The human face is a silent communicator, expressing emotions and thoughts through its facial expressions. With the advancements in computer vision in recent years, facial emotion recognition technology has made significant strides, enabling machines to decode the intricacies of facial cues. In this work, we propose ResEmoteNet, a novel deep learning architecture for facial emotion recognition designed with the combination of Convolutional, Squeeze-Excitation (SE) and Residual Networks. The inclusion of SE block selectively focuses on the important features of the human face, enhances the feature representation and suppresses the less relevant ones. This helps in reducing the loss and enhancing the overall model performance. We also integrate the SE block with three residual blocks that help in learning more complex representation of the data through deeper layers. We evaluated ResEmoteNet on four open-source databases: FER2013, RAF-DB, AffectNet-7 and ExpW, achieving accuracies of 79.79%, 94.76%, 72.39% and 75.67% respectively. The proposed network outperforms state-of-the-art models across all four databases. The source code for ResEmoteNet is available at this https URL.

Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) plays a crucial role in computer vision, with significant applications in human-computer interaction, affective computing, and areas such as mental health monitoring and personalized learning environments. However, a major challenge in FER task is the class imbalance commonly found in available datasets, which can hinder both model performance and generalization. In this paper, we tackle the issue of data imbalance by incorporating synthetic data augmentation and leveraging the ResEmoteNet model to enhance the overall performance on facial emotion recognition task. We employed Stable Diffusion 2 and Stable Diffusion 3 Medium models to generate synthetic facial emotion data, augmenting the training sets of the FER2013 and RAF-DB benchmark datasets. Training ResEmoteNet with these augmented datasets resulted in substantial performance improvements, achieving accuracies of 96.47% on FER2013 and 99.23% on RAF-DB. These findings shows an absolute improvement of 16.68% in FER2013, 4.47% in RAF-DB and highlight the efficacy of synthetic data augmentation in strengthening FER models and underscore the potential of advanced generative models in FER research and applications. The source code for ResEmoteNet is available at this https URL

Scaling laws offer a powerful lens to understand complex transactional behaviors in decentralized systems. This study reveals distinctive statistical signatures in the transactional dynamics of ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain by examining over 44 million token transfers between July 2017 and March 2018 (9-month period). Transactions are categorized into four types: EOA--EOA, EOA--SC, SC-EOA, and SC-SC based on whether the interacting addresses are Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) or Smart Contracts (SCs), and analyzed across three equal periods (each of 3 months). To identify universal statistical patterns, we investigate the presence of two canonical scaling laws: power law distributions and temporal Taylor's law (TL). EOA-driven transactions exhibit consistent statistical behavior, including a near-linear relationship between trade volume and unique partners with stable power law exponents ($\gamma \approx 2.3$), and adherence to TL with scaling coefficients ($\beta \approx 2.3$). In contrast, interactions involving SCs, especially SC-SC, exhibit sublinear scaling, unstable power-law exponents, and significantly fluctuating Taylor coefficients (variation in $\beta$ to be $\Delta\beta = 0.51$). Moreover, SC-driven activity displays heavier-tailed distributions (\gamma < 2), indicating bursty and algorithm-driven activity. These findings reveal the characteristic differences between human-controlled and automated transaction behaviors in blockchain ecosystems. By uncovering universal scaling behaviors through the integration of complex systems theory and blockchain data analytics, this work provides a principled framework for understanding the underlying mechanisms of decentralized financial systems.

The paper presents the comparative study of the nature of stock markets in short-term and long-term time scales with and without structural break in the stock data. Structural break point has been identified by applying Zivot and Andrews structural trend break model to break the original time series (TSO) into time series before structural break (TSB) and time series after structural break (TSA). The empirical mode decomposition based Hurst exponent and variance techniques have been applied to the TSO, TSB and TSA to identify the time scales in short-term and long-term from the decomposed intrinsic mode functions. We found that for TSO, TSB and TSA the short-term time scales and long-term time scales are within the range of few days to 3 months and greater than 5 months respectively, which indicates that the short-term and long-term time scales are present in the stock market. The Hurst exponent is $\sim 0.5$ and $\geq 0.75$ for TSO, TSB and TSA in short-term and long-term respectively, which indicates that the market is random in short-term and strongly correlated in long-term. The identification of time scales at short-term and long-term investment horizon will be useful for investors to design investment and trading strategies.

