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Online Test Paper Generation (Online-TPG) is a promising approach for Web-based testing and intelligent tutoring. It generates a test paper automatically online according to user specification based on multiple assessment criteria, and the generated test paper can then be attempted over the Web by user for self-assessment. Online-TPG is challenging as it is a multi-objective optimization problem on constraint satisfaction that is NP-hard, and it is also required to satisfy the online runtime requirement. The current techniques such as dynamic programming, tabu search, swarm intelligence and biologically inspired algorithms are ineffective for Online-TPG as these techniques generally require long runtime for generating good quality test papers. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach, called DAC-TS, which is based on the principle of constraint-based divide-and-conquer (DAC) and tabu search (TS) for constraint decomposition and multi-objective optimization for Online-TPG. Our empirical performance results have shown that the proposed DAC-TS approach has outperformed other techniques in terms of runtime and paper quality.

This paper is concerned with data mining techniques for identifying the main parameters of the printing press, the printing process and paper affecting the occurrence of paper web breaks in a pressroom. Two approaches are explored. The first one treats the problem as a task of data classification into "break " and "non break " classes. The procedures of classifier design and selection of relevant input variables are integrated into one process based on genetic search. The search process results in a set of input variables providing the lowest average loss incurred in taking decisions. The second approach, also based on genetic search, combines procedures of input variable selection and data mapping into a low dimensional space. The tests have shown that the web tension parameters are amongst the most important ones. It was also found that, provided the basic off-line paper parameters are in an acceptable range, the paper related parameters recorded online contain more information for predicting the occurrence of web breaks than the off-line ones. Using the selected set of parameters, on average, 93.7% of the test set data were classified correctly. The average classification accuracy of the break cases was equal to 76.7%.

Both Content analysis and link analysis have its advantages in measuring relationships among documents. In this paper, we propose a new method to combine these two methods to compute the similarity of research papers so that we can do clustering of these papers more accurately. In order to improve the efficiency of similarity calculation, we develop a strategy to deal with the relationship graph separately without affecting the accuracy. We also design an approach to assign different weights to different links to the papers, which can enhance the accuracy of similarity calculation. The experimental results conducted on ACM Data Set show that our new algorithm, S-SimRank,outperforms other algorithms.

We report on results of a paper-based lab study that used information on task performance, self appraisal and personal learning need assessment to validate the adaptation mechanisms for a work-integrated learning system. We discuss the results in the wider context of the evaluation of adaptive systems where the validation methods we used can be transferred to a work-based setting to iteratively refine adaptation mechanisms and improve model validity.

This article aims at presenting a methodological approach for classifying educational conference papers by employing a Bayesian Network (BN). A total of 400 conference papers were collected and categorized into 4 major topics (Intelligent Tutoring System, Cognition, e-Learning, and Teacher Education). In this study, we have implemented a 80-20 split of collected papers. 80% of the papers were meant for keywords extraction and BN parameter learning whereas the other 20% were aimed for predictive accuracy performance. A feature selection algorithm was applied to automatically extract keywords for each topic. The extracted keywords were then used for constructing BN. The prior probabilities were subsequently learned using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. The network has gone through a series of validation by human experts and experimental evaluation to analyze its predictive accuracy. The result has demonstrated that the proposed BN has outperformed Naive Bayesian Classifier, and BN learned from the training data.

This paper describes an approach to the use of citation links to improve the scientific paper classification performance. In this approach, we develop two refinement functions, a linear label refinement (LLR) and a probabilistic label refinement (PLR), to model the citation link structures of the scientific papers for refining the class labels of the documents obtained by the content-based Naive Bayes classification method. The approach with the two new refinement models is examined and compared with the content-based Naive Bayes method on a standard paper classification data set with increasing training set sizes. The results suggest that both refinement models can significantly improve the system performance over the content-based method for all the training set sizes and that PLR is better than LLR when the training examples are sufficient.

This article proposes a Memetic Differential Evolution (MDE) for designing digital filters which aim at detecting defects of the paper produced during an industrial process. The MDE is an adaptive evolutionary algorithm which combines the powerful explorative features of Differential Evolution (DE) with the exploitative features of two local searchers. The local searchers are adaptively activated by means of a novel control parameter which measures fitness diversity within the population. Numerical results show that the DE framework is efficient for the class of problems under study and employment of exploitative local searchers is helpful in supporting the DE explorative mechanism in avoiding stagnation and thus detecting solutions having a high performance.

The aim of our work is to provide support for reading (or skimming) scientific papers. In this paper we report on the task to identify concepts or terms with positive attributions in scientific papers. This task is challenging as it requires the analysis of the relationship between a concept or term and its sentiment expression. Furthermore, the context of the expression needs to be inspected. We propose an incremental knowledge acquisition framework to tackle these challenges. With our framework we could rapidly (within 2 days of an expert’s time) develop a prototype system to identify positive attributions in scientific papers. The resulting system achieves high precision (above 74%) and high recall rates (above 88%) in our initial experiments on corpora of scientific papers. It also drastically outperforms baseline machine learning algorithms trained on the same data.

