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Semi-Supervised Graph Clustering (SSGC) has emerged as a pivotal field at the intersection of graph clustering and semi-supervised learning (SSL), offering innovative solutions to intricate data analysis problems. However, despite its significance and wide-ranging applications, there exists a notable void in the literature—a comprehensive survey specifically dedicated to SSGC techniques and their diverse applications remains conspicuously absent. Addressing this gap, this paper presents a systematic and comprehensive review of SSGC methodologies, spanning from well-established approaches to cutting-edge developments. Through a meticulous categorization, critical examination, and insightful discussion of these techniques, this survey not only illuminates the current landscape of SSGC but also identifies unexplored avenues for exploration and innovation. In this paper we present a comprehensive survey of conventional graph construction, graph clustering, SSL methods, evaluation metrics and their primary development process. We then provide a taxonomy of SSGC techniques based on their structures and principles and thoroughly analyze and discuss the related models. Furthermore, we review the applications of SSGC in various fields. Lastly, we summarize the limitations of current SSGC algorithms and discuss the future directions of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semi-Supervised Graph Clustering (SSGC) has emerged as a pivotal field at the intersection of graph clustering and semi-supervised learning (SSL), offering innovative solutions to intricate data analysis problems. However, despite its significance and wide-ranging applications, there exists a notable void in the literature—a comprehensive survey specifically dedicated to SSGC techniques and their diverse applications remains conspicuously absent. Addressing this gap, this paper presents a systematic and comprehensive review of SSGC methodologies, spanning from well-established approaches to cutting-edge developments. Through a meticulous categorization, critical examination, and insightful discussion of these techniques, this survey not only illuminates the current landscape of SSGC but also identifies unexplored avenues for exploration and innovation. In this paper we present a comprehensive survey of conventional graph construction, graph clustering, SSL methods, evaluation metrics and their primary development process. We then provide a taxonomy of SSGC techniques based on their structures and principles and thoroughly analyze and discuss the related models. Furthermore, we review the applications of SSGC in various fields. Lastly, we summarize the limitations of current SSGC algorithms and discuss the future directions of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new, novel ranking method called Inverse-Reinforcement Learning Ranking. The main goal is to find a reward function representing the user's perceived utility after clicking on each result. It is necessary to utilize log information of all users' queries in the search engine dataset to reach this goal while assuming that the decisions (clicks) of the users are the best (optimal policy). The respective reward function is constructed using features extracted through a feature selection, and their corresponding weights are obtained by two optimization models, which are applicable for ranking results represented to the new users. In addition, new performance criteria were developed to illustrate the performance of the presented ranking method. To evaluate and test the proposed ranking algorithm, a real medium-sized dataset from a search engine is preprocessed and used in this research. Findings show promising results and decisive superiority over the default ranking method. It is illustrated that clicks on the top five results, top ten, and even the first results are remarkably improved by about 13–19% in all experiments, and the perplexity remarkably decreases by almost 23% after applying the ranking method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lighting requirements are subjective and one light setting cannot work for all. However, there is little work on developing smart lighting algorithms that can adapt to user preferences. To address this gap, this paper uses fuzzy logic and reinforcement learning to develop an adaptive lighting algorithm. In particular, we develop a baseline fuzzy inference system (FIS) using the domain knowledge, generating light recommendation based on a set of intuitive rules. These rules, derived from existing literature, are based on environmental conditions i.e. daily glare index, and user information including age, activity, and chronotype. Through a feedback mechanism, the user interacts with the algorithm, correcting the algorithm output to their preferences. We interpret these corrections as rewards to a Q-learning algorithm, which tunes the FIS parameters online to match the user preferences. The Q-learning is a model-free learning algorithm that learns to act optimally by interacting with the user and the rewards it receives. This allows the proposed algorithm to work in a model-free manner, effectively handling the uncertainties that might arise from the individualistic preferences of users. To the authors' best knowledge, this algorithm is pioneering work in designing intelligent algorithms for personalized lighting control, featuring several elements of novelty, including the number of environmental and user-related inputs, the continuous control of light intensity as opposed to common on/off control, and the ability to learn user preferences. The algorithm is implemented in a real aircraft cabin and is evaluated in an extensive user study. The implementation results demonstrate that the developed algorithm possesses the capability to learn user preferences while successfully adapting to a wide range of environmental conditions