We study how the 2024 U.S. presidential election, viewed as a major political risk event, affected cryptocurrency markets by distinguishing human-driven peer-to-peer stablecoin transactions from automated algorithmic activity. Using structural break analysis, we find that human-driven Ethereum Request for Comment 20 (ERC-20) transactions shifted on November 3, two days before the election, while exchange trading volumes reacted only on Election Day. Automated smart-contract activity adjusted much later, with structural breaks appearing in January 2025. We validate these shifts using surrogate-based robustness tests. Complementary energy-spectrum analysis of Bitcoin and Ethereum identifies pronounced post-election turbulence, and a structural vector autoregression confirms a regime shift in stablecoin dynamics. Overall, human-driven stablecoin flows act as early-warning indicators of political stress, preceding both exchange behavior and algorithmic responses.

Climate is an evolving complex system with dynamic interactions and non-linear feedback mechanisms, shaping environmental and socio-economic outcomes. Crop production is highly sensitive to climatic fluctuations (and many other environmental, social and governance factors). This paper studies the price volatility of agricultural crops as influenced by meteorological variables, which is critical for agricultural planning, sustainable finance and policy-making. As case studies, we choose the two Indian states: Madhya Pradesh (for Soybean) and Odisha (for Brinjal/Eggplant). We employ an Exponential Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (EGARCH) model to estimate the conditional volatility of the log returns from 2012 to 2024. We further explore the cross-correlations between price volatility and the meteorological variables followed by a Granger-causal test to analyze the causal effect of meteorological variables on the volatility. The Seasonal Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average with Exogenous Regressors (SARIMAX) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models are implemented as simple machine learning models of price volatility with meteorological factors as exogenous variables. Finally, to capture spatial dependencies in volatility across districts, we extend the analysis using a Conditional Autoregressive (CAR) model to construct monthly volatility surfaces that reflect both local price risk as well as geographic dependence. We believe, this paper will illustrate the usefulness of simple machine learning models in agricultural finance, and help the farmers to make informed decisions by considering climate patterns and making beneficial decisions with regard to crop rotation or allocations. In general, incorporating meteorological factors to assess agricultural performance could help to understand and reduce price volatility and possibly lead to economic stability.

The paper presents a comprehensive causality analysis of the US stock and commodity markets during the COVID-19 crash. The dynamics of different sectors are also compared. We use Topological Data Analysis (TDA) on multidimensional time-series to identify crashes in stock and commodity markets. The Wasserstein Distance WD shows distinct spikes signaling the crash for both stock and commodity markets. We then compare the persistence diagrams of stock and commodity markets using the WD metric. A significant spike in the $WD$ between stock and commodity markets is observed during the crisis, suggesting significant topological differences between the markets. Similar spikes are observed between the sectors of the US market as well. Spikes obtained may be due to either a difference in the magnitude of crashes in the two markets (or sectors), or from the temporal lag between the two markets suggesting information flow. We study the Granger-causality between stock and commodity markets and also between different sectors. The results show a bidirectional Granger-causality between commodity and stock during the crash period, demonstrating the greater interdependence of financial markets during the crash. However, the overall analysis shows that the causal direction is from stock to commodity. A pairwise Granger-causal analysis between US sectors is also conducted. There is a significant increase in the interdependence between the sectors during the crash period. TDA combined with Granger-causality effectively analyzes the interdependence and sensitivity of different markets and sectors.

This paper employs Topological Data Analysis (TDA) to detect extreme events (EEs) in the stock market at a continental level. Previous approaches, which analyzed stock indices separately, could not detect EEs for multiple time series in one go. TDA provides a robust framework for such analysis and identifies the EEs during the crashes for different indices. The TDA analysis shows that $L^1$, $L^2$ norms and Wasserstein distance ($W_D$) of the world leading indices rise abruptly during the crashes, surpassing a threshold of $\mu+4*\sigma$ where $\mu$ and $\sigma$ are the mean and the standard deviation of norm or $W_D$, respectively. Our study identified the stock index crashes of the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic across continents as EEs. Given that different sectors in an index behave differently, a sector-wise analysis was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic for the Indian stock market. The sector-wise results show that after the occurrence of EE, we have observed strong crashes surpassing $\mu+2*\sigma$ for an extended period for the banking sector. While for the pharmaceutical sector, no significant spikes were noted. Hence, TDA also proves successful in identifying the duration of shocks after the occurrence of EEs. This also indicates that the Banking sector continued to face stress and remained volatile even after the crash. This study gives us the applicability of TDA as a powerful analytical tool to study EEs in various fields.