In this paper, linear regression (LR), multi-linear regression (MLR) and polynomial regression (PR) techniques are applied to propose a model Li-MuLi-Poly. The model predicts COVID-19 deaths happening in the United States of America. The experiment was carried out on machine learning model, minimum mean square error model, and maximum likelihood ratio model. The best-fitting model was selected according to the measures of mean square error, adjusted mean square error, mean square error, root mean square error (RMSE) and maximum likelihood ratio, and the statistical t-test was used to verify the results. Data sets are analyzed, cleaned up and debated before being applied to the proposed regression model. The correlation of the selected independent parameters was determined by the heat map and the Carl Pearson correlation matrix. It was found that the accuracy of the LR model best-fits the dataset when all the independent parameters are used in modeling, however, RMSE and mean absolute error (MAE) are high as compared to PR models. The PR models of a high degree are required to best-fit the dataset when not much independent parameter is considered in modeling. However, the PR models of low degree best-fits the dataset when independent parameters from all dimensions are considered in modeling.

Engaging deep neural networks for textual sentiment analysis is an extensively practiced domain of research. Textual sentiment classification harnesses the full computational potential of deep learning models. Typically, these research works are carried either with a popular open-source data corpus, or self-extracted short phrase texts from Twitter, Reddit, or web-scrapped text data from other resources. Rarely do we see a large amount of data on a current ongoing event is being collected and cultured further. Also, an even more complex task would be to model the data from a currently ongoing event, not only for scaling the sentiment accuracy but also for making a predictive analysis for the same. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for achieving sentiment evaluation accuracy by using a deep neural network on live-streamed tweets on Coronavirus and future case growth prediction. We develop a large tweet corpus exclusively based on the Coronavirus tweets. We split the data into train and test sets, alongside we perform polarity classification and trend analysis. The refined outcome from the trend analysis helps to train the data to provide an incremental learning curvature for our neural network, and we obtain an accuracy of 90.67%. Finally, we provide a statistical-based future prediction for Coronavirus cases growth. Not only our model outperforms several previous state-of-art experiments in overall sentiment accuracy comparison for similar tasks, but it also maintains a throughout performance stability among all the test cases when tested with several popular open-source text corpora.

BackgroundOptimal detection and surveillance of bladder cancer (BCa) rely primarily on the cystoscopic visualization of bladder lesions. AI-assisted cystoscopy may improve image recognition and accelerate data acquisition.ObjectiveTo provide a comprehensive review of machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL) and convolutional neural network (CNN) applications in cystoscopic image recognition.Evidence acquisitionA detailed search of original articles was performed using the PubMed-MEDLINE database to identify recent English literature relevant to ML, DL and CNN applications in cystoscopic image recognition.Evidence synthesisIn total, two articles and one conference abstract were identified addressing the application of AI methods in cystoscopic image recognition. These investigations showed accuracies exceeding 90% for tumor detection; however, future work is necessary to incorporate these methods into AI-aided cystoscopy and compared to other tumor visualization tools. Furthermore, we present results from the RaVeNNA-4pi consortium initiative which has extracted 4200 frames from 62 videos, analyzed them with the U-Net network and achieved an average dice score of 0.67. Improvements in its precision can be achieved by augmenting the video/frame database.ConclusionAI-aided cystoscopy has the potential to outperform urologists at recognizing and classifying bladder lesions. To ensure their real-life implementation, however, these algorithms require external validation to generalize their results across other data sets.

Root cause analysis (RCA) is one of the most prominent tools used to comprehensively evaluate a biopharmaceutical production process. Despite of its widespread use in industry, the Food and Drug Administration has observed a lot of unsuitable approaches for RCAs within the last years. The reasons for those unsuitable approaches are the use of incorrect variables during the analysis and the lack in process understanding, which impede correct model interpretation. Two major approaches to perform RCAs are currently dominating the chemical and pharmaceutical industry: raw data analysis and feature-based approach. Both techniques are shown to be able to identify the significant variables causing the variance of the response. Although they are different in data unfolding, the same tools as principal component analysis and partial least square regression are used in both concepts. Within this article we demonstrate the strength and weaknesses of both approaches. We proved that a fusion of both results in a comprehensive and effective workflow, which not only increases better process understanding. We demonstrate this workflow along with an example. Hence, the presented workflow allows to save analysis time and to reduce the effort of data mining by easy detection of the most important variables within the given dataset. Subsequently, the final obtained process knowledge can be translated into new hypotheses, which can be tested experimentally and thereby lead to effectively improving process robustness.

In the paper, we consider sequential decision problems with uncertainty, represented as decision trees. Sensitivity analysis is always a crucial element of decision making and in decision trees it often focuses on probabilities. In the stochastic model considered, the user often has only limited information about the true values of probabilities. We develop a framework for performing sensitivity analysis of optimal strategies accounting for this distributional uncertainty. We design this robust optimization approach in an intuitive and not overly technical way, to make it simple to apply in daily managerial practice. The proposed framework allows for (1) analysis of the stability of the expected-value-maximizing strategy and (2) identification of strategies which are robust with respect to pessimistic/optimistic/mode-favoring perturbations of probabilities. We verify the properties of our approach in two cases: (a) probabilities in a tree are the primitives of the model and can be modified independently; (b) probabilities in a tree reflect some underlying, structural probabilities, and are interrelated. We provide a free software tool implementing the methods described.