and user characteristics. This underscores its viability as a potent solution for intelligent light management, featuring advanced learning capabilities. • Intelligent lighting algorithm with the ability to learn from and adapt to user preferences. • A fuzzy inference system tunes lighting based on environment and user traits. • The developed algorithm is tested and verified via an in-depth user study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grid-interactive building control poses a critical challenge in the context of grid modernization and decarbonization. Recently, various artificial intelligence-based optimal control approaches have been proposed, providing innovative solutions to optimal building control problems. However, researchers and practitioners are now confronted with a dilemma when selecting appropriate control strategies, ranging from model-based (knowledge-incorporating) to learning-based (data-driven) approaches, and hybrid methods combining them. Although each algorithm in existing literature claims superiority over specific baselines, their performance has never been systematically compared and analyzed, owing to the absence of a unified platform for comprehensive evaluation. To fill this knowledge gap, we identify and implement all state-of-the-art approaches within a modular training and evaluation framework, assessing their efficacy in a grid-interactive building control problem. In this paper, we also introduce a streamlined hybrid method that complements existing hybrid approaches. Our comparative study reveals and quantifies the advantages of hybrid methods: on average, they achieve near-optimal control while requiring less than 14% of the online computation of traditional model-based methods. To achieve this performance, they need as few as 2% of the training samples of purely learning-based methods. Finally, we provide insights into the merits, limitations, and implementation of each method to help researchers better understand the state of the art and future directions. The software framework implemented in this study is open-sourced to facilitate future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bayesian network (BN) structure learning is the basis of BN applications and plays a pivotal role in many machine learning tasks. Whereas remarkable progress in structure learning has been achieved in the past, making further improvements in the efficiency and accuracy of structure learning is a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose an efficient skeleton learning approach-based hybrid algorithm (ESLH), which consists of two phases. In the constraint-based phase, a dynamic threshold (DTH) strategy and a skeleton learning method based on triangle breaking (SLTB) are proposed to learn the skeleton of a BN structure efficiently. DTH designs a dynamic threshold to remove redundant edges in the initial skeleton with little time overhead. By the result of DTH, SLTB first finds, tests and breaks triangles in the initial skeleton to efficiently remove redundant edges and then removes the remaining redundant edges to discover the final skeleton. In the score-and-search phase, ESLH employs the hill-climbing algorithm to find the highest-scored structure. We propose a novel strategy to divide this phase into three steps, both utilizing the learned skeleton to constrain the search space and preventing the errors of the learned skeleton from reducing the quality of the final learned structure. Extensive experiments on benchmark BNs validate the effectiveness of DTH and SLTB and demonstrate that ESLH is more than five times faster than the state-of-the-art structure learning algorithms while maintaining the highest average accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bayesian network (BN) structure learning is the basis of BN applications and plays a pivotal role in many machine learning tasks. Whereas remarkable progress in structure learning has been achieved in the past, making further improvements in the efficiency and accuracy of structure learning is a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose an efficient skeleton learning approach-based hybrid algorithm (ESLH), which consists of two phases. In the constraint-based phase, a dynamic threshold (DTH) strategy and a skeleton learning method based on triangle breaking (SLTB) are proposed to learn the skeleton of a BN structure efficiently. DTH designs a dynamic threshold to remove redundant edges in the initial skeleton with little time overhead. By the result of DTH, SLTB first finds, tests and breaks triangles in the initial skeleton to efficiently remove redundant edges and then removes the remaining redundant edges to discover the final skeleton. In the score-and-search phase, ESLH employs the hill-climbing algorithm to find the highest-scored structure. We propose a novel strategy to divide this phase into three steps, both utilizing the learned skeleton to constrain the search space and preventing the errors of the learned skeleton from reducing the quality of the final learned structure. Extensive experiments on benchmark BNs validate the effectiveness of DTH and SLTB and demonstrate that ESLH is more than five times faster than the state-of-the-art structure learning algorithms while maintaining the highest average accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grassland restoration is a crucial method for preventing ecological degradation in grasslands. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer a promising solution to reduce extensive human labor and enhance restoration efficiency, given their fully automatic capabilities, yet their full potential remains exploited. This paper progresses this emerging technology for planning the grassland restoration. We undertake the first attempt to mathematically model the UAV-enabled restoration process as the maximization of restoration areas problem (MRAP). This model considers factors including limited UAV battery energy, grass seed weight, the number of restored areas, and their sizes. The MRAP is a composite problem involving trajectory design and area allocation, which are highly coupled and conflicting. Consequently, it requires solving two NP-hard subproblems: the variant Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and the Multidimensional Knapsack Problem (MKP) simultaneously. To address this complex problem, we introduce a novel cooperative memetic algorithm. The algorithm integrates an efficient heuristic algorithm, variant population-based incremental learning (PBIL), and a maximum-residual-energy-based local search (MRELS) strategy, referred to as CHAPBILM. The algorithm solves the two subproblems interlacedly by leveraging the interdependencies and inherent knowledge between them. The simulation results demonstrate that CHAPBILM successfully solves the MRAP on multiple instances in a near-optimal way. It also confirms the conflicts between trajectory design and area allocation. The effectiveness of CHAPBILM is further supported by comparisons with traditional optimization methods that do not exploit the interdependencies between the two subproblems. The proposed model and solution have the potential to be extended to other complex optimization problems in ecological protection and precision agriculture. • The maximization of restoration areas problem is first presented for the UAV-enabled grassland restoration method. • An energy-sensitive mathematical programming model is formulated for the maximization of restoration areas problem under the realistic constraints. • A novel cooperative memetic algorithm CHAPBILM is explored to effectively solve the maximization restoration areas problem, without ignoring the dependence between the two stages. • The simulation results demonstrate that CHAPBILM performs significantly better than the noncooperative optimization method for the problem, which also confirms the dependency relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attribute reduction can remove data noise and redundancy, thus reducing computational complexity, which is very important for machine learning. Because the difference between nominal attribute values is difficult to measure, attribute reduction for hybrid data faces challenges. In addition, most of the existing methods are sensitive to noise due to the lack of an anti-noise mechanism. Decision attribute contains the most important information of data. This paper proposes some techniques that consider the above problems from the perspective of fuzzy evidence theory. First of all, a new distance incorporating decision attributes is defined, and then a new fuzzy relation with an anti-noise mechanism is defined. Furthermore, fuzzy belief and fuzzy plausibility are defined based on the defined new distance and new fuzzy relation. In this framework, two anti-noise attribute reduction algorithms for hybrid data are proposed. Experiments on 12 data sets of various types show that compared with the other 8 state-of-the-art algorithms, the proposed algorithms improve the classification accuracy by at least 2% and the anti-noise ability by at least 11%. Therefore, it can be concluded that the proposed algorithms have excellent anti-noise ability while maintaining good feature selection ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MapReduce is a popular paradigm in distributed computing, but it is not efficient when executing iterative algorithms over a distributed big dataset due to its heavy data communication overhead. Non-MapReduce computing is an alternative for improving computing efficiency and data scalability when using iterative algorithms to process big distributed datasets on clusters. In this paper, we investigate Non-MapReduce approach in distributed computing and use Spark implementations of machine learning algorithms to discuss the problems of MapReduce in executing iterative algorithms over a big distributed dataset and the advantages of Non-MapReduce for the same tasks. We present a method to build a new machine learning library made of sequential algorithms for distributed computing. We use experiment results to show comparisons of computing efficiency and data scalability of MapReduce and Non-MapReduce in executing six machine learning algorithms over big datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese hospitals are increasing their efforts to control the number of patients to decrease cross-infection risks. In this paper, we investigate the flexible physician scheduling problem for emergency departments (EDs), considering the constraint of the maximum number of emergency patients in one time period. We model the ED service system as a time-varying queue with returns and formulate the physician scheduling problem as a mixed-integer programming model. To solve the scheduling problem effectively, we design a learning-based two-stage optimization algorithm. In the first stage, we solve the physician staffing problem, in which two effective acceleration strategies based on machine learning models are developed. In the second stage, we propose a branch-and-price algorithm to determine the physician scheduling plan. Numerical experiments based on real-life data show that the proposed two-stage algorithm can effectively solve our flexible physician scheduling problem, and the scheduling plan obtained by the proposed two-stage algorithm can significantly improve the physician schedule without involving more physicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aeroengine fault detection is an important means to ensure flight safety. The application premise of data driven fault detection method is that all data come from the same distribution. However, this assumption is invalid in the actual engine fault detection, because the engine state will change with the increase of operating time, and the collected data will also have distribution