the movie.
This analysis enabled us to make direct links between what the group was experiencing and their biological response to that experience. To achieve this, we first extracted visual and auditory features from a movie and compared it to the biomarkers in the crowd's breath, using both regression and pattern mining techniques. Our results supported the theory that a crowd's collective experience has a direct correlation to the biomarkers in the crowd's breath. Consequently, these findings suggest that visual and auditory experiences have predictable effects on the human body that can be monitored without the requirement of expensive and/or invasive neuroimaging techniques.},
keywords = {atmospheric chemistry, breath analysis, cinema data mining, data mining, dynamic time warping, emotional response analysis, machine learning, movie analysis, smell of fear, sof, time series},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
tppubtype = {article}
}
Breath collection is a non-invasive method for monitoring biological processes occurring within the human body. Prior studies have extended these methods to observe the general processes occurring in groups of humans and are able to link them to what those groups are collectively experiencing. However, previous work lacked an objective measure of emotional stimuli. In this research, we applied machine learning techniques to breath data collected from cinema audiences to find associations between the biomarkers in the crowd's breath and both the audio-visual stimuli and thematic events of the movie.
This analysis enabled us to make direct links between what the group was experiencing and their biological response to that experience. To achieve this, we first extracted visual and auditory features from a movie and compared it to the biomarkers in the crowd's breath, using both regression and pattern mining techniques. Our results supported the theory that a crowd's collective experience has a direct correlation to the biomarkers in the crowd's breath. Consequently, these findings suggest that visual and auditory experiences have predictable effects on the human body that can be monitored without the requirement of expensive and/or invasive neuroimaging techniques.
This analysis enabled us to make direct links between what the group was experiencing and their biological response to that experience. To achieve this, we first extracted visual and auditory features from a movie and compared it to the biomarkers in the crowd's breath, using both regression and pattern mining techniques. Our results supported the theory that a crowd's collective experience has a direct correlation to the biomarkers in the crowd's breath. Consequently, these findings suggest that visual and auditory experiences have predictable effects on the human body that can be monitored without the requirement of expensive and/or invasive neuroimaging techniques.
2.
Poonawala-Lohani, Nooriyan; Riddle, Pat; Adnan, Mehnaz; Wicker, Jörg
In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Health Informatics, pp. 1-7, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2022, ISBN: 9781450393867.
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Altmetric | Tags: bioinformatics, computational sustainability, dynamic time warping, forecasting, influenza, machine learning, medicine, time series
@inproceedings{poonawala-lohani2022geographic,
title = {Geographic Ensembles of Observations using Randomised Ensembles of Autoregression Chains: Ensemble methods for spatio-temporal Time Series Forecasting of Influenza-like Illness},
author = {Nooriyan Poonawala-Lohani and Pat Riddle and Mehnaz Adnan and J\"{o}rg Wicker},
doi = {10.1145/3535508.3545562},
isbn = {9781450393867},
year = {2022},
date = {2022-08-07},
urldate = {2022-08-07},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Health Informatics},
pages = {1-7},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
abstract = {Influenza is a communicable respiratory illness that can cause serious public health hazards. Flu surveillance in New Zealand tracks case counts from various District health boards (DHBs) in the country to monitor the spread of influenza in different geographic locations. Many factors contribute to the spread of the influenza across a geographic region, and it can be challenging to forecast cases in one region without taking into account case numbers in another region. This paper proposes a novel ensemble method called Geographic Ensembles of Observations using Randomised Ensembles of Autoregression Chains (GEO-Reach). GEO-Reach is an ensemble technique that uses a two layer approach to utilise interdependence of historical case counts between geographic regions in New Zealand. This work extends a previously published method by the authors called Randomized Ensembles of Auto-regression chains (Reach). State-of-the-art forecasting models look at studying the spread of the virus. They focus on accurate forecasting of cases for a location using historical case counts for the same location and other data sources based on human behaviour such as movement of people across cities/geographic regions. This new approach is evaluated using Influenza like illness (ILI) case counts in 7 major regions in New Zealand from the years 2015-2019 and compares its performance with other standard methods such as Dante, ARIMA, Autoregression and Random Forests. The results demonstrate that the proposed method performed better than baseline methods when applied to this multi-variate time series forecasting problem.},
