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Abstract: Feature selection methods have been extensively applied in machine learning tasks, such as computer vision, pattern recognition, and data mining. These methods aim to identify a subset of the original features with high discriminating power. Among them, the feature selection technique for unsupervised tasks is more attractive since the cost to obtain the labels of the data and/or the information between classes is often high. On the other hand, the low-dimensional manifold of the “same” class data is usually revealed by considering the local invariance of the data structure, it may not be adequate to deal with unsupervised tasks where the class information is completely absent. In this paper, a novel feature selection method, called Minimum–maximum local structure information Laplacian Score (MMLS), is proposed to minimize the within-locality information (i.e., preserving the manifold structure of the “same” class data) and to maximize the between-locality information (i.e., maximizing the information between the manifold structures of the “different” class data) at the same time. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated with experiments on classification and clustering. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The present paper considers the problem of partitioning a dataset into a known number of clusters using the sum of squared errors criterion (SSE). A new clustering method, called DE-KM, which combines differential evolution algorithm (DE) with the well known K-means procedure is described. In the method, the K-means algorithm is used to fine-tune each candidate solution obtained by mutation and crossover operators of DE. Additionally, a reordering procedure which allows the evolutionary algorithm to tackle the redundant representation problem is proposed. The performance of the DE-KM clustering method is compared to the performance of differential evolution, global K-means method, genetic K-means algorithm and two variants of the K-means algorithm. The experimental results show that if the number of clusters K is sufficiently large, DE-KM obtains solutions with lower SSE values than the other five algorithms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: It is desirable to find unusual data objects by Ramaswamy et al.’s distance-based outlier definition, because only a metric distance function between two objects is required. This definition does not need any neighborhood distance threshold required by many existing algorithms based on the definition of Knorr and Ng. Bay and Schwabacher proposed an efficient algorithm ORCA, which can give near linear time performance, for this task. To further reduce the running time, we propose in this paper two algorithms RC and RS using the following two techniques, respectively: (i) faster cutoff update, and (ii) space utilization after pruning. We tested RC, RS, and RCS (a hybrid approach combining both RC and RS) on several large and high-dimensional real data sets with millions of objects. The experiments show that the speed of RCS is as fast as 1.4–2.3 times that of ORCA, and the improvement of RCS is relatively insensitive to the increase in the data size. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In real world situations, explanations for the same observations may be different depending on perceptions or contexts. They may change with time especially when concept drift occurs. This phenomenon incurs ambiguities. It is useful if an algorithm can learn to reflect ambiguities and select the best decision according to context or situation. Based on this viewpoint, we study the problem of deriving ambiguous decision trees from data streams to cope with concept drift. CVFDT (Concept-adapting Very Fast Decision Tree) is one of the most well-known streaming data mining methods that can learn decision trees incrementally. In this paper, we establish a method called ambiguous CVFDT (aCVFDT), which integrates ambiguities into CVFDT by exploring multiple options at each node whenever a node is to be split. When aCVFDT is used to make class predictions, it is guaranteed that the best and newest knowledge is used. When old concepts recur, aCVFDT can immediately relearn them by using the corresponding options recorded at each node. Furthermore, CVFDT does not automatically detect occurrences of concept drift and only scans trees periodically, whereas an automatic concept drift detecting mechanism is used in aCVFDT. In our experiments, hyperplane problem and two benchmark problems from the UCI KDD Archive, namely Network Intrusion and Forest CoverType, are used to validate the performance of aCVFDT. The experimental results show that aCVFDT obtains significantly improved results over traditional CVFDT. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]