Author name cluster

João Gama

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

10 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

DFDT: Dynamic Fast Decision Tree for IoT Data Stream Mining on Edge Devices

Afonso Lourenço
João Rodrigo
João Gama
Goreti Marreiros

The Internet of Things generates massive data streams, with edge computing emerging as a key enabler for online IoT applications and 5G networks. Edge solutions facilitate real-time machine learning inference, but also require continuous adaptation to concept drifts. While extensions of the Very Fast Decision Tree (VFDT) remain state-of-the-art for tabular stream mining, their unregulated growth limit efficiency, particularly in ensemble settings where post-pruning at the individual tree level is seldom applied. This paper presents DFDT, a novel memory-constrained algorithm for online learning. DFDT employs activity-aware pre-pruning, dynamically adjusting splitting criteria based on leaf node activity: low-activity nodes are deactivated to conserve resources, moderately active nodes split under stricter conditions, and highly active nodes leverage a skipping mechanism for accelerated growth. Additionally, adaptive grace periods and tie thresholds allow DFDT to modulate splitting decisions based on observed data variability, enhancing the accuracy–memory–runtime trade-off while minimizing the need for hyperparameter tuning. An ablation study reveals three DFDT variants suited to different resource profiles. Fully compatible with existing ensemble frameworks, DFDT provides a drop-in alternative to standard VFDT-based learners.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Salvador Urban Network Transportation (SUNT): A Landmark Spatiotemporal Dataset for Public Transportation (Abstract Reprint)

Marcos V. Ferreira
Matheus Souza
Tatiane N. Rios
Islame F. C. Fernandes
Jorge Nery
João Gama
Albert Bifet
Ricardo A. Rios

Efficient public transportation management is essential for the development of large urban centers, providing several benefits such as comprehensive coverage of population mobility, reduction of transport costs, better control of traffic congestion, and significant reduction of environmental impact limiting gas emissions and pollution. Realizing these benefits requires a deeply understanding the population and transit patterns and the adoption of approaches to model multiple relations and characteristics efficiently. This work addresses these challenges by providing a novel dataset that includes various public transportation components from three different systems: regular buses, subway, and BRT (Bus Rapid Transit). Our dataset comprises daily information from about 700,000 passengers in Salvador, one of Brazil’s largest cities, and local public transportation data with approximately 2,000 vehicles operating across nearly 400 lines, connecting almost 3,000 stops and stations. With data collected from March 2024 to March 2025 at a frequency lower than one minute, SUNT stands as one of the largest, most comprehensive, and openly available urban datasets in the literature.

PDF Details DOI

EAAI Journal 2025 Journal Article

Decision-making systems improvement based on explainable artificial intelligence approaches for predictive maintenance

Lala Rajaoarisoa
Raubertin Randrianandraina
Grzegorz J. Nalepa
João Gama

To maintain the performance of the latest generation of onshore and offshore wind turbine systems, a new methodology must be proposed to enhance the maintenance policy. In this context, this paper introduces an approach to designing a decision support tool that combines predictive capabilities with anomaly explanations for effective IoT predictive maintenance tasks. Essentially, the paper proposes an approach that integrates a predictive maintenance model with an explicative decision-making system. The key challenge is to detect anomalies and provide plausible explanations, enabling human operators to determine the necessary actions swiftly. To achieve this, the proposed approach identifies a minimal set of relevant features required to generate rules that explain the root causes of issues in the physical system. It estimates that certain features, such as the active power generator, blade pitch angle, and the average water temperature of the voltage circuit protection in the generator’s sub-components, are particularly critical to monitor. Additionally, the approach simplifies the computation of an efficient predictive maintenance model. Compared to other deep learning models, the identified model provides up to 80% accuracy in anomaly detection and up to 96% for predicting the remaining useful life of the system under study. These performance metrics and indicators values are essential for enhancing the decision-making process. Moreover, the proposed decision support tool elucidates the onset of degradation and its dynamic evolution based on expert knowledge and data gathered through Internet of Things (IoT) technology and inspection reports. Thus, the developed approach should aid maintenance managers in making accurate decisions regarding inspection, replacement, and repair tasks. The methodology is demonstrated using a wind farm dataset provided by Energias De Portugal.

Details DOI

JMLR Journal 2024 Journal Article

Aequitas Flow: Streamlining Fair ML Experimentation

Sérgio Jesus
Pedro Saleiro
Inês Oliveira e Silva
Beatriz M. Jorge
Rita P. Ribeiro
João Gama
Pedro Bizarro
Rayid Ghani

Aequitas Flow is an open-source framework and toolkit for end-to-end Fair Machine Learning (ML) experimentation, and benchmarking in Python. This package fills integration gaps that exist in other fair ML packages. In addition to the existing audit capabilities in Aequitas, the Aequitas Flow module provides a pipeline for fairness-aware model training, hyperparameter optimization, and evaluation, enabling easy-to-use and rapid experiments and analysis of results. Aimed at ML practitioners and researchers, the framework offers implementations of methods, datasets, metrics, and standard interfaces for these components to improve extensibility. By facilitating the development of fair ML practices, Aequitas Flow hopes to enhance the incorporation of fairness concepts in AI systems making AI systems more robust and fair. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] [ code ] &copy JMLR 2024. ( edit, beta )

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Turning the Tables: Biased, Imbalanced, Dynamic Tabular Datasets for ML Evaluation

Sérgio Jesus
José Pombal
Duarte Alves
André Cruz
Pedro Saleiro
Rita Ribeiro
João Gama
Pedro Bizarro