keywords = {bioinformatics, computational sustainability, dynamic time warping, forecasting, influenza, machine learning, medicine, time series},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Influenza is a communicable respiratory illness that can cause serious public health hazards. Flu surveillance in New Zealand tracks case counts from various District health boards (DHBs) in the country to monitor the spread of influenza in different geographic locations. Many factors contribute to the spread of the influenza across a geographic region, and it can be challenging to forecast cases in one region without taking into account case numbers in another region. This paper proposes a novel ensemble method called Geographic Ensembles of Observations using Randomised Ensembles of Autoregression Chains (GEO-Reach). GEO-Reach is an ensemble technique that uses a two layer approach to utilise interdependence of historical case counts between geographic regions in New Zealand. This work extends a previously published method by the authors called Randomized Ensembles of Auto-regression chains (Reach). State-of-the-art forecasting models look at studying the spread of the virus. They focus on accurate forecasting of cases for a location using historical case counts for the same location and other data sources based on human behaviour such as movement of people across cities/geographic regions. This new approach is evaluated using Influenza like illness (ILI) case counts in 7 major regions in New Zealand from the years 2015-2019 and compares its performance with other standard methods such as Dante, ARIMA, Autoregression and Random Forests. The results demonstrate that the proposed method performed better than baseline methods when applied to this multi-variate time series forecasting problem.
3.
Poonawala-Lohani, Nooriyan; Riddle, Pat; Adnan, Mehnaz; Wicker, Jörg
A Novel Approach for Time Series Forecasting of Influenza-like Illness Using a Regression Chain Method Inproceedings
In: Altman, Russ; Dunker, Keith; Hunter, Lawrence; Ritchie, Marylyn; Murray, Tiffany; Klein, Teri (Ed.): Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, pp. 301-312, 2022.
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Altmetric | Tags: computational sustainability, forecasting, influenza, machine learning, time series
@inproceedings{poonawala-lohani2022novel,
title = {A Novel Approach for Time Series Forecasting of Influenza-like Illness Using a Regression Chain Method},
author = {Nooriyan Poonawala-Lohani and Pat Riddle and Mehnaz Adnan and J\"{o}rg Wicker},
editor = {Russ Altman and Keith Dunker and Lawrence Hunter and Marylyn Ritchie and Tiffany Murray and Teri Klein},
url = {https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789811250477_0028
http://psb.stanford.edu/psb-online/proceedings/psb22/poorawala-lohani.pdf},
doi = {10.1142/9789811250477_0028},
year = {2022},
date = {2022-01-03},
urldate = {2022-01-03},
booktitle = {Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing},
volume = {27},
pages = {301-312},
abstract = {Influenza is a communicable respiratory illness that can cause serious public health hazards. Due to its huge threat to the community, accurate forecasting of Influenza-like-illness (ILI) can diminish the impact of an influenza season by enabling early public health interventions. Current forecasting models are limited in their performance, particularly when using a longer forecasting window. To support better forecasts over a longer forecasting window, we propose to use additional features such as weather data. Commonly used methods to fore-cast ILI, including statistical methods such as ARIMA, limit prediction performance when using additional data sources that might have complex non-linear associations with ILI incidence. This paper proposes a novel time series forecasting method, Randomized Ensembles of Auto-regression chains (Reach). Reach implements an ensemble of random chains for multi-step time series forecasting. This new approach is evaluated on ILI case counts in Auckland, New Zealand from the years 2015-2018 and compared to other standard methods. The results demonstrate that the proposed method performed better than baseline methods when applied to this multi-variate time series forecasting problem.},
keywords = {computational sustainability, forecasting, influenza, machine learning, time series},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Influenza is a communicable respiratory illness that can cause serious public health hazards. Due to its huge threat to the community, accurate forecasting of Influenza-like-illness (ILI) can diminish the impact of an influenza season by enabling early public health interventions. Current forecasting models are limited in their performance, particularly when using a longer forecasting window. To support better forecasts over a longer forecasting window, we propose to use additional features such as weather data. Commonly used methods to fore-cast ILI, including statistical methods such as ARIMA, limit prediction performance when using additional data sources that might have complex non-linear associations with ILI incidence. This paper proposes a novel time series forecasting method, Randomized Ensembles of Auto-regression chains (Reach). Reach implements an ensemble of random chains for multi-step time series forecasting. This new approach is evaluated on ILI case counts in Auckland, New Zealand from the years 2015-2018 and compared to other standard methods. The results demonstrate that the proposed method performed better than baseline methods when applied to this multi-variate time series forecasting problem.
