Udaya Bhasker Cheerala

Santhi Bharath Punati, Sandeep Kanta, Udaya Bhasker Cheerala et al.

Accurate multi-horizon retail forecasts are critical for inventory and promotions. We present a novel study of weekly Walmart sales (45 stores, 2010--2012) using a Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) that fuses static store identifiers with time-varying exogenous signals (holidays, CPI, fuel price, temperature). The pipeline produces 1--5-week-ahead probabilistic forecasts via Quantile Loss, yielding calibrated 90\% prediction intervals and interpretability through variable-selection networks, static enrichment, and temporal attention. On a fixed 2012 hold-out dataset, TFT achieves an RMSE of \$57.9k USD per store-week and an $R^2$ of 0.9875. Across a 5-fold chronological cross-validation, the averages are RMSE = \$64.6k USD and $R^2$ = 0.9844, outperforming the XGB, CNN, LSTM, and CNN-LSTM baseline models. These results demonstrate practical value for inventory planning and holiday-period optimization, while maintaining model transparency.

Udaya Bhasker Cheerala, Varun Teja Chirukuri, Venkata Akhil Kumar Gummadi et al.

Wildfires pose a significant global threat to ecosystems worldwide, with California experiencing recurring fires due to various factors, including climate, topographical features, vegetation patterns, and human activities. This study aims to develop a comprehensive wildfire risk map for California by applying the random forest (RF) algorithm, augmented with Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) through Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), to interpret model predictions. Model performance was assessed using both spatial and temporal validation strategies. The RF model demonstrated strong predictive performance, achieving near-perfect discrimination for grasslands (AUC = 0.996) and forests (AUC = 0.997). Spatial cross-validation revealed moderate transferability, yielding ROC-AUC values of 0.6155 for forests and 0.5416 for grasslands. In contrast, temporal split validation showed enhanced generalization, especially for forests (ROC-AUC = 0.6615, PR-AUC = 0.8423). SHAP-based XAI analysis identified key ecosystem-specific drivers: soil organic carbon, tree cover, and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) emerged as the most influential in forests, whereas Land Surface Temperature (LST), elevation, and vegetation health indices were dominant in grasslands. District-level classification revealed that Central Valley and Northern Buttes districts had the highest concentration of high-risk grasslands, while Northern Buttes and North Coast Redwoods dominated forested high-risk areas. This RF-SHAP framework offers a robust, comprehensible, and adaptable method for assessing wildfire risks, enabling informed decisions and creating targeted strategies to mitigate dangers.

Varun Teja Chirukiri, Udaya Bhasker Cheerala, Sandeep Kanta et al.

Accurate prediction of the remaining useful life (RUL) of industrial machinery is essential for reducing downtime and optimizing maintenance schedules. Existing approaches, such as long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), often struggle to model both global temporal dependencies and fine-grained degradation trends in multivariate sensor data. We propose a hybrid model, FTT-GRU, which combines a Fast Temporal Transformer (FTT) -- a lightweight Transformer variant using linearized attention via fast Fourier transform (FFT) -- with a gated recurrent unit (GRU) layer for sequential modeling. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of an FTT with a GRU for RUL prediction on NASA CMAPSS, enabling simultaneous capture of global and local degradation patterns in a compact architecture. On CMAPSS FD001, FTT-GRU attains RMSE 30.76, MAE 18.97, and $R^2=0.45$, with 1.12 ms CPU latency at batch=1. Relative to the best published deep baseline (TCN--Attention), it improves RMSE by 1.16\% and MAE by 4.00\%. Training curves averaged over $k=3$ runs show smooth convergence with narrow 95\% confidence bands, and ablations (GRU-only, FTT-only) support the contribution of both components. These results demonstrate that a compact Transformer-RNN hybrid delivers accurate and efficient RUL predictions on CMAPSS, making it suitable for real-time industrial prognostics.