differences. Due to the high cost of collecting engine data, it is difficult to collect enough data from the current state. Fortunately, transfer learning can transfer data information from other fields to the target field, thus alleviating the problem of data scarcity in the target domain. Therefore, from the idea of transfer learning, this paper proposes a cross domain aeroengine fault detection method, viz. transfer learning based on kernel perception algorithm with uneven margins (TL-KPAUM). The proposed method is divided into two stages. In the first stage, KPAUM is trained using the data in the source domain to extract the information in the source domain. In the second stage, the data in the target domain is used to realize the adaptation to the target domain. Compared with several baseline methods, TL-KPAUM has better performance when the amount of data in the target domain is small. Finally, using the simulation data of turbofan engine, the fault detection experiments of degraded state are designed, and the results show that this method is effective. [Display omitted] • A transfer learning algorithm is proposed for aeroengine fault detection. • The proposed method is applied to engine fault detection in different domains. • Simulation results show the effectiveness of this method compared with other methods. • The proposed method has good performance in the case of sparse data in the target domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep Reinforcement Learning systems are now a hot topic in Machine Learning for their effectiveness in many complex tasks, but their application in safety-critical domains (e.g., robot control or self-autonomous driving) remains dangerous without mechanism to detect and prevent risk situations. In Deep RL, such risk is mostly in the form of adversarial attacks, which introduce small perturbations to sensor inputs with the aim of changing the network-based decisions and thus cause catastrophic situations. In the light of these dangers, a promising line of research is that of providing these Deep RL algorithms with suitable defenses, especially when deploying in real environments. This paper suggests that this line of research could be greatly improved by the concepts from the existing research field of Safe Reinforcement Learning, which has been postulated as a family of RL algorithms capable of providing defenses against many forms of risks. However, the connections between Safe RL and the design of defenses against adversarial attacks in Deep RL remain largely unexplored. This paper seeks to explore precisely some of these connections. In particular, this paper proposes to reuse some of the concepts from existing Safe RL algorithms to create a novel and effective instance-based defense for the deployment stage of Deep RL policies. The proposed algorithm uses a risk function based on how far a state is from the state space known by the agent, that allows identifying and preventing adversarial situations. The success of the proposed defense has been evaluated in 4 Atari games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a self-adaptive classification learning hybrid JAYA and Rao-1 algorithm, which is called EHRJAYA, is proposed for solving large-scale numerical problems and real-world complex engineering optimization problems. JAYA algorithm and Rao-1 algorithm are two kinds of algorithms with simple structure and superior performance, which have the characteristics of no particular controlling parameters. In EHRJAYA the evolution strategies of the two algorithms are selected through a random selection mechanism. Then, a novel self-adaptive classification learning strategy is proposed, which fully utilizes information from different individuals. On this basis, two different adaptive coefficients are introduced to guide the population towards the optimal individual and away from the worst individual. Finally, combining the linear population reduction strategy and the dynamic lens opposition-based learning strategy, the convergence speed and ability to jump out of local optimum of the algorithm are greatly improved. To verify the performance of the proposed EHRJAYA, 59 complex functions from the CEC2014 and CEC2017 competitions are solved by EHRJAYA. Then, EHRJAYA and more than 20 algorithms with superior performance jointly solve ten challenging real-world engineering optimization problems. Experimental results show that the proposed EHRJAYA can obtain optimal results with the least computational resources in most cases. Therefore, in the face of these problems, effective solutions can be provided by EHRJAYA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clustering is an essential tool in data mining research and applications. It is the subject of active research in many fields of study, such as computer science, data science, statistics, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Several clustering techniques have been proposed and implemented, and most of them successfully find excellent quality or optimal clustering results in the domains mentioned earlier. However, there has been a gradual shift in the choice of clustering methods among domain experts and practitioners alike, which is precipitated by the fact that most traditional clustering algorithms still depend on the number of clusters provided a priori. These conventional clustering algorithms cannot effectively handle real-world data clustering analysis problems where the number of clusters in data objects cannot be easily identified. Also, they cannot effectively manage problems where the optimal number of clusters for a high-dimensional dataset cannot be easily determined. Therefore, there is a need for improved, flexible, and efficient clustering techniques. Recently, a variety of efficient clustering algorithms have been proposed in the literature, and these algorithms produced good results when evaluated on real-world clustering