2019
4.
Williams, Jonathan; Stönner, Christof; Edtbauer, Achim; Derstorff, Bettina; Bourtsoukidis, Efstratios; Klüpfel, Thomas; Krauter, Nicolas; Wicker, Jörg; Kramer, Stefan
What can we learn from the air chemistry of crowds? Inproceedings
In: Hansel, Armin; Dunkl, Jürgen (Ed.): 8th International Conference on Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometry and its Applications, pp. 121-123, Innsbruck University Press, Innsbruck, 2019.
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: atmospheric chemistry, breath analysis, cheminformatics, cinema data mining, data mining, emotional response analysis, machine learning, movie analysis, smell of fear, sof, time series
@inproceedings{williams2019what,
title = {What can we learn from the air chemistry of crowds?},
author = {Jonathan Williams and Christof St\"{o}nner and Achim Edtbauer and Bettina Derstorff and Efstratios Bourtsoukidis and Thomas Kl\"{u}pfel and Nicolas Krauter and J\"{o}rg Wicker and Stefan Kramer},
editor = {Armin Hansel and J\"{u}rgen Dunkl},
url = {https://www.ionicon.com/sites/default/files/uploads/doc/Contributions_8th-PTR-MS-Conference-2019_web.pdf#page=122},
year = {2019},
date = {2019-05-10},
booktitle = {8th International Conference on Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometry and its Applications},
pages = {121-123},
publisher = {Innsbruck University Press},
address = {Innsbruck},
abstract = {Current PTR-MS technology allows hundreds of volatile trace gases in air to be measured every second at extremely low levels (parts per trillion). These instruments are often used in atmospheric research on planes and ships and even in the Amazon rainforest. Recently, we have used this technology to examine air composition changes caused by large groups of people (10,000-30,000) under real world conditions at a football match and in a movie theater. In both cases the trace gas signatures measured in ambient air are shown to reflect crowd behavior. By applying advanced data mining techniques we have shown that groups of people reproducibly respond to certain emotional stimuli (e.g. suspense and comedy) by exhaling specific trace gases. Furthermore, we explore whether this information can be used to determine the age classification of films.},
keywords = {atmospheric chemistry, breath analysis, cheminformatics, cinema data mining, data mining, emotional response analysis, machine learning, movie analysis, smell of fear, sof, time series},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Current PTR-MS technology allows hundreds of volatile trace gases in air to be measured every second at extremely low levels (parts per trillion). These instruments are often used in atmospheric research on planes and ships and even in the Amazon rainforest. Recently, we have used this technology to examine air composition changes caused by large groups of people (10,000-30,000) under real world conditions at a football match and in a movie theater. In both cases the trace gas signatures measured in ambient air are shown to reflect crowd behavior. By applying advanced data mining techniques we have shown that groups of people reproducibly respond to certain emotional stimuli (e.g. suspense and comedy) by exhaling specific trace gases. Furthermore, we explore whether this information can be used to determine the age classification of films.
2018
5.
Stönner, Christof; Edtbauer, Achim; Derstorff, Bettina; Bourtsoukidis, Efstratios; Klüpfel, Thomas; Wicker, Jörg; Williams, Jonathan
Proof of concept study: Testing human volatile organic compounds as tools for age classification of films Journal Article
In: PLOS One, vol. 13, no. 10, pp. 1-14, 2018.