There is an increase in consumption of agricultural produce as a result of the rapidly growing human population, particularly in developing nations. This has triggered high-quality plant phenotyping research to help with the breeding of high-yielding plants that can adapt to our continuously changing climate. Novel, low-cost, fully automated plant phenotyping systems, capable of infield deployment, are required to help identify quantitative plant phenotypes. The identification of quantitative plant phenotypes is a key challenge which relies heavily on the precise segmentation of plant images. Recently, the plant phenotyping community has started to use very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to help tackle this fundamental problem. However, these very deep CNNs rely on some millions of model parameters and generate very large weight matrices, thus making them difficult to deploy infield on low-cost, resource-limited devices. We explore how to compress existing very deep CNNs for plant image segmentation, thus making them easily deployable infield and on mobile devices. In particular, we focus on applying these models to the pixel-wise segmentation of plants into multiple classes including background, a challenging problem in the plant phenotyping community. We combined two approaches (separable convolutions and SVD) to reduce model parameter numbers and weight matrices of these very deep CNN-based models. Using our combined method (separable convolution and SVD) reduced the weight matrix by up to 95% without affecting pixel-wise accuracy. These methods have been evaluated on two public plant datasets and one non-plant dataset to illustrate generality. We have successfully tested our models on a mobile device.

Discerning behaviours of free-ranging animals allows for quantification of their activity budget, providing important insight into ecology. Over recent years, accelerometers have been used to unveil the cryptic lives of animals. The increased ability of accelerometers to store large quantities of high resolution data has prompted a need for automated behavioural classification. We assessed the performance of several machine learning (ML) classifiers to discern five behaviours performed by accelerometer-equipped juvenile lemon sharks (Negaprion brevirostris) at Bimini, Bahamas (25°44′N, 79°16′W). The sharks were observed to exhibit chafing, burst swimming, headshaking, resting and swimming in a semi-captive environment and these observations were used to ground-truth data for ML training and testing. ML methods included logistic regression, an artificial neural network, two random forest models, a gradient boosting model and a voting ensemble (VE) model, which combined the predictions of all other (base) models to improve classifier performance. The macro-averaged F-measure, an indicator of classifier performance, showed that the VE model improved overall classification (F-measure 0.88) above the strongest base learner model, gradient boosting (0.86). To test whether the VE model provided biologically meaningful results when applied to accelerometer data obtained from wild sharks, we investigated headshaking behaviour, as a proxy for prey capture, in relation to the variables: time of day, tidal phase and season. All variables were significant in predicting prey capture, with predations most likely to occur during early evening and less frequently during the dry season and high tides. These findings support previous hypotheses from sporadic visual observations. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s00227-018-3318-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

In this paper, we employed two machine learning algorithms – namely, a clustering and a neural network algorithm – to analyze the network traffic recorded from three sources. Of the three sources, two of the traffic sources were synthetic, which means the traffic was generated in a controlled environment for intrusion detection benchmarking. The main objective of the analysis is to determine the differences between synthetic and real-world traffic, however the analysis methodology detailed in this paper can be employed for general network analysis purposes. Moreover the framework, which we employed to generate one of the two synthetic traffic sources, is briefly discussed.

In this short paper, I outline representative techniques for modeling plants and trees using images and sketches. Image-based approaches have the distinct advantage that the resulting model inherits the realistic shape and complexity of a real plant or tree. Using sketches to produce tree models relies much more on prior knowledge of tree construction but makes the modeling process intuitive and easy.

The main goal of information fusion can be seen as improving human or automatic decision-making by exploiting diversities in information from multiple sources. High-level information fusion aims specifically at decision support regarding situations, often expressed as “achieving situation awareness”. A crucial issue for decision making based on such support is trust that can be defined as “accepted dependence”, where dependence or dependability is an overall term for many other concepts, e.g., reliability. This position paper reports on ongoing and planned research concerning imprecise probability as an approach to improved dependability in high-level information fusion. We elaborate on high-level information fusion from a generic perspective and a partial mapping from a taxonomy of dependability to high-level information fusion is presented. Three application domains: defense, manufacturing, and precision agriculture, where experiments are planned to be implemented are depicted. We conclude that high-level information fusion as an application-oriented research area, where precise probability (Bayesian theory) is commonly adopted, provides an excellent evaluation ground for imprecise probability.

In this paper we present a machine learning system that can accurately predict the transitions between frames in a video sequence. We propose a set of novel features and describe how to use dominant features based on a coarse-to-fine strategy to accurately predict video transitions.