During any unique crisis, panic sell-off leads to a massive stock market crash that may continue for more than a day, termed as mainshock. The effect of a mainshock in the form of aftershocks can be felt throughout the recovery phase of stock price. As the market remains in stress during recovery, any small perturbation leads to a relatively smaller aftershock. The duration of the recovery phase has been estimated using structural break analysis. We have carried out statistical analyses of the 1987 stock market crash, 2008 financial crisis and 2020 COVID-19 pandemic considering the actual crash-times of the mainshock and aftershocks. Earlier, such analyses were done considering an absolute one-day return, which cannot capture a crash properly. The results show that the mainshock and aftershock in the stock market follow the Gutenberg-Richter (GR) power law. Further, we obtained a higher $\beta$ value for the COVID-19 crash compared to the financial-crisis-2008 from the GR law. This implies that the recovery of stock price during COVID-19 may be faster than the financial-crisis-2008. The result is consistent with the present recovery of the market from the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis shows that the high magnitude aftershocks are rare, and low magnitude aftershocks are frequent during the recovery phase. The analysis also shows that the distribution $P(\tau_i)$ follows the generalized Pareto distribution, i.e., $\displaystyle~P(\tau_i)\propto\frac{1}{\{1+\lambda(q-1)\tau_i\}^{\frac{1}{(q-1)}}}$, where $\lambda$ and $q$ are constants and $\tau_i$ is the inter-occurrence time. This analysis may help investors to restructure their portfolios during a market crash.

A signed graph product is defined for a new product, and initially the unsigned graph product's Laplacian spectrum and signless Laplacian spectrum are found. Next, for the signed graph product, the adjacency spectrum, Laplacian spectrum, and signless Laplacian spectrum are found. In the end, we determined the prerequisite for the signed graph product to be integral and we also have generated a sequence of co-spectral signed graphs and a sequence of non-co-spectral equienergetic signed graphs.

Agricultural price volatility challenges sustainable finance, planning, and policy, driven by market dynamics and meteorological factors such as temperature and precipitation. In India, the Minimum Support Price (MSP) system acts as implicit crop insurance, shielding farmers from price drops without premium payments. We analyze the impact of climate on price volatility for soybean (Madhya Pradesh), rice (Assam), and cotton (Gujarat). Using ERA5-Land reanalysis data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, we analyze historical climate patterns and evaluate two scenarios: SSP2.4.5 (moderate case) and SSP5.8.5 (severe case). Our findings show that weather conditions strongly influence price fluctuations and that integrating meteorological data into volatility models enhances risk-hedging. Using the Exponential Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (EGARCH) model, we estimate conditional price volatility and identify cross-correlations between weather and price volatility movements. Recognizing MSP's equivalence to a European put option, we apply the Black-Scholes model to estimate its implicit premium, quantifying its fiscal cost. We propose this novel market-based risk-hedging mechanism wherein the government purchases insurance equivalent to MSP, leveraging Black-Scholes for accurate premium estimation. Our results underscore the importance of meteorological data in agricultural risk modeling, supporting targeted insurance and strengthening resilience in agricultural finance. This climate-informed financial framework enhances risk-sharing, stabilizes prices, and informs sustainable agricultural policy under growing climate uncertainty.

Connectivity is one of the central ideas in graph theory, especially when it comes to building fault-tolerant networks. A cutset $S$ of $G$ is defined to be the set of vertices in $G$ whose removal disconnects the graph. An $R_g$ cutset of $G$ is a cutset whose removal disconnects the graph in such a way that each connected component has at least $g+1$ vertices. If $G$ has at least one $R_g$ cutset then the $g-$extra vertex connectivity (or the $g-$extra edge connectivity), denoted as $\kappa_g(G)$ ($\lambda_g(G)$), is defined as the minimum cardinality of $R_g$ cutset. In this paper, we obtain the $g-$ extra connectivity of various corona type graph products edge corona, neighbourhood corona, subdivision vertex neighbourhood corona,subdivision edge neighbourhood corona and generalised corona product.