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Altmetric | Tags: atmospheric chemistry, breath analysis, cheminformatics, cinema data mining, data mining, emotional response analysis, machine learning, movie analysis, smell of fear, sof, time series
@article{Stonner2018,
title = {Proof of concept study: Testing human volatile organic compounds as tools for age classification of films},
author = {Christof St\"{o}nner and Achim Edtbauer and Bettina Derstorff and Efstratios Bourtsoukidis and Thomas Kl\"{u}pfel and J\"{o}rg Wicker and Jonathan Williams},
doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.0203044},
year = {2018},
date = {2018-10-11},
journal = {PLOS One},
volume = {13},
number = {10},
pages = {1-14},
publisher = {Public Library of Science},
abstract = {Humans emit numerous volatile organic compounds (VOCs) through breath and skin. The nature and rate of these emissions are affected by various factors including emotional state. Previous measurements of VOCs and CO2 in a cinema have shown that certain chemicals are reproducibly emitted by audiences reacting to events in a particular film. Using data from films with various age classifications, we have studied the relationship between the emission of multiple VOCs and CO2 and the age classifier (0, 6, 12, and 16) with a view to developing a new chemically based and objective film classification method. We apply a random forest model built with time independent features extracted from the time series of every measured compound, and test predictive capability on subsets of all data. It was found that most compounds were not able to predict all age classifiers reliably, likely reflecting the fact that current classification is based on perceived sensibilities to many factors (e.g. incidences of violence, sex, antisocial behaviour, drug use, and bad language) rather than the visceral biological responses expressed in the data. However, promising results were found for isoprene which reliably predicted 0, 6 and 12 age classifiers for a variety of film genres and audience age groups. Therefore, isoprene emission per person might in future be a valuable aid to national classification boards, or even offer an alternative, objective, metric for rating films based on the reactions of large groups of people.},
keywords = {atmospheric chemistry, breath analysis, cheminformatics, cinema data mining, data mining, emotional response analysis, machine learning, movie analysis, smell of fear, sof, time series},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}
Humans emit numerous volatile organic compounds (VOCs) through breath and skin. The nature and rate of these emissions are affected by various factors including emotional state. Previous measurements of VOCs and CO2 in a cinema have shown that certain chemicals are reproducibly emitted by audiences reacting to events in a particular film. Using data from films with various age classifications, we have studied the relationship between the emission of multiple VOCs and CO2 and the age classifier (0, 6, 12, and 16) with a view to developing a new chemically based and objective film classification method. We apply a random forest model built with time independent features extracted from the time series of every measured compound, and test predictive capability on subsets of all data. It was found that most compounds were not able to predict all age classifiers reliably, likely reflecting the fact that current classification is based on perceived sensibilities to many factors (e.g. incidences of violence, sex, antisocial behaviour, drug use, and bad language) rather than the visceral biological responses expressed in the data. However, promising results were found for isoprene which reliably predicted 0, 6 and 12 age classifiers for a variety of film genres and audience age groups. Therefore, isoprene emission per person might in future be a valuable aid to national classification boards, or even offer an alternative, objective, metric for rating films based on the reactions of large groups of people.
2016
6.
Raza, Atif; Wicker, Jörg; Kramer, Stefan
Trading Off Accuracy for Efficiency by Randomized Greedy Warping Inproceedings
In: Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, pp. 883-890, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2016, ISBN: 978-1-4503-3739-7.
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Altmetric | Tags: data mining, dynamic time warping, time series
@inproceedings{raza2016trading,
title = {Trading Off Accuracy for Efficiency by Randomized Greedy Warping},
author = {Atif Raza and J\"{o}rg Wicker and Stefan Kramer},
url = {https://wicker.nz/nwp-acm/authorize.php?id=N10030
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2851613.2851651},
doi = {10.1145/2851613.2851651},
isbn = {978-1-4503-3739-7},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-01-01},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing},
pages = {883-890},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
series = {SAC '16},
abstract = {Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is a widely used distance measure for time series data mining. Its quadratic complexity requires the application of various techniques (e.g. warping constraints, lower-bounds) for deployment in real-time scenarios. In this paper we propose a randomized greedy warping algorithm for f i nding similarity between time series instances.We show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the simple greedy approach and also provides very good time series similarity approximation consistently, as compared to DTW. We show that the Randomized Time Warping (RTW) can be used in place of DTW as a fast similarity approximation technique by trading some classification accuracy for very fast classification.},
keywords = {data mining, dynamic time warping, time series},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is a widely used distance measure for time series data mining. Its quadratic complexity requires the application of various techniques (e.g. warping constraints, lower-bounds) for deployment in real-time scenarios. In this paper we propose a randomized greedy warping algorithm for f i nding similarity between time series instances.We show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the simple greedy approach and also provides very good time series similarity approximation consistently, as compared to DTW. We show that the Randomized Time Warping (RTW) can be used in place of DTW as a fast similarity approximation technique by trading some classification accuracy for very fast classification.