As data grow rapidly on social media by users' contributions, specially with the recent coronavirus pandemic, the need to acquire knowledge of their behaviors is in high demand. The opinions behind posts on the pandemic are the scope of the tested dataset in this study. Finding the most suitable classification algorithms for this kind of data is challenging. Within this context, models of deep learning for sentiment analysis can introduce detailed representation capabilities and enhanced performance compared to existing feature-based techniques. In this paper, we focus on enhancing the performance of sentiment classification using a customized deep learning model with an advanced word embedding technique and create a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. Furthermore, we propose an ensemble model that combines our baseline classifier with other state-of-the-art classifiers used for sentiment analysis. The contributions of this paper are twofold. (1) We establish a robust framework based on word embedding and an LSTM network that learns the contextual relations among words and understands unseen or rare words in relatively emerging situations such as the coronavirus pandemic by recognizing suffixes and prefixes from training data. (2) We capture and utilize the significant differences in state-of-the-art methods by proposing a hybrid ensemble model for sentiment analysis. We conduct several experiments using our own Twitter coronavirus hashtag dataset as well as public review datasets from Amazon and Yelp. For concluding results, a statistical study is carried out indicating that the performance of these proposed models surpasses other models in terms of classification accuracy.

In the paper we consider the problem of the statistical evaluation and comparison of different classification algorithms. For this purpose we apply the methodology of statistical tests for testing independence in the case the multinomial distribution. We propose to use two-sample tests for the comparison of different classification algorithms. In the paper we consider only the case of the supervised classification when an external ‘expert’ evaluates the correctness of classification. The results of the proposed statistical tests are interpreted using possibilistic methodology based on indices of dominance introduced by [7].

Process mining techniques are able to extract knowledge from event logs commonly available in today’s information systems. These techniques provide new means to discover, monitor, and improve processes in a variety of application domains. Process discovery—discovering a process model from example behavior recorded in an event log—is one of the most challenging tasks in process mining. A variety of process discovery techniques have been proposed. Most techniques suffer from the problem that often the discovered model is internally inconsistent (i.e., the model has deadlocks, livelocks or other behavioral anomalies). This suggests that the search space should be limited to sound models. In this paper, we propose a tree representation that ensures soundness. We evaluate the impact of the search space reduction by implementing a simple genetic algorithm that discovers such process trees. Although the result can be translated to conventional languages, we ensure the internal consistency of the resulting model while mining, thus reducing the search space and allowing for more efficient algorithms.

Robocup is a popular test bed for AI programs around the world. Robosoccer is one of the two major parts of Robocup, in which AIBO entertainment robots take part in the middle sized soccer event. The three key challenges that robots need to face in this event are manoeuvrability, image recognition and decision making skills. This paper focuses on the decision making problem in Robosoccer- The goal keeper problem. We investigate whether reinforcement learning (RL) as a form of semi-supervised learning can effectively contribute to the goal keeper’s decision making process when penalty shot and two attacker problem are considered. Currently, the decision making process in Robosoccer is carried out using rule-base system. RL also is used for quadruped locomotion and navigation purpose in Robosoccer using AIBO. Moreover the ball distance is being calculated using IR sensors available at the nose of the robot. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning based approach that uses a dynamic state-action mapping using back propagation of reward and Q-learning along with spline fit (QLSF) for the final choice of high level functions in order to save the goal. The novelty of our approach is that the agent learns while playing and can take independent decision which overcomes the limitations of rule-base system due to fixed and limited predefined decision rules. The spline fit method used with the nose camera was also able to find out the location and the ball distance more accurately compare to the IR sensors. The noise source and near and far sensor dilemma problem with IR sensor was neutralized using the proposed spline fit method. Performance of the proposed method has been verified against the bench mark data set made with Upenn’03 code logic and a base line experiment with IR sensors. It was found that the efficiency of our QLSF approach in goalkeeping was better than the rule based approach in conjunction with the IR sensors. The QLSF develops a semi-supervised learning process over the rule-base system’s input-output mapping process, given in the Upenn’03 code.

This paper presents an application of a random forest based classifier that aims at recognizing flawed products in a highly automated production environment. Within the course of this paper, some data set and application features are highlighted that make the underlying classification problem rather complex and hinders the usage of machine learning algorithms straight out-of-the-box. The findings regarding these features and how to treat the concluded challenges are highlighted in a abstracted and generalized manner.

This paper proposes the use of neural network classifiers to evaluate back propagation (BP) and learning vector quantization (LVQ) for feature selection of load identification in a non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) system. To test the performance of the proposed approach, data sets for electrical loads were analyzed and established using a computer supported program - Electromagnetic Transient Program (EMTP) and onsite load measurement. Load identification techniques were applied in neural networks. The efficiency of load identification and computational requirements was analyzed and compared using BP or LVQ classifiers method. This paper revealed some contributions below. The turn-on transient energy signatures can improve the efficiency of load identification and computational time under multiple operations. The turn-on transient energy has repeatability when used as a power signature to recognize industrial loads in a NILM system. Moreover, the BP classifier is better than the LVQ classifier in the efficiency of load identification and computational requirements.

The process of identifying record pairs that represent the same real-world entity in multiple databases, commonly known as record linkage, is one of the important steps in many data mining applications. In this paper, we address one of the sub-tasks in record linkage, i.e., the problem of assigning record pairs with an appropriate matching status. Techniques for solving this problem are referred to as decision models. Most existing decision models rely on good training data, which is, however, not commonly available in real-world applications. Decision models based on unsupervised machine learning techniques have recently been proposed. In this paper, we review several existing decision models and then propose an enhancement to cluster-based decision models. Experimental results show that our proposed decision model achieves the same accuracy of existing models while significantly reducing the number of record pairs required for manual review. The proposed model also provides a mechanism to trade off the accuracy with the number of record pairs required for clerical review.

