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To improve the effect of web page information extraction, this paper proposes an improved information extraction method of mixed text density grids. Under various power constraints of the relay node itself, this paper proposes a design scheme of joint beamforming and artificial noise based on safety and rate maximisation. Furthermore, with the help of semidefinite relaxation techniques and first‐order approximations, it can be approximated as a semidefinite programming problem that is easy to solve. In addition, this paper uses an iterative algorithm based on a continuous convex approximation to process data to improve the accuracy of web page data extraction. The experimental results show that the information extraction method based on improved mixed text density webpages proposed in this paper has a good information extraction effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With technological advancements, much data is being captured by sensors, smartphones, wearable devices, and so forth. These vast datasets are stored in data centres and utilized to forge data‐driven models for the condition monitoring of infrastructures and systems through future data mining tasks. However, these datasets often surpass the processing capabilities of traditional information systems and methodologies due to their significant size. Additionally, not all samples within these datasets contribute valuable information during the model training phase, leading to inefficiencies. The processing and training of Machine Learning algorithms become time‐consuming, and storing all the data demands excessive space, contributing to the Big Data challenge. In this paper, we propose two novel techniques to reduce large time‐series datasets into more compact versions without undermining the predictive performance of the resulting models. These methods also aim to decrease the time required for training the models and the storage space needed for the condensed datasets. We evaluated our techniques on five public datasets, employing three Machine Learning algorithms: Holt‐Winters, SARIMA, and LSTM. The outcomes indicate that for most of the datasets examined, our techniques maintain, and in several instances enhance, the forecasting accuracy of the models. Moreover, we significantly reduced the time required to train the Machine Learning algorithms employed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E‐commerce online stores are now virtual platforms for connecting with millions of potential clients worldwide in the age of digitization. The marketing teams develop digital marketing tactics to attract traffic to their e‐commerce sites and increase sales volume. With the vast amount of data provided by the cloud, decisions that were previously made with a significant level of intuition based on the knowledge and experience of decision‐makers can now be backed using artificial intelligence algorithms. To identify the variables influencing pricing decisions for products launched on e‐commerce shopping sites and to develop variable pricing techniques for each product found on an e‐commerce site. This paper introduces a novel approach that applies Fuzzy association rule mining (FARM) and Fuzzy TOPSIS MCDM methodology. A B2B e‐commerce marketing store based in Hong Kong has created and implemented Smart‐Quo, a pricing decision support system for B2B e‐commerce retail businesses. After a six‐month trial period, there has been a substantial advance in the effectiveness and efficiency of choosing prices for each product. The case study illustrates the viability and potential advantages of implementing artificial intelligence tools in marketing management in the digital era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection is a knowledge discovery tool to understand the problem by analysing features. In particular, the application of feature selection in data mining can not only improve the quality of extracted patterns and knowledge but also decrease computational costs. Various techniques have been applied to this complex optimization problem, in which metaheuristics have been validated to be superior. This study introduces a new metaheuristic known for having lean and fast programming, inspired by the sunflower's motions for feature selection for the first time. It is equipped with a v‐shaped transfer function and associated with the KNN classifier to become the binary sunflower optimization (BSFO). A total of 12 variants of BSFO are designed based on the chaos theory and Lévy flights, called improved binary sunflower optimization (IBSFO). A discussion between these improvement theories for feature selection has also not been made yet, and it is performed in this paper using 15 benchmark datasets from the UCI repository. The experimental results show that all variants can advance the fitness value of BSFO, and nine of them considerably decrease the computational costs. Furthermore, the chaotic BSFO with the Chebyshev function, taking replacement to normal rand, has the lowest fitness value (−11.37%) and execution time (−9.31%) than the original BSFO. Further, IBSFO is compared with another eight metaheuristics and outperforms these competitors on average fitness value and execution time. Overall, IBSFO proved to find subsets with reduced dimension and high accuracy with meagre computational cost due to its robust explorative and exploitative capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personalized search comes under recommendation systems which provide more user‐focused query results. Applications such as movie recommendations, document recommendations, and so forth are using machine learning algorithms to suggest user‐tailored content. These algorithms train on historical user query data and predict documents based on user preferences. The existing methodologies on personalization have shown two main limitations: privacy concerns over the usage of personal data and a lack of efficient personalizing strategies for better accuracy and overall standardization. In this paper, we propose a novel federated learning (FL) algorithm for personalized search results using temporal characteristics of the user query data. Individual user query data is used for developing specific client models while the aggregate of such models is developed for general search suggestions. The introduction of time‐series interpretation of queries provides for larger training data as well as a better understanding of a user's current needs and intent. The proposed algorithm is validated using the AOL4PS dataset and is evaluated on the efficiency of personalization, and the amount of data and time required to achieve the results. Its performance is compared with existing state‐of‐the‐art personalization algorithms that utilize deep learning and FL. Mean reciprocal rank (MRR) is the primary metric for measuring the algorithm's performance. After training for 35 federated rounds, the server model yielded an MRR score of 0.8638 while the client models were able to yield an average MRR score of 0.9308. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text matching is a basic task of NLP and is important for tasks such as text retrieval, question answering, and so forth. The development of pre‐trained language models has promoted the progress of text matching tasks. However, due to the natural particularity of Chinese characters and expressions, the Chinese text matching tasks still have problems such as word segmentation difficulty, serious semantic loss, and model instability. In this paper, we propose the DAINet model, which includes DMM, AA and IO modules. We use the Dynamic Multi‐Mask module (DMM) to enhance the completeness of word segmentation. Then we use the Augmented Adversarial module (AA) to further extraction of semantic information. Finally, we use the Integrated Output module (IO) for a more stable output. We conducted experiments on LCQMC, BQ and Xiaobu datasets and compared the results with seven strong baseline models. The results showed that DAINet model made great improvement, including improving ACC value of BQ dataset to 86.0%+0.8%, AUC value to 93.9%+0.8%, ACC value of LCQMC dataset to 88.7%+1.1% and AUC value to 97.2%+1.0%. The ACC value of Xiaobu dataset was improved to 83.2%+1.3% and the AUC value was improved to 91.7%+2.2%. Further ablation experiment results show that the proposed DMM, AA and IO modules have good adaptability and improvement over existing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we are proposing two novel swarm intelligence approaches for solving discrete problems. Two different continuous evolutionary algorithms inspired by the behaviour of elephants, namely elephant herding optimization and elephant swarm water search algorithm, are studied and analysed in order to propose discrete versions of the latter called discrete elephant herding optimization and discrete elephant swarm water search algorithm. As an illustration of how our proposals can work on discrete problems, a case study on association rule mining is carried out where the proposed discrete algorithms are modelled and applied on the problem in order to extract interesting association rules from large‐scale databases. Extensive experiments on eight different real‐life and relevant datasets with various sizes showed that both our proposals yield good results that compete and sometimes outperform state of the art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet technology is vital in education as it is an enabler tool used by students for information exchange, communication and creation of knowledge. However, issues related to Internet use behaviour (IUB) and effects on students' performance are still being debated due to inconsistent results. Thus, the main aim of this paper is to propose a specific IUB classification model to discover comprehensive prediction models on students' performance by using educational data mining (EDM). Data related to the students' CGPA and their internet usage activities were collected from 469 undergraduate students. Primarily, in this study several techniques were ensembled to predict students' performance based on IUB. An EDM approach comprising of clustering, classification, correlation, and regression was used. The base classifiers including decision tree (j48) ensembled with EM clustering technique were exploited to develop a high accuracy of prediction results. At first, the usage of clustering technique was to cluster the dataset into smaller variable and applied classification technique to solve the complexity of the variables. Correlation come across to measure the degree of IUB and students' performance and later regression was applied to produce predictive results. Based on 11 IUB categories, the results indicate that online gaming has a negative significant effect on the students' performance. Additionally, the prediction model revealed a high correlation, which generates good predictions of 92%. The prediction model would enable higher learning institutions to detect as early as possible those students who are at risk. This will then help them in taking timely and proactive measures to improve their performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outlier detection is an important problem occurring in a wide range of areas. Outliers are the outcome of fraudulent behaviour, mechanical faults, human error, or simply natural deviations. Many data mining applications perform outlier detection, often as a preliminary step in order to filter out outliers and build more representative models. In this paper, we propose an outlier detection method based on a clustering process. The aim behind the proposal outlined in this paper is to overcome the specificity of many existing outlier detection techniques that fail to take into account the inherent dispersion of domain objects. The outlier detection method is based on four criteria designed to represent how human beings (experts in each domain) visually identify outliers within a set of objects after analysing the clusters. This has an advantage over other clustering‐based outlier detection techniques that are founded on a purely numerical analysis of clusters. Our proposal has been evaluated, with satisfactory results, on data (particularly time series) from two different domains: stabilometry, a branch of medicine studying balance‐related functions in human beings and electroencephalography (EEG), a neurological exploration used to diagnose nervous system disorders. To validate the proposed method, we studied method outlier detection and efficiency in terms of runtime. The results of regression analyses confirm that our proposal is useful for detecting outlier data in different domains, with a false positive rate of less than 2% and a reliability greater than 99%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data preprocessing is known to be essential to produce accurate data from which mining methods are able to extract valuable knowledge. When data constantly arrives from one or more sources, preprocessing techniques need to be adapted to efficiently handle these data streams. To help domain experts to define and execute preprocessing tasks for data streams, this paper proposes the use of active rule‐based systems and, more specifically, complex event processing (CEP) languages and engines. The main contribution of our approach is the formulation of preprocessing procedures as event detection rules, expressed in an SQL‐like language, that provide domain experts a simple way to manipulate temporal data. This idea is materialized into a publicly available solution that integrates a CEP engine with a library for online data mining. To evaluate our approach, we present three practical scenarios in which CEP rules preprocess data streams with the aim of adding temporal information, transforming features and handling missing values. Experiments show how CEP rules provide an effective language to express preprocessing tasks in a modular and high‐level manner, without significant time and memory overheads. The resulting data streams do not only help improving the predictive accuracy of classification algorithms, but also allow reducing the complexity of the decision models and the time needed for learning in some cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is currently a large amount of e‐Learning resources available to learners on the Web. However, learners often have difficulty finding and retrieving relevant materials to support their learning goals because they lack the domain knowledge to craft effective queries that convey what they wish to learn. In addition, the unfamiliar vocabulary often used by domain experts makes it difficult to map a learner's query to a relevant learning material. We address these challenges by introducing an innovative method that automatically builds background knowledge for a learning domain. In creating our method, we exploit a structured collection of teaching materials as a guide for identifying the important domain concepts. We enrich the identified concepts with discovered text from an encyclopedia, thereby increasing the richness of our acquired knowledge. We employ the developed background knowledge for influencing the representation and retrieval of learning resources to improve e‐Learning recommendation. The effectiveness of our method is evaluated using a collection of Machine Learning and Data Mining papers. Our method outperforms the benchmark, demonstrating the advantage of using background