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An accurate and noninvasive stress assessment from human physiology is a strenuous task. In this paper, a pattern recognition system to learn complex correlates between heart rate variability (HRV) features and salivary stress biomarkers is proposed. Using the Trier social stress test, heart rate and salivary measurements were obtained from volunteers under varying levels of stress induction. Measurements of salivary alpha-amylase and cortisol were used as objective measures of stress, and were correlated with the HRV features using fuzzy ARTMAP (FAM). In improving the predictive ability of the ARTMAPs, techniques, such as genetic algorithms for parameter optimization and voting ensembles, were employed. The ensemble of FAMs can be used for predicting stress responses of salivary alpha-amylase or cortisol using heart rate measurements as the input. Using alpha-amylase as the stress indicator, the ensemble was able to classify stress from heart rate features with 75% accuracy, and 80% accuracy when cortisol was used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaboration enables weak species to survive in an environment where different species compete for limited resources. Cooperative coevolution (CC) is a nature-inspired optimization method that divides a problem into subcomponents and evolves them while genetically isolating them. Problem decomposition is an important aspect in using CC for neuroevolution. CC employs different problem decomposition methods to decompose the neural network training problem into subcomponents. Different problem decomposition methods have features that are helpful at different stages in the evolutionary process. Adaptation, collaboration, and competition are needed for CC, as multiple subpopulations are used to represent the problem. It is important to add collaboration and competition in CC. This paper presents a competitive CC method for training recurrent neural networks for chaotic time-series prediction. Two different instances of the competitive method are proposed that employs different problem decomposition methods to enforce island-based competition. The results show improvement in the performance of the proposed methods in most cases when compared with standalone CC and other methods from the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The multivalued neuron with periodic activation function (MVN-P) was proposed by Aizenberg for solving classification problems. The boundaries between two distinct categories are crisply specified in MVN-P, which may result in slow convergence or being unable to converge at all in the learning process. In this paper, we propose a revised model of MVN-P based on the idea of unsharp boundaries. In this revised model, a fuzzy buffer is provided around a boundary between two distinct categories, allowing incorrect assignments with membership degree less than a threshold to be tolerated in the training phase. Genetic algorithms are applied to derive optimal values for the parameters involved in this model, alleviating the burden of setting them manually by the user. Besides, MVN-P has difficulties solving the classification problems having a large number of categories. A tree structure is developed to overcome these difficulties. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]