problems. This study presents an up-to-date systematic and comprehensive review of traditional and state-of-the-art clustering techniques for different domains. This survey considers clustering from a more practical perspective. It shows the outstanding role of clustering in various disciplines, such as education, marketing, medicine, biology, and bioinformatics. It also discusses the application of clustering to different fields attracting intensive efforts among the scientific community, such as big data, artificial intelligence, and robotics. This survey paper will be beneficial for both practitioners and researchers. It will serve as a good reference point for researchers and practitioners to design improved and efficient state-of-the-art clustering algorithms. • Provide an up-to-date comprehensive review of the different clustering techniques. • Highlight novel and most recent practical applications areas of clustering. • Provide a convenient research path for new researchers. • Help experts develop new algorithms for emerging challenges in the research area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the rapidly growing volume and velocity of big data, real-time streaming data analysis has become increasingly important in many applications. To discover knowledge from such data, a wide range of machine learning techniques have been proposed and used in practice. Among them, clustering, which aims at grouping objects into different classes on the basis of their similarity, is the most common form of unsupervised learning. However, most existing clustering algorithms are designed for static data, and hence are not best suited for streaming data. In this paper, we propose PC-DPC, a two-stage progressive clustering algorithm with graph-augmented density peak clustering. PC-DPC first identifies clusters of streaming data using an improved density peak clustering algorithm, and then merges newly arriving data into the existing data pool by measuring inter-cluster structural similarity, which considers the distance between a center and representative points. We illustrate the superiority of PC-DPC over several state-of-the-art clustering algorithms in terms of clustering accuracy and running time on publicly available benchmark datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA) that is one of the population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithms basically consists of the updating mechanism based on sine and cosine functions. In this algorithm, a few random and adaptive variables are also utilized for more effective motions of the candidate solutions. SCA has some drawbacks like other some metaheuristic algorithms. SCA tends to be stuck into the local regions in the search space and this affects negatively on the computational effort required to find the best solution point in the search space. This paper presents four different improved versions of SCA. The proposed improvements on original SCA are the innovations on the updating mechanism of SCA. To evaluate the performances of Improved Sine Cosine Algorithms (ImpSCAs), well-known numerical optimization problems including CEC 2014 test suite are used. Firstly, different analyses of the proposed ImpSCAs are dealt with such as the convergence analysis, search history analysis, trajectory analysis, average distance analysis, and computational complexity analysis. Secondly, the proposed four versions of ImpSCAs are compared with the original SCA for CEC 2014 benchmark problems with dimension sizes of 10D, 30D and 50D. Finally, original SCA and ImpSCAs are adapted to select optimal feature combination and they are tested for 10 feature selection datasets taken from the UCI machine learning repository. The benchmark results show that the performances of the ImpSCA 1 , ImpSCA 2 , and ImpSCA 4 are better than that of the original SCA. From the feature selection results, it is observed that three versions of ImpSCAs (except ImpSCA 3) outperform the original SCA in 80% of the datasets. Source codes of ImpSCAs are publicly available at https://github.com/uguryuzgec/ImpSCAs. • We focused to improve the exploration and exploitation ability of the original SCA. • The basic idea is based on the innovations on the update mechanism. • The ISCAs were evaluated using CEC2014 benchmark test suite. • The proposed ISCAs were tested for 10 popular UCI datasets. • Three versions of ISCAs (except ISCA 3) outperform the SCA in 80% of the datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic taxonomy induction is a challenging task in the field of natural language understanding (NLU) and information retrieval (IR) because it requires machine learning and understanding the is-a relation (i.e. hypernym relation) between term pairs. Therefore, the deep taxa (DTaxa) based on the actor–critic algorithm framework is designed to deal with the aforementioned problems in this paper. The agent in the DTaxa regards the taxonomy induction process as the sequential decision steps so that the agent can take the operation of a term as an action via the policy network to jointly optimize hypernym detection and hypernym organization. Meanwhile, the DTaxa obtains a stable performance from the experiences buffered in the memory. In order to verify the effectiveness of the DTaxa for the automatic taxonomy induction, two experiments are performed on the all bottomed-out full subtrees extracted from WordNet 3.0 and the English environment and science taxonomies in the SemEval-2016 task 13, respectively. The proposed method outperforms these existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art among most metrics. [Display omitted] • The end-to-end DTaxa is proposed for automatic taxonomy induction. • The DTaxa based on actor–critic framework decreases large variance caused by REINFORCEMET algorithm. • The performance of the DTaxa is performed on two publicly available datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]