knowledge for improving the representation and recommendation of e‐Learning materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many real‐world data mining applications involve obtaining predictive models using imbalanced datasets. Frequently, the least common target variables present within datasets are associated with events that are highly relevant for end users. When these variables are nominal, we have a class‐imbalance problem which has been thoroughly studied within machine learning. As for regression tasks where target variables are continuous, few predictive models and evaluation techniques exist. This paper proposes a solution to these challenges. First, we introduce a cost‐sensitive learning algorithm based on a neural network trained on the minimization of a biased loss function. Results show a higher or comparable performance and convergence speed to existent techniques. Second, we develop new approaches for performance assessment of regression tasks within imbalanced domains by proposing new scalar measures, namely Geometric Mean Error (GME) and Class‐Weighted Error (CWE), as well as new graphical‐based measures, namely RECTPR, RECTNR, RECG − Mean and RECCWA curves. Unlike standard measures, our evaluation strategies are shown to be more robust to data imbalance as they reflect the performance of both rare and frequent events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mining data streams for predictive analysis is one of the most interesting topics in machine learning. With the drifting data distributions, it becomes important to build adaptive systems which are dynamic and accurate. Although ensembles are powerful in improving accuracy of incremental learning, it is crucial to maintain a set of best suitable learners in the ensemble while considering the diversity between them. By adding diversity‐based pruning to the traditional accuracy‐based pruning, this paper proposes a novel concept drift handling approach named Two‐Level Pruning based Ensemble with Abstained Learners (TLP‐EnAbLe). In this approach, deferred similarity based pruning delays the removal of under performing similar learners until it is assured that they are no longer fit for prediction. The proposed scheme retains diverse learners that are well suited for current concept. Two‐level abstaining monitors performance of learners and chooses the best set of competent learners for participating in decision making. This is an enhancement to traditional majority voting system which dynamically chooses high performing learners and abstains the ones which are not suitable for prediction. In our experiments, it has been demonstrated that TLP‐EnAbLe handles concept drift more effectively than other state‐of‐the‐art algorithms on nineteen artificially drifting and ten real‐world datasets. Further, statistical tests conducted on various drift patterns which include gradual, abrupt, recurring and their combinations prove efficiency of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data clustering is an important technique of data mining in which the objective is to partition N data objects into K clusters that minimize the sum of intra‐cluster distances between each data object to its nearest centroid. This is an optimization problem, and various optimization algorithms have been suggested for capturing the position vectors of optimal centroids. However, in these approaches, the problem of local entrapment is very common due to weak exploration mechanism. In this paper, a novel approach based on a whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is suggested for data clustering. The performance of the suggested approach is validated using 14 benchmark datasets of the UCI machine learning repository. The experimental results and various statistical tests have justified the efficacy of the suggested approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decade has seen an increase in the attention paid to the development of cost‐sensitive learning algorithms that aim to minimize misclassification costs while still maintaining accuracy. Most of this attention has been on cost‐sensitive decision tree learning, whereas relatively little attention has been paid to assess if it is possible to develop better cost‐sensitive classifiers based on Bayesian networks. Hence, this paper presents EBNO, an algorithm that utilizes Genetic algorithms to learn cost‐sensitive Bayesian networks, where genes are utilized to represent the links between the nodes in Bayesian networks and the expected cost is used as a fitness function. An empirical comparison of the new algorithm has been carried out with respect to (a) an algorithm that induces cost‐insensitive Bayesian networks to provide a base line, (b) ICET, a well‐known algorithm that uses Genetic algorithms to induce cost‐sensitive decision trees, (c) use of MetaCost to induce cost‐sensitive Bayesian networks via bagging (d) use of AdaBoost to induce cost‐sensitive Bayesian networks, and (e) use of XGBoost, a gradient boosting algorithm, to induce cost‐sensitive decision trees. An empirical evaluation on 28 data sets reveals that EBNO performs well in comparison with the algorithms that produce single interpretable models and performs just as well as algorithms that use bagging and boosting methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ensemble method is a powerful data mining paradigm, which builds a classification model by integrating multiple diversified component learners. Bagging is one of the most successful ensemble methods. It is made of bootstrap‐inspired classifiers and uses these classifiers to get an aggregated classifier. However, in bagging, bootstrapped training sets become more and more similar as redundancy is increasing. Besides redundancy, any training set is usually subject to noise. Moreover, the training set might be imbalanced. Thus, each training instance has a different impact on the learning process. This paper explores some properties of the ensemble margin and its use in improving the performance of bagging. We introduce a new approach to measure the importance of training data in learning, based on the margin theory. Then, a new bagging method concentrating on critical instances is proposed. This method is more accurate than bagging and more robust than boosting. Compared to bagging, it reduces the bias while generally keeping the same variance. Our findings suggest that (a) examples with low margins tend to be more critical for the classifier performance; (b) examples with higher margins tend to be more redundant; (c) misclassified examples with high margins tend to be noisy examples. Our experimental results on 15 various data sets show that the generalization error of bagging can be reduced up to 2.5% and its resilience to noise strengthened by iteratively removing both typical and noisy training instances, reducing the training set size by up to 75%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a core area in data mining, frequent pattern (or itemset) mining has been studied for a long time. Weighted frequent pattern mining prunes unimportant patterns and maximal frequent pattern mining discovers compact frequent patterns. These approaches contribute to improving mining performance by reducing the search space. However, we need to consider both the downward closure property and patterns' subset checking process when integrating these different methods in order to prevent unintended pattern losses. Moreover, it is also essential to extract valid patterns with faster runtime and less memory consumption. For this reason, in this paper, we propose more efficient maximal weighted frequent pattern (MWFP) mining approaches based on tree and array structures. We describe how to handle these problems more