This paper explores how knowledge in the form of propositions in an expert system can be used as input into data mining. The output is multi-level knowledge which can be used to provide structure, suggest interesting concepts, improve understanding and support querying of the original knowledge. Appropriate algorithms for mining knowledge must take into account the peculiar features of knowledge which distinguish it from data. The most obvious and problematic distinction is that only one of each rule exists. This paper introduces the possible benefits of mining knowledge and describes a technique for reorganizing knowledge and discovering higher-level concepts in the knowledge base. The rules input may have been acquired manually (we describe a simple technique known as Ripple Down Rules for this purpose) or automatically using an existing data mining technique. In either case, once the knowledge exists in propositional form, Formal Concept Analysis is applied to the rules to develop an abstraction hierarchy from which multi-level rules can be extracted. The user is able to explore the knowledge at and across any of the levels of abstraction to provide a much richer picture of the knowledge and understanding of the domain.

The paper is focused on adaptation of the information extraction method for environmental heatmaps to U-matrices of Self Organising Maps—SOM neural networks. Our method bases on OCR, image processing and image recognition techniques. The approach was designed to be as much as possible general but information acquired from a heatmap and the form of a heatmap defer depending on the heatmap type. In the paper we introduce some dedicated processing steps while trying to minimize the number of changes in the previously proposed method. The results for U-matrices of SOM neural network are evaluated in the experimental study and compared with efficiency of the method for environmental maps.

The problem of Text Classification TC has been studied for decades, and this problem is particularly interesting because the features are derived from syntactic or semantic indicators, while the classification, in and of itself, is based on statistical Pattern Recognition PR strategies. Thus, all the recorded TC schemes work using the fundamental paradigm that once the statistical features are inferred from the syntactic/semantic indicators, the classifiers themselves are the well-established ones such as the Bayesian, the Naive Bayesian, the SVM etc. and those that are neural or fuzzy. In this paper, we shall demonstrate that by virtue of the skewed distributions of the features, one could advantageously work with information latent in certain "non-central" quantiles i.e., those distant from the mean of the distributions. We, indeed, demonstrate that such classifiers exist and are attainable, and show that the design and implementation of such schemes work with the recently-introduced paradigm of Quantile Statistics QS-based classifiersThe foundational properties for CMQS for generic and some straightforward distributions were initially described in [17]. Their properties for uni-dimensional distributions of the exponential family are included in [9], and for multi-dimensional distributions in [18]. The authors of [17],i¾?[9] and [18] had initially proposed their results as being based on the Order-Statistics of the distributions. This was later corrected in [19], where they showed that their results were rather based on their Quantile Statistics.. These classifiers, referred to as Classification by Moments of Quantile Statistics CMQS, are essentially "Anti"-Bayesian in their modus operandi. To achieve our goal, in this paper we demonstrate the power and potential of CMQS to describe the very high-dimensional TC-related vector spaces in terms of a limited number of "outlier-based" statistics. Thereafter, the PR task in classification invokes the CMQS classifier for the underlying multi-class problem by using a linear number of pair-wise CMQS-based classifiers. By a rigorous testing on the standard 20-Newsgroups corpus we show that CMQS-based TC attains accuracy that is comparable to the best-reported classifiers. We also propose the potential of fusing the results of a CMQS-based methodology with those obtained from a more traditional scheme.

Computer programming is a highly cognitive skill. It requires mastery of many domains. But in reality many learners are not able to cope with the mental demands required in learning programming. Thus it leads to rote learning and memorization. There are many reasons for this situation. However one of the main reasons is the nature of the novice learners who experience high cognitive load while learning programming. Given the fact that the novice learners lack well defined schema and the limitation of the working memory, the students could not assimilate the knowledge required for learning. Many types of learning supports like visualization is provide to reduce the cognitive load. It is expected that the visualization will help in reducing the cognitive load by expanding the working memory. However the effect of visualization in learning is not clearly tangible. There are two common methods used to measure the cognitive load namely physiological and non physiological measures .It is found based on our prior studies that non physiological measure are more appropriate for measuring cognitive load in a class room situation. The non physiological measures include NASA TLX rating scale. It is also observed from our prior studies that there is a variation in learning performance using same visualization support among the students in a homogenous group. This variation is attributed to the level of Long Term Memory which includes prior mathematical, prior language skills, demographics and gender. This paper will propose a framework to optimize the instruction to learners based on their background profile and the extent of the long term memory and will employ neural network to optimize the instruction by suggesting the best visualization tool for each learner. The paper also validates the performance of the proposed tool by a study with the learners to evaluate the accuracy of the tool.