2015
7.
Wicker, Jörg; Krauter, Nicolas; Derstorff, Bettina; Stönner, Christof; Bourtsoukidis, Efstratios; Klüpfel, Thomas; Williams, Jonathan; Kramer, Stefan
Cinema Data Mining: The Smell of Fear Inproceedings
In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 1235-1304, ACM ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2015, ISBN: 978-1-4503-3664-2.
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Altmetric | Tags: atmospheric chemistry, breath analysis, causality, cheminformatics, cinema data mining, data mining, emotional response analysis, movie analysis, smell of fear, sof, time series
@inproceedings{wicker2015cinema,
title = {Cinema Data Mining: The Smell of Fear},
author = {J\"{o}rg Wicker and Nicolas Krauter and Bettina Derstorff and Christof St\"{o}nner and Efstratios Bourtsoukidis and Thomas Kl\"{u}pfel and Jonathan Williams and Stefan Kramer},
url = {https://wicker.nz/nwp-acm/authorize.php?id=N10031
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2783258.2783404},
doi = {10.1145/2783258.2783404},
isbn = {978-1-4503-3664-2},
year = {2015},
date = {2015-01-01},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining},
pages = {1235-1304},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
organization = {ACM},
series = {KDD '15},
abstract = {While the physiological response of humans to emotional events or stimuli is well-investigated for many modalities (like EEG, skin resistance, ...), surprisingly little is known about the exhalation of so-called Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) at quite low concentrations in response to such stimuli. VOCs are molecules of relatively small mass that quickly evaporate or sublimate and can be detected in the air that surrounds us. The paper introduces a new field of application for data mining, where trace gas responses of people reacting on-line to films shown in cinemas (or movie theaters) are related to the semantic content of the films themselves. To do so, we measured the VOCs from a movie theatre over a whole month in intervals of thirty seconds, and annotated the screened films by a controlled vocabulary compiled from multiple sources. To gain a better understanding of the data and to reveal unknown relationships, we have built prediction models for so-called forward prediction (the prediction of future VOCs from the past), backward prediction (the prediction of past scene labels from future VOCs) and for some forms of abductive reasoning and Granger causality. Experimental results show that some VOCs and some labels can be predicted with relatively low error, and that hints for causality with low p-values can be detected in the data.},
keywords = {atmospheric chemistry, breath analysis, causality, cheminformatics, cinema data mining, data mining, emotional response analysis, movie analysis, smell of fear, sof, time series},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}
While the physiological response of humans to emotional events or stimuli is well-investigated for many modalities (like EEG, skin resistance, ...), surprisingly little is known about the exhalation of so-called Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) at quite low concentrations in response to such stimuli. VOCs are molecules of relatively small mass that quickly evaporate or sublimate and can be detected in the air that surrounds us. The paper introduces a new field of application for data mining, where trace gas responses of people reacting on-line to films shown in cinemas (or movie theaters) are related to the semantic content of the films themselves. To do so, we measured the VOCs from a movie theatre over a whole month in intervals of thirty seconds, and annotated the screened films by a controlled vocabulary compiled from multiple sources. To gain a better understanding of the data and to reveal unknown relationships, we have built prediction models for so-called forward prediction (the prediction of future VOCs from the past), backward prediction (the prediction of past scene labels from future VOCs) and for some forms of abductive reasoning and Granger causality. Experimental results show that some VOCs and some labels can be predicted with relatively low error, and that hints for causality with low p-values can be detected in the data.