Quantum cryptography was proposed as a counter to the capacity of quantum computers to break classical cryptosystems. A broad subclass of quantum cryptography, called quantum key distribution (QKD), relies on quantum mechanical process for secure distribution of the keys. Quantum channels are inherently noisy, and therefore these protocols will be susceptible to noise as well. In this paper, we study the performance of two QKD protocols - BB84 and E91 under thermal relaxation error. We show that while E91 protocol loses its security immediately due to loss of entanglement, the performance of BB84 protocol reduces to random guessing with increasing time. Next, we consider the action of an Eve on the BB84 protocol under thermal relaxation noise, who is restricted to guessing the outcome of the protocol only. Under this restriction, we show that Eve can still do better than random guessing when equipped with the characteristics of the noisy channel. Finally, we propose a modification of the BB84 protocol which retains the security of the original protocol, but ensures that Eve cannot get any advantage in guessing the outcome, even with a complete channel information.

Dysarthric speech severity classification is crucial for objective clinical assessment and progress monitoring in individuals with motor speech disorders. Although prior methods have addressed this task, achieving robust generalization in speaker-independent (SID) scenarios remains challenging. This work introduces DSSCNet, a novel deep neural architecture that combines Convolutional, Squeeze-Excitation (SE), and Residual network, helping it extract discriminative representations of dysarthric speech from mel spectrograms. The addition of SE block selectively focuses on the important features of the dysarthric speech, thereby minimizing loss and enhancing overall model performance. We also propose a cross-corpus fine-tuning framework for severity classification, adapted from detection-based transfer learning approaches. DSSCNet is evaluated on two benchmark dysarthric speech corpora: TORGO and UA-Speech under speaker-independent evaluation protocols: One-Speaker-Per-Severity (OSPS) and Leave-One-Speaker-Out (LOSO) protocols. DSSCNet achieves accuracies of 56.84% and 62.62% under OSPS and 63.47% and 64.18% under LOSO setting on TORGO and UA-Speech respectively outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. Upon fine-tuning, the performance improves substantially, with DSSCNet achieving up to 75.80% accuracy on TORGO and 68.25% on UA-Speech in OSPS, and up to 77.76% and 79.44%, respectively, in LOSO. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of DSSCNet for fine-grained severity classification across diverse dysarthric speech datasets.

We study how the 2024 U.S. presidential election, viewed as a major political risk event, affected cryptocurrency markets by distinguishing human-driven peer-to-peer stablecoin transactions from automated algorithmic activity. Using structural break analysis, we find that human-driven Ethereum Request for Comment 20 (ERC-20) transactions shifted on November 3, two days before the election, while exchange trading volumes reacted only on Election Day. Automated smart-contract activity adjusted much later, with structural breaks appearing in January 2025. We validate these shifts using surrogate-based robustness tests. Complementary energy-spectrum analysis of Bitcoin and Ethereum identifies pronounced post-election turbulence, and a structural vector autoregression confirms a regime shift in stablecoin dynamics. Overall, human-driven stablecoin flows act as early-warning indicators of political stress, preceding both exchange behavior and algorithmic responses.

We compute concurrence, a measure of bipartite entanglement, of the first excited state of the $1$-D Heisenberg frustrated $J_1$-$J_2$ spin-chain and observe a sudden change in the entanglement of the eigen state near the coupling strength $\alpha=J_2/J_1\approx0.241$, where a quantum phase transition from spin-fluid phase to dimer phase has been previously reported. We numerically observe this phenomena for spin-chain with $8$ sites to $16$ sites, and the value of $\alpha$ at which the change in entanglement is observed asymptotically tends to a value $\alpha_c\approx0.24116$. We have calculated the finite-size scaling exponents for spin chains with even and odd spins. It may be noted that bipartite as well as multipartite entanglement measures applied on the ground state of the system, fail to detect any quantum phase transition from the gapless to the gapped phase in the $1$-D Heisenberg frustrated $J_1$-$J_2$ spin-chain. Furthermore, we measure bipartite entanglement of first excited states for other spin models like $2$-D Heisenberg $J_1$-$J_2$ model and Shastry-Sutherland model and find similar indications of quantum phase transitions.

Recently, a stock price model is proposed by A. Mahata et al. [Physica A, 574, 126008 (2021)] to understand the effect of COVID-19 on stock market. It describes V- and L-shaped recovery of the stocks and indices, but fails to simulate the U- and Swoosh-shaped recovery that arises due to sharp crisis and prolong drop followed by quick recovery (U-shaped) or slow recovery for longer period (Swoosh-shaped recovery). We propose a modified model by introducing a new variable $\theta$ that quantifies the sentiment of the investors. $\theta=+1,~0,~-1$ for positive, neutral and negative sentiment, respectively. The model explains the movement of sectoral indices with positive $\phi$ showing U- and Swoosh-shaped recovery. The simulation using synthetic fund-flow ($\Psi_{st}$) with different shock lengths ($T_S$), $\phi$, negative sentiment period ($T_N$) and portion of fund-flow ($\lambda$) during recovery period show U- and Swoosh-shaped recovery. The results show that the recovery of the indices with positive $\phi$ becomes very weak with the extended $T_S$ and $T_N$. The stocks with higher $\phi$ and $\lambda$ recover quickly. The simulation of the Nifty Bank, Nifty Financial and Nifty Realty show U-shaped recovery and Nifty IT shows Swoosh-shaped recovery. The simulation result is consistent with the real stock price movement. The time-scale ($\tau$) of the shock and recovery of these indices during the COVID-19 are consistent with the time duration of the change of negative sentiment from the onset of the COVID-19. This study may help the investors to plan their investment during different crises.

We show that the nearest neighbour entanglement in a mixture of ground and first excited states - a subjacent state - of the J1-J2 Heisenberg quantum spin chain can be used as an order parameter to detect the phase transition of the chain from a gapless spin fluid to a gapped dimer phase. We study the effectiveness of the order parameter for varying relative mixing probabilities between the ground and first excited states in the subjacent state for different system sizes, and extrapolate the results to the thermodynamic limit. We observe that the nearest neighbour concurrence can play a role of a good order parameter even if the system is in the ground state, but with a small finite probability of leaking into the first excited state. Moreover, we apply the order parameter of the subjacent state to investigate the response to separate introductions of anisotropy and of glassy disorder on the phase diagram of the model, and analyse the corresponding finite-size scale exponents and the emergent tricritical point in the former case. The anisotropic J1-J2 chain has a richer phase diagram which is also clearly visible by using the same order parameter.

This paper explores interlacing inequalities in the Laplacian spectrum of signed cycles and investigates interlacing relationship between the spectrum of the net-Laplacian of a signed graph and its subgraph formed by removing a vertex together with its incident edges. Additionally, an inequality is derived between the net-Laplacian spectrum of a complete co-regular signed graph $\Gamma$ and the Laplacian spectrum of the graph obtained by removing any vertex $v$ from $\Gamma$. Also for a signed graph $\Gamma$, the net-Laplacian matrix is normalized and an inequality is derived between the spectrum of the normalized net-Laplacian of a signed graph and its subgraph, formed by contraction of edge and vertex.

Statistical analysis of high-frequency stock market order transaction data is conducted to understand order transition dynamics. We employ a first-order time-homogeneous discrete-time Markov chain model to the sequence of orders of stocks belonging to six different sectors during the USA-China trade war of 2018. The Markov property of the order sequence is validated by the Chi-square test. We estimate the transition probability matrix of the sequence using maximum likelihood estimation. From the heat-map of these matrices, we found the presence of active participation by different types of traders during high volatility days. On such days, these traders place limit orders primarily with the intention of deleting the majority of them to influence the market. These findings are supported by high stationary distribution and low mean recurrence values of add and delete orders. Further, we found similar spectral gap and entropy rate values, which indicates that similar trading strategies are employed on both high and low volatility days during the trade war. Among all the sectors considered in this study, we observe that there is a recurring pattern of full execution orders in Finance & Banking sector. This shows that the banking stocks are resilient during the trade war. Hence, this study may be useful in understanding stock market order dynamics and devise trading strategies accordingly on high and low volatility days during extreme macroeconomic events.