This paper addresses causal inference and modeling over event streams where data have high throughput, are unbounded, and may arrive out of order. The availability of large amount of data with these characteristics presents several new challenges related to causal modeling, such as the need for fast causal inference operations while ensuring consistent and valid results. There is no existing work specifically for such a streaming environment. We meet the challenges by introducing a time-centric causal inference strategy which leverages temporal precedence information to decrease the number of conditional independence tests required to establish the causalities between variables in a causal network. (Dependency and temporal precedence of cause over effect are the two properties of a causal relationship.) Moreover, we employ change-driven causal network inference to safely reduce the running time further. In this paper we present the Order-Aware Temporal Network Inference algorithm to model the temporal precedence relationships into a temporal network and then propose the Enhanced Fast Causal Network Inference algorithm for learning a causal network faster using the temporal network. Experiments using synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithms.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of classification methods in recognizing a cardiovascular pathology. Based on clinical and electrocardiographic (ECG) Holter data we propose a method for predicting a coronary stenosis demanding revascularization in patients with a diagnosis of a stable coronary heart disease. A possible solution of this problem has been set in a context of rough set theory and methods. The rough set theory introduced by Zdzislaw Pawlak during the early 1980s provides a foundation for the construction of classifiers. From the rough set perspective, classifiers presented in the paper are based on a decision tree calculated on a basis of a local discretization method, related to the problem of reducts computation. We present a new modification of a tree building method which emphasizes the discernibility of objects belonging to decision classes indicated by human experts. The presented method may be used to assess the need for the coronary revascularization. The paper includes results of experiments that have been performed on medical data obtained from Second Department of Internal Medicine, Collegium Medicum, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.

In this paper moving image matching task allocation strategies based on the Multi-Agent system are discussed. Combined with genetic algorithm and simulated annealing algorithm, it gives out a new moving image pattern match-ing task allocation strategies based on the Multi-Agent system. Due to the unique nature of genetic algorithms and simulated annealing algorithm, makes the task allocation algorithm presented in this paper has new features that is different from the traditional method.

In this position paper, I first describe a new perspective on machine learning (ML) by four basic problems (or levels), namely “What to learn?”, “How to learn?”, “What to evaluate?”, and “What to adjust?”. The paper stresses more on the first level of “What to learn?”, or “Learning Target Selection”. Toward this primary problem within the four levels, I briefly review the existing studies about the connection between information theoretical learning (ITL [1]) and machine learning. A theorem is given on the relation between the empirically-defined similarity measure and information measures. Finally, a conjecture is proposed for pursuing a unified mathematical interpretation to learning target selection.

This paper discusses possibilities of using ensembles of neural-networks-based classifiers in pattern recognition and classification. Attention is paid to systems that minimize demands on data preprocessing. Minimizing of requirements for preprocessing leads automatically to systems that are able to sufficiently classify the submitted data into predefined classes without knowledge of details of their significance. In our experiment, we try to increase diversity of classifiers by various filtering methods. The methods proposed in this paper come out from a technique called boosting, which is based on the principle of combining a large number of so-called weak classifiers into a strong classifier. All proposed improvements are experimentally verified.

The induction of classification rules from previously unseen examples is one of the most important data mining tasks in science as well as commercial applications. In order to reduce the influence of noise in the data, ensemble learners are often applied. However, most ensemble learners are based on decision tree classifiers which are affected by noise. The Random Prism classifier has recently been proposed as an alternative to the popular Random Forests classifier, which is based on decision trees. Random Prism is based on the Prism family of algorithms, which is more robust to noise. However, like most ensemble classification approaches, Random Prism also does not scale well on large training data. This paper presents a thorough discussion of Random Prism and a recently proposed parallel version of it called Parallel Random Prism. Parallel Random Prism is based on the MapReduce programming paradigm. The paper provides, for the first time, novel theoretical analysis of the proposed technique and in-depth experimental study that show that Parallel Random Prism scales well on a large number of training examples, a large number of data features and a large number of processors. Expressiveness of decision rules that our technique produces makes it a natural choice for Big Data applications where informed decision making increases the user’s trust in the system.

Inferring the magnitude and occurrence of real-world events from natural language text is a crucial task in various domains. Particularly in the domain of public health, the state-of-the-art document and token centric event detection approaches have not kept the pace with the growing need for more robust event detection in public health. In this paper, we propose UPHED, a unified approach, which combines both the document and token centric event detection techniques in an unsupervised manner such that events which are: rare (aperiodic); reoccurring (periodic) can be detected using a generative model for the domain of public health. We evaluate the efficiency of our approach as well as its effectiveness for two real-world case studies with respect to the quality of document clusters. Our results show that we are able to achieve a precision of 60% and a recall of 71% analyzed using manually annotated real-world data. Finally, we also make a comparative analysis of our work with the well-established rule-based system of MedISys and find that UPHED can be used in a cooperative way with MedISys to not only detect similar anomalies, but can also deliver more information about the specific outbreak of reported diseases.

It is always difficult to solve the problem that how to help international students to learn second language (L2) out-class seamlessly. This paper consider using the context environment to recognize international students’ situations and help them to learning second language out-class seamlessly. This approach is based on the Ubiquitous learning log system called SCROLL. In proposal approach, first of all, when learners go to a new environment and do not know what they should learn there, they check in the location information with the name of the location. Secondly, proposal approach will recommend some learning logs for them using social network analysis algorithm with learners’ situation with location information. At last, this paper does the evaluation experiment and discusses the result.