efficiently, maintaining the correctness of our method. We develop two types of maximal weighted frequent mining algorithms based on weight ascending order and support descending order and compare these two algorithms to conclude which is more suitable for MWFP mining. In addition, comprehensive tests in this paper show that our algorithms are more efficient and scalable than state-of-the-art algorithms, and they also have the correctness of the MWFP mining in terms of their pattern generation results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuous increase in the number of open online courses has radically changed the traditional sector of education during the last years. These new learning approaches are very difficult to manage by using traditional management methods. This is one of the challenges in order to improve the new massive open online courses. In this paper, we propose a big data modelling approach, considering information from a big data analysis perspective, finding out which are the most relevant indicators in order to guarantee the success of the course. This novel approach is described along the paper using the case study of an open online course offered at our university. We describe the lessons learned in this work with the objective of providing general tools and indicators for other online courses. This will enhance the analysis and management of this kind of courses, contributing to their success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the warehousing activities in distribution centres, order picking is the most time-consuming and labour-intensive. As a result, order picking may become a bottleneck preventing distribution centres from maximizing the effectiveness of their warehousing activities. Although storage location assignment (or product allocation) is a tactical decision, it is especially influential on the effectiveness of order picking. In previous studies, most storage assignment approaches considered the order frequency of individual products rather than that of product groups, which often are purchased together. This paper proposes a new association measure, weighted support count (WSC), based on association rule mining, to represent both the intensity and nature of the relationships between products in a distribution centre. This paper presents two storage assignment heuristics, the modified class-based heuristic (MCBH) and the association seed based heuristic (ASBH), designed to facilitate efficient order picking by applying WSC. The real-world data set of a grocery distribution centre is used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. From the computational results, MCBH cuts at most 4% from the travel distance for order picking per month, as compared with the traditional class-based approach. Meanwhile, ASBH achieves at most a 13% reduction in travel distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to highlight the particularities of Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) traffic from a long-range dependence perspective. The application presented in this paper consists in the estimation of the quality of base stations (BS) positioning in the architecture of a WiMAX network. Analysing the traffic of the considered WiMAX network, with an original data mining methodology based on long-range dependence, we determine which BS have a correct position in the topology of the network and which BS have an incorrect position. These BS must be repositioned when the next session of the network maintenance will take place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes the application of association rule mining to improve quizzes and courses. First, the paper shows how to preprocess quiz data and how to create several data matrices for use in the process of knowledge discovery. Next, the proposed algorithm that uses grammar-guided genetic programming is described and compared with both classical and recent soft-computing association rule mining algorithms. Then, different objective and subjective rule evaluation measures are used to select the most interesting and useful rules. Experiments have been carried out by using real data of university students enrolled on an artificial intelligence practice Moodle's course on the CLIPS programming language. Some examples of these rules are shown, together with the feedback that they provide to instructors making decisions about how to improve quizzes and courses. Finally, starting with the information provided by the rules, the CLIPS quiz and course have been updated. These innovations have been evaluated by comparing the performance achieved by students before and after applying the changes using one control group and two different experimental groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The computing-intensive data mining (DM) process calls for the support of a heterogeneous computing system, which consists of multiple computers with different configurations connected by a high-speed large-area network for increased computational power and resources. The DM process can be described as a multi-phase pipeline process, and in each phase there could be many optional methods. This makes the workflow for DM very complex and it can be modeled only by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). A heterogeneous computing system needs an effective and efficient scheduling framework, which orchestrates all the computing hardware to perform multiple competitive DM workflows. Motivated by the need for a practical solution of the scheduling problem for the DM workflow, this paper proposes a dynamic DAG scheduling algorithm according to the characteristics of an execution time estimation model for DM jobs. Based on an approximate estimation of job execution time, this algorithm first maps DM jobs to machines in a decentralized and diligent (defined in this paper) manner. Then the performance of this initial mapping can be improved through job migrations when necessary. The scheduling heuristic used considers the factors of both the minimal completion time criterion and the critical path in a DAG. We implement this system in an established multi-agent system environment, in which the reuse of existing DM algorithms is achieved by encapsulating them into agents. The system evaluation and its usage in oil well logging analysis are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Case-based reasoning (CBR) has been used in various problem-solving areas such as financial forecasting, credit analysis and medical diagnosis. However, conventional CBR has the limitation that it has no criterion for choosing the nearest cases based on the probabilistic similarity of cases. It uses a fixed number of neighbors without considering an optimal number for each target case, so it does not guarantee optimal similar neighbors for various target cases. This leads to the weakness of lowering predictability due to deviation from desired similar neighbors. In this paper we suggest a new case extraction technique called statistical case-based reasoning. The main idea involves a dynamic adaptation of the optimal number of neighbors by considering the distribution of distances between potential similar neighbors for each target case. In order to do this, our technique finds the optimal distance threshold and selects similar neighbors satisfying the distance threshold criterion. We apply this new method to five real-life medical data sets and compare the results with those of the statistical method, logistic regression; we also compare the results with the learning methods C5.0, CART, neural networks and conventional CBR. The results of this paper show that the proposed technique outperforms those of many other methods, it overcomes the limitation of conventional CBR, and it provides improved classification accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deluge of data available to managers underscores the need to develop intelligent systems to generate new knowledge. Such tools are available in the form of learning systems from artificial intelligence. This paper explores how the novel tools can support decision-making in the ubiquitous managerial task of forecasting. For concreteness, the methodology is examined in the context of predicting a financial index whose chaotic properties render the time series difficult to predict. The study investigates the circumstances under which enough new knowledge is extracted from temporal data to overturn the efficient markets hypothesis. The efficient markets hypothesis precludes the possibility of anticipating in financial markets. More precisely, the markets are deemed to be so efficient that the best forecast of a price level for the subsequent period is precisely the current price. Certain anomalies to the efficient market premise have been observed, such as calendar effects. Even so, forecasting techniques have been largely unable to outperform the random walk model which corresponds to the behavior of prices under the efficient markets hypothesis. This paper tests the validity of the efficient markets hypothesis by developing knowledge-based tools to forecast a market index. The predictions are examined across several horizons: single-period forecasts as well as multiple periods. For multiperiod forecasts, the predictive methodology takes two forms: a single jump from the current period to the end of the forecast horizon, and a multistage web of forecasts which progresses systematically from one period to the next. These models are first evaluated using neural networks and case-based reasoning, and are then compared against a random walk model. The computational models are examined in the context of forecasting a composite for the Korean stock market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context-based email classification requires understanding of semantic and structural attributes of email. Most of the research has focused on generating semantic properties through structural components of email. By viewing emails as events (as a major subset of class of email), a rich contextual test-bed representation for understanding of the semantic attributes of emails has been devised. The event- based emails have traditionally been studied based on simple structural properties. In this paper, we present a novel approach by first representing such class of emails as graphs, followed by heuristically applying graph mining and matching algorithm to pick templates representing contextual and semantic attributes that help classify emails. The classification templates used three key event classes: social, personal and professional. Results show that our graph mining and matching supported template-based approach performs consistently well over event email data set with high accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational data mining (EDM) is a research area where the goal is to develop data mining methods to examine data critically from educational environments. Traditionally, EDM has addressed the following problems: clustering, classification, regression, anomaly detection and association rule mining. In this paper, the ordinal regression (OR) paradigm, is introduced in the field of EDM. The goal of OR problems is the classification of items in an ordinal scale. For instance, the prediction of students' performance in categories (where the different grades could be ordered according to A ≻ B ≻ C ≻ D) is a classical example of an OR problem. The EDM community has not yet explored this paradigm (despite the importance of these problems in the field of EDM). Furthermore, an amenable and interpretable OR model based on the concept of gravitation is proposed. The model is an extension of a recently proposed gravitational model that tackles imbalanced nominal classification problems. The model is carefully adapted to the ordinal scenario and validated with four EDM datasets. The results obtained were compared with state-of-the-art OR algorithms and nominal classification ones. The proposed models can be used to better understand the learning-teaching process in higher education environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many data mining tasks, the goal is to classify entities into a set of pre-defined groups (classes). A second and equally important goal is the interpretation, i.e. understanding the nature of the population aggregated in each class. These tasks are rendered even more complex when there is no a-priori information regarding the right classification. The current paper is based on two concepts: (1) Bounded-Rationality theory which implements an S-shaped function that represents human logic as a saliency measure to determine the substantial features that characterize each potential group and (2) Classification by clustering (CBC) that applies Decision Tree-like classification in unsupervised clustering problems, where neither an a-priori classification nor target-attributes are known in advance. In the context of these two concepts, the current research contributes: (1) by expanding the saliency measure to all possible types of variables (nominal as well as numerical), (2) by evaluating, using five datasets, a composite model that combines the CBC method and the saliency concept. The findings show that by using clustering algorithms for classification tasks (CBC method) the results are as accurate as those obtained by conventional Decision Trees, but with a better saliency factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A proper semantic representation of textual information underlies many natural language processing tasks. In this paper, a novel semantic annotator is presented to generate conceptual features for text documents. A comprehensive conceptual network is automatically constructed with the aid of Wikipedia that has been represented as a Markov chain. Furthermore, semantic annotator gets a fragment of natural language text and initiates a random walk to generate conceptual features that represent topical semantic of the input text. The generated conceptual features are applicable to many natural language processing tasks where the input is textual information and the output is a decision based on its context. Consequently, the effectiveness of the generated features is evaluated in the task of document clustering and classification. Empirical results demonstrate that representing text using conceptual features and considering the relations between concepts can significantly improve not only the bag of words representation but also other state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early prediction of school dropout is a serious problem in education, but it is not an easy issue to resolve. On the one hand, there are many factors that can influence student retention. On the other hand, the traditional classification approach used to solve this problem normally has to be implemented at the end of the course to gather maximum information in order to achieve the highest accuracy. In this paper, we propose a methodology and a specific classification algorithm to discover comprehensible prediction models of student dropout as soon as possible. We used data gathered from 419 high schools students in Mexico. We carried out several experiments to predict dropout at different steps of the course, to select the best indicators of dropout and to compare our proposed algorithm versus some classical and imbalanced well-known classification algorithms. Results show that our algorithm was capable of predicting student dropout within the first 4-6 weeks of the course and trustworthy enough to be used in an early warning system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the performance of statistical, mathematical programming and heuristic linear models for cost-sensitive classification. In particular, we use five cost-sensitive techniques including Fisher's discriminant analysis (DA), asymmetric misclassification cost mixed integer programming (AMC-MIP), cost-sensitive support vector machine (CS-SVM), a hybrid support vector machine and mixed integer programming (SVMIP) and heuristic cost-sensitive genetic algorithm (CGA) techniques. Using simulated datasets of varying group overlaps, data distributions and class biases, and real-world datasets from financial and medical domains, we compare the performances of our five techniques based on overall holdout sample misclassification cost. The results of our experiments on simulated datasets indicate that when group overlap is low and data distribution is exponential, DA appears to provide superior performance. For all other situations with simulated datasets, CS-SVM provides superior performance. In case of real-world datasets from financial domain, CGA and AMC-MIP hold a slight edge over the two SVM-based classifiers. However, for medical domains with mixed continuous and discrete attributes, SVM classifiers perform better than heuristic (CGA) and AMC-MIP classifiers. The SVMIP model is the most computationally inefficient model and poor performing model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the major issues in the process of machine translation is the problem of choosing the proper translation for a multi-sense word referred to as word sense disambiguation (WSD). Two commonly used approaches to this problem are statistical and example-based methods. In statistical methods, ambiguity resolution is mostly carried out by making use of some statistics extracted from previously translated documents or dual corpora of source and target languages. Example-based methods follow a similar approach as they also make use of bilingual corpora. However, they perform the task of matching at run-time (i.e. online matching). In this paper, by looking at the WSD problem from a different viewpoint, we propose a system, which consists of two main parts. The first part includes a data mining algorithm, which runs offline and extracts some useful knowledge about the co-occurrences of the words. In this algorithm, each sentence is imagined as a transaction in Market Basket Data Analysis problem, and the words included in a sentence play the role of purchased items. The second part of the system is an expert system whose knowledge base consists of the set of association rules generated by the first part. Moreover, in order to deduce the correct senses of the words, we introduce an efficient algorithm based on forward chaining in order to be used in the inference engine of the proposed expert system. The encouraging performance of the system in terms of precision and recall as well as its efficiency will be analysed and discussed through a set of experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modelling students' behaviours has reached a status that can only be overcome by improving the ability of predicting the results on teamwork. Indeed, teamwork is an important piece on the learning process, but understanding their mechanisms and predicting the results achieved is far from being solved by traditional classifiers. In this paper, we address the problem of predicting teamwork results, and propose a recommender system that suggests new teams, in the context of a given curricular unit. Any student, who is looking for a team, may use the system; in particular, he may ask for the best team to join, either considering all available colleagues or just the set of his previous teammates. Our system makes use of social network analysis and classification methods as the algorithmic core of the decision-making process. System evaluation is presented through a set of experimental results, which report the performance of social network analysis and classification algorithms over real datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social online learning environments provide new recommendation opportunities to meet users' needs. However, current educational recommender systems do not usually take advantage of these opportunities. To progress on this issue, we have proposed a knowledge engineering approach based on human-computer interaction (i.e. user-centred design as defined by the standard ISO 9241-210:2010) and artificial intelligence techniques (i.e. data mining) that involve educators in the process of eliciting educational oriented recommendations. To date, this approach differs from most recommenders in education in focusing on identifying relevant actions to be recommended on e-learning services from a user-centric perspective, thus widening the range of recommendation types. This approach has been used to identify 32 recommendations that consider several types of actions, which focus on promoting active participation of learners and on strengthening the sharing of experiences among peers through the usage of the social services provided by the learning environment. The paper describes where data mining techniques have been applied to complement the user-centred design methods to produce social oriented recommendations in online learning environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web communities and the Web 2.0 provide a huge amount of experiences and there has been a growing availability of Linked (Open) Data. Making experiences and data available as knowledge to be used in case-based reasoning (CBR) systems is a current research effort. The process of extracting such knowledge from the diverse data types used in web communities, to transform data obtained from Linked Data sources, and then formalising it for CBR, is not an easy task. In this paper, we present a prototype, the Knowledge Extraction Workbench (KEWo), which supports the knowledge engineer in this task. We integrated the KEWo into the open-source case-based reasoning tool myCBR Workbench. We provide details on the abilities of the KEWo to extract vocabularies from Linked Data sources and generate taxonomies from Linked Data as well as from web community data in the form of semi-structured texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It plays a vital role in scientometrics, bibliometrics, webometrics, and altmetrics, which require applying sophisticated algorithms to curate and derive useful insights from scholarly data. In scientific data mining, document classification is needed to categorize scientific papers into topics, keywords, etc. The past two decades have witnessed the rapid growth of scientific publications in all areas of research. [Extracted from the article]

In conventional algorithms, the lack of entity information, reference, and semantic relations in the current corpus leads to a low rate of precision and efficiency in constructing cross‐language bilingual mapping. According to natural language processing and machine translation technology, to solve the problem, this paper aims to establish a parallel corpus for information extraction based on the OntoNotes corpus by combining automatic extraction and manual adjustment. To verify the validity of the parallel corpus constructed in this paper, a comparative experiment was carried out on the corpus. The corpus entity alignment rate, anaphora absence, and syntactic structure were analysed in detail based on statistics. The data set is well performed in language processing and machine translation. The parallel corpus for information extraction constructed in this paper can produce highly precise, stable, and efficient information in the process of bilingual mapping, which provides an effective parallel corpus for the study in machine translation of bilingual mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper deals with the problem of an assessment of symptoms in medical diagnosis. A unified interpretation of symptoms is necessary to estimate their significance in a diagnosis. Yet, even if they are properly defined, different evaluations of them based on experts' knowledge or statistical estimation are possible. The present study aims at combining evaluations that may originate from an expert or can be found from statistical features of the data, as well as those determined for ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ diagnostic cases. A model of diagnostic inference is proposed in the framework of the Dempster–Shafer theory extended for fuzzy focal elements. The basic probability assignment defined in this theory estimates weights of symptoms. Two basic probability assignments can be created and then combined. In this way weights of symptoms represent knowledge common for two kinds of data or obtained from an expert and from data. Thus, a combination of heuristics and data mining results becomes possible. An algorithm of the basic probability assignment calculation is suggested and tested for medical data: a database from the internet and individually gathered data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical issue in the clinical decision support system (CDSS) research area is how to represent and reason with both uncertain medical domain knowledge and clinical symptoms to arrive at accurate conclusions. Although a number of methods and tools have been developed in the past two decades for modelling clinical guidelines, few of those modelling methods have capabilities of handling the uncertainties that exist in almost every stage of a clinical decision-making process. This paper describes how to apply a recently developed generic rule-base inference methodology using the evidential reasoning approach (RIMER) to model clinical guidelines and the clinical inference process in a CDSS. In RIMER, a rule base is designed with belief degrees embedded in all possible consequents of a rule. Such a rule base is capable of capturing vagueness, incompleteness and non-linear causal relationships, while traditional IF–THEN rules can be represented as a special case. Inference in such a rule base is implemented using the evidential reasoning approach which has the capability of handling different types and degrees of uncertainty in both medical domain knowledge and clinical symptoms. A case study demonstrates that employing RIMER in developing a guideline-based CDSS is a valid novel approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the intrusion detection system (IDS) database is to detect transactions that access data without permission. This paper proposes a novel approach to identifying malicious transactions. The approach concentrates on two aspects of database transactions: (1) dependencies among data items and (2) variations of each individual data item which can be considered as time-series data. The advantages are threefold. First, dependency rules among data items are extended to detect transactions that read or write data without permission. Second, a novel behaviour similarity criterion is introduced to reduce the false positive rate of the detection. Third, time-series anomaly analysis is conducted to pinpoint intrusion transactions that update data items with unexpected pattern. As a result, the proposed approach is able to track normal transactions and detect malicious ones more effectively than existing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although data mining and knowledge discovery techniques have recently been used to diagnose human disease, little research has been conducted on disease diagnostic modelling using human gene information. Furthermore, to our knowledge, no study has reported on diagnosis models using single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) information. A disease diagnosis model using data mining techniques and SNP information should prove promising from a practical perspective as more information on human genes becomes available. Data mining and knowledge discovery techniques can be put to practical use detecting human disease, since a haplotype analysis using high-density SNP markers has gained great attention for evaluating human genes related to various human diseases. This paper explores how data mining and knowledge discovery can be applied to medical informatics using human gene information. As an example, we applied case-based reasoning to a cancer detection problem using human gene information and SNP analysis because case-based reasoning has been applied in medicine relatively less often than other data mining techniques. We propose a modified case-based reasoning method that is appropriate for associated categorical variables to use in detecting gastric cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bioscience field has seen some spectacular advances in genomic and proteomic technologies that are able to deliver vast quantities of information on cellular activity. Such technologies are of critical importance to biology, medical science and in drug discovery. However, living systems are highly complex and to fully exploit these technologies requires knowledge at many different levels. Information such as genome sequence data, gene expression data, protein-to-protein interactions and metabolic pathways is required to understand the complexity of biological processes. The challenge for bioinformatics is to tackle the problem of fragmentation of knowledge by integrating the many sources of heterogeneous information into a coherent entity. Another problem is that the high level of biological complexity and the fragmented nature of biological research has meant that it is difficult to keep fully conversant with the latest research and discoveries. Progress in one area of biology may have implications for other areas but the dissemination of this knowledge is not straightforward; difficulties such as differences in naming conventions for genes and biological processes has led to confusion and the lack of productivity. This paper reviews the most recent research to overcome the fragmentation problem where technologies such as text mining and ontologies are used within the knowledge discovery process and the specific technical challenges they address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of fuzzy sets is one of the most fundamental and influential tools in the development of computational intelligence. In this paper the fuzzy pincer search algorithm is proposed. It generates fuzzy association rules by adopting combined top-down and bottom-up approaches. A fuzzy grid representation is used to reduce the number of scans of the database and our algorithm trims down the number of candidate fuzzy grids at each level. It has been observed that fuzzy association rules provide more realistic visualization of the knowledge extracted from databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Customer retention is a critical issue for the survival of any business in today's competitive marketplace. In this paper, we propose a dynamic procedure utilizing self-organizing maps and a Markov process for detecting and preventing customer defection that uses data of past and current customer behavior. The basic concept originates from empirical observations that identified that a customer has a tendency to change behavior (i.e. trim-out usage volumes) before eventual withdrawal and defection. Our explanatory model predicts when potential defectors are likely to withdraw. Two strategies are suggested to respond to the question of where to lead potential defectors for the next stage, based on anticipating when the potential defector will leave. Our model predicts potential defectors with little deterioration of prediction accuracy compared with that of the multilayer perceptron neural network and decision trees. Moreover, it performs reasonably well in a controlled experiment using an online game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding and adapting to changes in customer behavior is an important aspect for survival in a continuously changing environment. This paper develops a methodology based on decision tree analysis to detect the change in classified customer segments automatically between two data sets collected over time. We first define three types of changes as the emerging pattern, the unexpected change and the added/perished rule. Then, similarity and difference measures are developed for rule matching to detect all types of change. Finally, the degree of change is developed to evaluate the amount of change. Our suggested methodology based on decision tree analysis in the change detection problem can be used in more structured situations in which the manager has a specific research question and it also detects the change of classification criteria in a dynamically changing environment. A Korean Internet shopping mall case is evaluated to represent the performance of our suggested methodology, and practical business implications for this methodology are also provided. We believe that the change detection problem and the suggested methodology will become increasingly important as more data mining applications are implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a method for integrating cognitive maps and neural networks to gain competitive advantage using qualitative information acquired from news information on the World Wide Web. We have developed the KBNMiner, which is designed to represent the knowledge of domain experts with cognitive maps, to search and retrieve news information on the Internet according to the knowledge and to apply the information to a neural network model. In addition, we investigate ways to train neural networks more effectively by separating the learning data into two groups on the basis of event information acquired from news information. To validate our proposed method, we applied 180,000 news articles to the KBNMiner. The experimental results are found to support our proposed method through tenfold cross-validation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's competitive environment, rapid advances in economic globalization and information technology have forced many organizations to anticipate and respond to increasing volatility and competitive pressures. Numerous researches have focused on developing techniques on the analysis, design and management of whole logistics chains in particular in the domain of data mining, data analysis and data classification. While the data mining techniques and computational intelligence techniques are good independently for solving specific tasks, they can be synergized through the formation of an integrated and unified model, which can take advantage of the goods and offset the flaws of the two techniques. In this paper, an intelligent information infrastructure, which is characterized by its ability to encompass a rich collection of knowledge representation formalisms for dealing with a logistics information flow problem, is presented. Such intelligent information infrastructure includes a two-step strategy that embraces the combination of online analytical processing and neural networks to support knowledge discovery. In addition, extensible markup language is used to support the overall infrastructure, in order to facilitate the seamless data interchange within an enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge representation is one of the important topics in data mining research. In this paper, based on the feature space theory in data mining, the transformation between extensions and intensions of concepts is discussed in detail. First, inner projections of fuzzy relations, as a basic mathematical tool, are defined, and properties of inner projections are discussed. Then inner transformation of fuzzy relations, inverse inner transformations, and related properties are introduced. The concept structure is shown by feature spaces. Lastly, transformations between extensions and intensions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a three–stage approach to data mining which puts special emphasis on the visualization and interpretability of the results. In the first stage, the input data are represented by a self–organizing map in order to allow visualization and to reduce the amount of data while removing noise, outliers and missing values. Then this preprocessed information is used to identify and display fuzzy clusters of similarity. Finally, descriptions close to natural language are computed for these clusters in order to provide the analyst with qualitative information. This is accomplished by generating fuzzy rules using an inductive learning method. The proposed approach is applied to three case studies, including image data and real–world data sets. The results illustrate the robustness, intuitiveness and wide applicability of the method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination is.an important approach to comprehensively evaluate students' abilities. An examination paper is composed of test items. Most studies assume that test items are independent, but there may, in fact, be associations among test items. How to select test items with low correlations into a test paper is our concern. Meanwhile, for diagnostic learning, students must perform highly relevant exercises to help them efficiently understand the concepts included in the test items. People usually find the associations among test items based on properties of individual test items. This paper proposes a test item association model to represent the correlations of test item pairs by mining the response data of examinees. Then, a hypothesis test and an empirical analysis were used to verify and analyse the relationship between the test item correlation and similarity. Next, the effects of test item parameters on the correlation are investigated by applying the model to the simulated response data which are produced by Item Response Theory (IRT) simulation data generation software. Finally, three applications of this test item association model are listed. After verification, the proposed model can be used for precise teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic classification of virus instances into a concept hierarchy has been attracting much attention from malware research community. However, it is definitely not a trivial work, because malwares usually come in binary forms whose actions are complicated and obfuscated. Therefore, the typical data mining approaches based on feature extraction are not easily applied. In this paper, we tackle this problem by introducing a framework known as MarCHGen (Malware Concept Hierarchy Generation). In this framework, we first apply virus logical concept analysis, which incorporates formal concept analysis with temporal logic to capture malware behaviours and generalize a virus concept lattice accordingly. Second, we propose an on‐the‐fly conceptual clustering technique to generate a malware concept hierarchy. In the MarCHGen framework, the malware concept hierarchy will be monitored by the prelarge data set management technique to avoid reclustering several times unnecessarily. Our approach has been applied in a real data set of virus, and promising experimental results have been acquired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]