Karan Sehgal

Karan Sehgal, Khawar Naveed Bhatti

ESG and climate risk data remain fragmented across heterogeneous Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 reporting environments, while conventional validation pipelines lack provenance aware auditability, hidden drift detection, and reproducibility oriented governance. This paper proposes a deterministic climate risk intelligence framework integrating single source of truth orchestration, temporal anomaly detection, imbalance aware ensemble learning, and explainability oriented governance for auditable ESG validation. To support open reproducibility, we construct and release a synthetic ESG validation benchmark calibrated against publicly reported characteristics of the GHG Protocol, PCAF, and ISSB standards. The methodology incorporates temporal drift analysis, SMOTE based rare event optimization, ensemble learning, provenance aware orchestration, and TreeSHAP based interpretability for governance inspection and audit reconstruction. We evaluate the framework against statistical classifiers, anomaly detection methods, temporal forecasting baselines, and a threshold based system using classification metrics (recall, F1, ROC AUC), calibration metrics (ECE, Brier score), and a governance oriented audit trace completeness metric measuring the fraction of flagged anomalies for which a deterministic source to escalation provenance chain can be reconstructed. Results are reported as mean and standard deviation across stratified five fold cross validation with paired significance testing. The framework reframes ESG reporting toward deterministic climate risk governance infrastructure supporting reproducibility, explainability, and operational auditability.

Karan Sehgal, Khawar Naveed Bhatti

Financial distress prediction remains a significant challenge in enterprise risk analysis due to the highly imbalanced nature of real-world financial datasets, where bankrupt or distressed firms typically constitute only a small minority of observations. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of classical statistical methods, ensemble learning approaches, and exploratory neural models for minority-class financial distress prediction under class imbalance constraints. The study incorporates structured preprocessing, imbalance mitigation using the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), comparative evaluation across ensemble learning architectures including XGBoost, CatBoost, LightGBM, Random Forest, and explainability analysis using SHAP-based feature attribution methods. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that gradient-boosting approaches achieved improved minority-class sensitivity relative to baseline statistical classifiers under severe imbalance conditions. The workflow additionally emphasises reproducibility, interpretability, auditability, and governance-oriented machine learning evaluation within enterprise financial risk environments. The work is positioned as an applied engineering evaluation intended to support reproducible and interpretable machine learning workflows for financial distress prediction under severe class imbalance constraints.

Ashish Kumar, Karan Sehgal, Prerna Garg et al.

Deep convolutional networks have been quite successful at various image classification tasks. The current methods to explain the predictions of a pre-trained model rely on gradient information, often resulting in saliency maps that focus on the foreground object as a whole. However, humans typically reason by dissecting an image and pointing out the presence of smaller concepts. The final output is often an aggregation of the presence or absence of these smaller concepts. In this work, we propose MACE: a Model Agnostic Concept Extractor, which can explain the working of a convolutional network through smaller concepts. The MACE framework dissects the feature maps generated by a convolution network for an image to extract concept based prototypical explanations. Further, it estimates the relevance of the extracted concepts to the pre-trained model's predictions, a critical aspect required for explaining the individual class predictions, missing in existing approaches. We validate our framework using VGG16 and ResNet50 CNN architectures, and on datasets like Animals With Attributes 2 (AWA2) and Places365. Our experiments demonstrate that the concepts extracted by the MACE framework increase the human interpretability of the explanations, and are faithful to the underlying pre-trained black-box model.