Forecasting academic performance of student has been a substantial research inquest in the Educational Data-Mining that utilizes Machine-learning (ML) procedures to probe the data of educational setups. Quantifying student academic performance is challenging because academic performance of students hinges on several factors. The in hand research work focuses on students’ grade and marks prediction utilizing supervised ML approaches. The data-set utilized in this research work has been obtained from the Board of Intermediate & Secondary Education (B.I.S.E) Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. There are 7 areas in BISEP i.e., Peshawar, FR-Peshawar, Charsadda, Khyber, Mohmand and Upper and Lower Chitral. This paper aims to examine the quality of education that is closely related to the aims of sustainability. The system has created an abundance of data which needs to be properly analyzed so that most useful information should be obtained for planning and future development. Grade and marks forecasting of students with their historical educational record is a renowned and valuable application in the EDM. It becomes an incredible information source that could be utilized in various ways to enhance the standard of education nationwide. Relevant research study reveals that numerous methods for academic performance forecasting are built to carryout improvements in administrative and teaching staff of academic organizations. In the put forwarded approach, the acquired data-set is pre-processed to purify the data quality, the labeled academic historical data of student (30 optimum attributes) is utilized to train regression model and DT-classifier. The regression will forecast marks, while grade will be forecasted by classification system, eventually analyzed the results obtained by the models. The results obtained show that machine learning technology is efficient and relevant for predicting students performance.

Multicriteria Decision Making (MCDM) has a huge role to play while ruling out one suitable alternative among a pool of alternatives governed by predefined multiple criteria. Some of the factors like imprecision, lack of information/data, etc., which are present in traditional MCDM processes have showcased their lack of efficiency and hence eventually it has paved the ways for the development of Fuzzy multicriteria decision making (FMCDM). In FMCDM processes, the decision makers can model most of the real-life phenomena by fuzzy information-based preferences. The availability of a wide literature on similarity measure (SM) emphasizes the vital role of SM of generalized fuzzy numbers (GFNs) to conduct accurate and precise decision making in FMCDM problems. Despite having few advantages, most of the existing approaches possessed a certain degree of counter intuitiveness and discrepancies. Thus, we have attempted to propose a novel SM for generalized trapezoidal fuzzy numbers (GTrFNs) which could deliberately overcome the impediments associated with the earlier existing approaches. Moreover, a meticulous comparative study with the existing approaches is also presented. This paper provides us with an improved method to obtain the similarity values between GTrFNs and the proposed SM consists of calculating the prominent features of fuzzy numbers such as expected value and variance. We use fourteen different sets of GTrFNs, to compare the fruition of the present approach with the existing SM approaches. Furthermore, to show the utility and applicability of our proposed measure, we illustrate few practical scenarios such as the launching of an electronic gadget by a company, a problem of medical diagnosis and finally, a proper anti-virus mask selection in light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic. The obtained results with our proposed SM, for the mentioned FMCDM problems, are analytically correct and they depict the efficiency and novelty of the present article.

This paper proposes an efficient purchase pattern clustering method based on SOM(Self-Organizing Map) for Personal Ontology Recommender System in u-Commerce under ubiquitous computing environment which is required by real time accessibility and agility. In this paper, it is necessary for us to keep clustering the user’s information to join the user’s score based on RFM factors using SOM network and the analysis of RFM to be able to reflect the attributes of the user in order to reflect frequently changing trends of purchase pattern by emphasizing the important users and items, and to improve better performance of recommendation. The proposed makes the task of an efficient purchase pattern clustering based on SOM for preprocessing so as to be possible to recommend by the loyalty of RFM factors as considering user’s propensity. To verify improved better performance of proposing system than the previous systems, we carry out the experiments in the same dataset collected in a cosmetic internet shopping mall.

Methods based on fuzzy outranking relations constitute one of the main approaches to multiple criteria decision problems. In this paper we examine multicriteria selection and ranking problems for which ELECTRE III is one of the most popular methods. ELECTRE III applications require the elicitation of a large number of parameters: weights and different thresholds; but direct eliciting is often an arduous task for the decision-maker. In this paper, an evolutionary-multiobjective-based indirect elicitation of the complete ELECTRE III modelparameter set is proposed. The proposal needs some kind of “preference knowledge”, which is implicit in a set of reference examples illustrating the decision policy from a “decision-maker”. This method performs very well in some illustrative examples; its generalization to other outranking methods is straightforward.

In real-time strategy (RTS) games, path planning is an important task for game players. This paper selects a typical RTS game attack–defense scenario and uses artificial potential field algorithm to plan the near-optimal-attacking path. When using traditional potential field method, the local minimum occurs easily and the damage of attacker is high. Besides, there are often interactions among game units which will greatly influence the quality of path planning. Fuzzy measure and fuzzy integral can be used to describe the interaction of units. In this paper, a fuzzy artificial potential field method is presented to support the path planning of the attacker and a repulsive gain factor is introduced to the repulsive potential function, which indicates the degree of the interactions around the defense units. The simulation results show that the damage of attacker obtained by fuzzy potential field is lower than that obtained by the traditional methods; and the proposed method is more efficient and makes the selected game scenario be closer to the real games.