Evaluating new techniques on realistic datasets plays a crucial role in the development of ML research and its broader adoption by practitioners. In recent years, there has been a significant increase of publicly available unstructured data resources for computer vision and NLP tasks. However, tabular data — which is prevalent in many high-stakes domains — has been lagging behind. To bridge this gap, we present Bank Account Fraud (BAF), the first publicly available 1 privacy-preserving, large-scale, realistic suite of tabular datasets. The suite was generated by applying state-of-the-art tabular data generation techniques on an anonymized, real-world bank account opening fraud detection dataset. This setting carries a set of challenges that are commonplace in real-world applications, including temporal dynamics and significant class imbalance. Additionally, to allow practitioners to stress test both performance and fairness of ML methods, each dataset variant of BAF contains specific types of data bias. With this resource, we aim to provide the research community with a more realistic, complete, and robust test bed to evaluate novel and existing methods.

PDF Details

EAAI Journal 2020 Journal Article

NORMO: A new method for estimating the number of components in CP tensor decomposition

Sofia Fernandes
Hadi Fanaee-T
João Gama

Tensor decompositions are multi-way analysis tools which have been successfully applied in a wide range of different fields. However, there are still challenges that remain few explored, namely the following: when applying tensor decomposition techniques, what should we expect from the result? How can we evaluate its quality? It is expected that, when the number of components is suitable, then few redundancy is observed in the decomposition result. Based on this assumption, we propose a new method, NORMO, which aims at estimating the number of components in CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition so that no redundancy is observed in the result. To the best of our knowledge, this work encompasses the first attempt to tackle such problem. According to our experiments, the number of non-redundant components estimated by NORMO is among the most accurate estimates of the true CP number of components in both synthetic and real-world tensor datasets (thus validating the rationale guiding our method). Moreover, NORMO is more efficient than most of its competitors. Additionally, our method can be used to discover multi-levels of granularity in the patterns discovered.

Details DOI

EAAI Journal 2014 Journal Article

Enhancing data stream predictions with reliability estimators and explanation

Zoran Bosnić
Jaka Demšar
Grega Kešpret
Pedro Pereira Rodrigues
João Gama
Igor Kononenko

Incremental learning from data streams is increasingly attracting research focus due to many real streaming problems (such as learning from transactions, sensors or other sequential observations) that require processing and forecasting in the real time. In this paper we deal with two issues related to incremental learning – prediction accuracy and prediction explanation – and demonstrate their applicability on several streaming problems for predicting electricity load in the future. For improving prediction accuracy we propose and evaluate the use of two reliability estimators that allow us to estimate prediction error and correct predictions. For improving interpretability of the incremental model and its predictions we propose an adaptation of the existing prediction explanation methodology, which was originally developed for batch learning from stationary data. The explanation methodology is combined with a state-of-the-art concept drift detector and a visualization technique to enhance the explanation in dynamic streaming settings. The results show that the proposed approaches can improve prediction accuracy and allow transparent insight into the modeled concept.

Details DOI

NeurIPS Conference 2009 Conference Paper

Posterior vs Parameter Sparsity in Latent Variable Models

Kuzman Ganchev
Ben Taskar
Fernando Pereira
João Gama

In this paper we explore the problem of biasing unsupervised models to favor sparsity. We extend the posterior regularization framework [8] to encourage the model to achieve posterior sparsity on the unlabeled training data. We apply this new method to learn ﬁrst-order HMMs for unsupervised part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and show that HMMs learned this way consistently and signiﬁcantly out-performs both EM-trained HMMs, and HMMs with a sparsity-inducing Dirichlet prior trained by variational EM. We evaluate these HMMs on three languages — English, Bulgarian and Portuguese — under four conditions. We ﬁnd that our method always improves performance with respect to both baselines, while variational Bayes actually degrades performance in most cases. We increase accuracy with respect to EM by 2. 5%-8. 7% absolute and we see improvements even in a semisupervised condition where a limited dictionary is provided.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2007 Conference Paper

Expectation Maximization and Posterior Constraints

Kuzman Ganchev
Ben Taskar
João Gama

The expectation maximization (EM) algorithm is a widely used maximum likelihood estimation procedure for statistical models when the values of some of the variables in the model are not observed. Very often, however, our aim is primarily to find a model that assigns values to the latent variables that have intended meaning for our data and maximizing expected likelihood only sometimes accomplishes this. Unfortunately, it is typically difficult to add even simple a-priori information about latent variables in graphical models without making the models overly complex or intractable. In this paper, we present an efficient, principled way to inject rich constraints on the posteriors of latent variables into the EM algorithm. Our method can be used to learn tractable graphical models that satisfy additional, otherwise intractable constraints. Focusing on clustering and the alignment problem for statistical machine translation, we show that simple, intuitive posterior constraints can greatly improve the performance over standard baselines and be competitive with more complex, intractable models.

PDF Details

TCS Journal 2003 Journal Article

Iterative Bayes

João Gama

Naive Bayes is a well-known and studied algorithm both in statistics and machine learning. Bayesian learning algorithms represent each concept with a single probabilistic summary. In this paper we present an iterative approach to naive Bayes. The Iterative Bayes begins with the distribution tables built by the naive Bayes. Those tables are iteratively updated in order to improve the probability class distribution associated with each training example. In this paper we argue that Iterative Bayes minimizes a quadratic loss function instead of the 0–1 loss function that usually applies to classification problems. Experimental evaluation of Iterative Bayes on 27 benchmark data sets shows consistent gains in accuracy. An interesting side effect of our algorithm is that it shows to be robust to attribute dependencies.

Details DOI