With the development of Internet, business models of offline service rendering and online service promotion and evaluation developed. But how to evaluate the service trustworthiness has not attracted great attention and much research. We build a Service Trustworthiness Evaluation Model based on outlier detection, user clustering and BP-Neural Network. In this paper, we use real data of trustworthy community to prove our assumption. Results of practical experiments show that the Service Trustworthiness Evaluation Model proposed in this paper can objectively reflect service trustworthiness. At the same time, it has significance for other evaluation systems.

Data understanding is an iterative process in which domain experts combine their knowledge with the data at hand to explore and confirm hypotheses. One important set of tools for exploring hypotheses about data are visualizations. Often, however, traditional, unsupervised dimensionality reduction algorithms are used for visualization. These tools allow for interaction, i.e., exploring different visualizations, only by means of manipulating some technical parameters of the algorithm. Therefore, instead of being able to intuitively interact with the visualization, domain experts have to learn and argue about these technical parameters. In this paper we propose a knowledge-based kernel PCA approach that allows for intuitive interaction with data visualizations. Each embedding direction is given by a non-convex quadratic optimization problem over an ellipsoid and has a globally optimal solution in the kernel feature space. A solution can be found in polynomial time using the algorithm presented in this paper. To facilitate direct feedback, i.e., updating the whole embedding with a sufficiently high frame-rate during interaction, we reduce the computational complexity further by incremental up- and down-dating. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the flexibility and utility of this approach.

This paper proposes a novel asynchronous reference-based evaluation named as ARE for an asynchronous EA that evolves individuals independently unlike general EAs that evolve all individuals at the same time. ARE is designed for an asynchronous evolution by tertiary parent selection and its archive. In particular, ARE asynchronously evolves individuals through a comparison with only three of individuals i.e., two parents and one reference individual as the tertiary parent. In addition, ARE builds an archive of good reference individuals. This differ from synchronous evolution in EAs in which selection involves comparison with all population members. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of ARE, by applying it to some standard problems used in Linear GP that aim being to minimize the execution step of machine-code programs. We compare GP using ARE ARE-GP with steady state synchronous GP SSGP and our previous asynchronous GP Tierra-based Asynchronous GP: TAGP. The experimental results have revealed that ARE-GP not only asynchronously evolves the machine-code programs, but also outperforms SSGP and TAGP in all test problems.

In this paper, we present a novel simulation tool to analyze the results from Feature Feedback-based pattern recognition method especially for the face recognition. Using Feature Feedback, we can choose an important region that affects the classification and utilize the region for the recognition. To do so, a reverse mapping is used from the feature space to the original data space. However, in Feature Feedback, there are many parameters such as number of Fisherfaces, threshold value, etc. used to obtain better results. The simulation tool described in this paper makes it easier to evaluate the effect of those parameters on the recognition rate by optionally changing their values. It also helps the students have an intuitive look on Eigenface, Fisherface or feature mask which are important for the understanding of the Feature Feedback and pattern recognition theory.

This paper focuses on building a generalized mood classification model with many mood classes instead of a personalized one with few mood classes. Two methods are adopted to improve the performance of mood classification. The one of them is a new feature reduction based on standard deviation of feature values, which is designed to solve the problem of lowered performance when all 391 features provided by MIR toolbox used to extract features of music. Our experiments show that the feature reduction method suggested in this paper has better performance than that of the conventional dimension reduction methods, R-Squared and PCA. As performance improvement by feature reduction only is limited, the modular neural network approach is used additionally. The experiments also show that the method improves the performance effectively.

The aim of the paper is to present a new machine learning method for determining intelligent co-operation at project realization. The method uses local optimization task of a special form and is based on learning idea. Additionally, the information gathered during a searching process is used to prune non-perspective solutions. The paper presents a formal approach to creation of constructive algorithms that use a sophisticated local optimization and are based on a formal definition of multistage decision process. It also proposes a general conception of creation local optimization tasks for different problems as well as a conception of local optimization task modification on basis of acquired information. To illustrate the conceptions, the learning algorithm for NP-hard scheduling problem is presented as well as results of computer experiments.

The notion of similarity plays an important role in machine learning and artificial intelligence. It is widely used in tasks related to a supervised classification, clustering, an outlier detection and planning. Moreover, in domains such as information retrieval or case-based reasoning, the concept of similarity is essential as it is used at every phase of the reasoning cycle. The similarity itself, however, is a very complex concept that slips out from formal definitions. A similarity of two objects can be different depending on a considered context. In many practical situations it is difficult even to evaluate the quality of similarity assessments without considering the task for which they were performed. Due to this fact the similarity should be learnt from data, specifically for the task at hand. This paper presents a research on the problem of similarity learning, which is a part of author’s PHD dissertation. It describes a similarity model, called Rule-Based Similarity, and shows algorithms for constructing this model from available data. The model utilizes notions from the rough set theory to derive a similarity function that allows to approximate the similarity relation in a given context. It is largely inspired by the idea of Tversky’s feature contrast model and it has several analogical properties. In the paper, those theoretical properties are described and discussed. Moreover, the paper presents results of experiments on real-life data sets, in which a quality of the proposed model is thoroughly evaluated and compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms.