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In numerous scientific disciplines and practical applications, addressing optimization challenges is a common imperative. Nature-inspired optimization algorithms represent a highly valuable and pragmatic approach to tackling these complexities. This paper introduces Dendritic Growth Optimization (DGO), a novel algorithm inspired by natural branching patterns. DGO offers a novel solution for intricate optimization problems and demonstrates its efficiency in exploring diverse solution spaces. The algorithm has been extensively tested with a suite of machine learning algorithms, deep learning algorithms, and metaheuristic algorithms, and the results, both before and after optimization, unequivocally support the proposed algorithm's feasibility, effectiveness, and generalizability. Through empirical validation using established datasets like diabetes and breast cancer, the algorithm consistently enhances model performance across various domains. Beyond its working and experimental analysis, DGO's wide-ranging applications in machine learning, logistics, and engineering for solving real-world problems have been highlighted. The study also considers the challenges and practical implications of implementing DGO in multiple scenarios. As optimization remains crucial in research and industry, DGO emerges as a promising avenue for innovation and problem solving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The moth-flame algorithm shows some shortcomings in solving the complex problem of optimization, such as insufficient population diversity and unbalanced search ability. In this paper, an IMFO (Improved Moth-Flame Optimization) algorithm is proposed to be applied in solving the optimization problem of function. First, cat chaotic mapping is used to generate the initial position of moth to improve the population diversity. Second, cosine inertia weight is introduced to balance the global and local search abilities of the algorithm. Third, the memory information in the particle swarm algorithm is introduced into the iterative process of the algorithm to speed up the convergence of the population. Finally, Gaussian mutation strategy is used in the current optimal solution to avoid the algorithm from falling into the local optimum. Simulation experiments are conducted on 11 benchmark test functions, compared with other improved MFO (Moth-Flame Optimization) algorithms and classical optimization algorithms. The results show that the IMFO has higher accuracy and stability in solving the above-mentioned test functions. The proposed algorithm is experimented and verified by optimizing the KELM (Kernel Extreme Learning Machine) in an engineering example and exhibits a better optimization performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine learning (ML) is evolving rapidly and has made many theoretical breakthroughs while widely applied in various fields. ML allows systems the ability to access data and use it to enable computers to execute cognitive processes such as learning and improving from previous experiences and solving complicated issues. Many first-order stochastic optimization methods have been used to solve the optimization model of ML. These algorithms adopt Barzilai-Borwein (BB) step size instead of fixed or diminishing step size to improve performance. However, the BB step size format involves fractional calculation, which inevitably leads to a zero denominator, especially when the objective function is non-convex. The BB technique will be violated if the denominator is near 0 or even negative. To improve the computation of the step size, a Positive Defined Stabilized Barzilai-Borwein (PDSBB) approach is introduced in this paper. Integrating PDSBB with the stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) approach, a new method SVRG-PDSBB is proposed. Numerical experiments have shown that the new algorithm has stabilized the performance of the new step size, which successfully avoiding zero denominators and effectively solving the common problems in machine learning. The convergence of SVRG-PDSBB is theoretically and numerically proven, and the effectiveness of the new algorithm is shown by comparison with other algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much recent research effort has been directed to the development of efficient algorithms for solving minimax problems with theoretical convergence guarantees due to the relevance of these problems to a few emergent applications. In this paper, we propose a unified single-loop alternating gradient projection (AGP) algorithm for solving smooth nonconvex-(strongly) concave and (strongly) convex–nonconcave minimax problems. AGP employs simple gradient projection steps for updating the primal and dual variables alternatively at each iteration. We show that it can find an ε -stationary point of the objective function in O ε - 2 (resp. O ε - 4 ) iterations under nonconvex-strongly concave (resp. nonconvex–concave) setting. Moreover, its gradient complexity to obtain an ε -stationary point of the objective function is bounded by O ε - 2 (resp., O ε - 4 ) under the strongly convex–nonconcave (resp., convex–nonconcave) setting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a simple and unified single-loop algorithm is developed for solving both nonconvex-(strongly) concave and (strongly) convex–nonconcave minimax problems. Moreover, the complexity results for solving the latter (strongly) convex–nonconcave minimax problems have never been obtained before in the literature. Numerical results show the efficiency of the proposed AGP algorithm. Furthermore, we extend the AGP algorithm by presenting a block alternating proximal gradient (BAPG) algorithm for solving more general multi-block nonsmooth nonconvex-(strongly) concave and (strongly) convex–nonconcave minimax problems. We can similarly establish the gradient complexity of the proposed algorithm under these four different settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network virtualization is a technology proven to be a key enabling a family of strategies in different targets, such as energy efficiency, economic revenue, network usage, adaptability or failure protection. Network virtualization allows us to adapt the needs of a network to new circumstances, resulting in greater flexibility. The allocation decisions of the demands onto the physical network resources impact the costs and the benefits. Therefore it is one of the major current problems, called virtual network embedding (VNE). Many algorithms have been proposed recently in the literature to solve the VNE problem for different targets. Due to the current successful rise of artificial intelligence, it has been widely used recently to solve technological problems. In this context, this paper investigates the requirements and analyses the use of the Q-learning algorithm for energy-efficient VNE. The results achieved validate the strategy and show clear improvements in terms of cost/revenue and energy savings, compared to traditional algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research on artistic psychological intervention to judge emotional fluctuations by extracting emotional features from interactive vocal signals has become a research topic with great potential for development. Based on the interactive vocal music instruction theory of emotion recognition, this paper studies the design of artistic psychological intervention system. This paper uses the vocal music emotion recognition algorithm to first train the interactive recognition network, in which the input is a row vector composed of different vocal music characteristics, and finally recognizes the vocal music of different emotional categories, which solves the problem of low data coupling in the artistic psychological intervention system. Among them, the vocal music emotion recognition experiment based on the interactive recognition network is mainly carried out from six aspects: the number of iterative training, the vocal music instruction rate, the number of emotion recognition signal nodes in the artistic psychological intervention layer, the number of sample sets, different feature combinations, and the number of emotion types. The input data of the system is a training class learning video, and actions and expressions need to be recognized before scoring. In the simulation process, before the completion of the sample indicators is unbalanced, the R language statistical analysis tool is used to balance the existing unbalanced data based on the artificial data synthesis method, and 279 uniformly classified samples are obtained. The 279 ∗ 7 dataset was used for statistical identification of the participants. The experimental results show that under the guidance of four different interactive vocal music, the vocal emotion recognition rate is between 65.85%-91.00%, which promotes the intervention of music therapy on artistic psychological intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the offline assignment of fixed priorities in partitioned preemptive real-time systems where tasks have precedence constraints. This problem is crucial in this type of systems, as having a good fixed priority assignment allows for an efficient use of the processing resources while meeting all the deadlines. In the literature, we can find several proposals to solve this problem, which offer varying trade-offs between the quality of their results and their computational complexities. In this paper , we propose a new approach, leveraging existing algorithms that are widely exploited in the field of Machine Learning: Gradient Descent, the Adam Optimizer, and Gradient Noise. We show how to adapt these algorithms to the problem of fixed priority assignment in conjunction with existing worst-case response time analyses. We demonstrate the performance of our proposal on synthetic task-sets with different sizes. This evaluation shows that our proposal is able to find more schedulable solutions than previous heuristics, approximating optimal but intractable algorithms such as MILP or brute-force, while requiring reasonable execution times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the useful knowledge representation tools, which can describe the joint probability distribution between some random variables with a graphical model and can be trained by a dataset, is the Bayesian network (BN). A BN is composed of a network structure and a conditional probability distribution table for each node. Discovering an optimal BN structure is an NP‐hard optimization problem that various meta‐heuristic algorithms are applied to solve this problem by researchers. The genetic algorithms, ant colony optimization, evolutionary programming, artificial bee colony, and bacterial foraging optimization are some of the meta‐heuristic methods to solve this problem using a dataset. Most of these methods are applying a scoring metric to generate the best network structure from a set of candidates. A Fixed Structure Learning Automata‐Based (FSLA‐B) algorithm is presented in this paper to solve the structure learning problem of BNs. There is a fixed structure learning automaton for each pair of vertices in the BN's graph structure in the proposed algorithm. The action of this automaton determines the presence and direction of an edge between the vertices. The proposed algorithm performs a guided search procedure using the FSLA and escapes from local optimums. Several datasets are utilised in this paper to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. By performing various experiments, multiple meta‐heuristic algorithms are compared with the introduced new one. The obtained results represented that the proposed algorithm could produce competitive results and find the near‐optimal solution for the BN structure learning problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional English teaching system has certain problems in the acquisition of teaching resources and the innovation of teaching models. In order to improve the effect of subsequent English online teaching, this paper improves the machine learning algorithm to make it a core algorithm that can be used by artificial intelligence systems. Moreover, this paper combines the WBIETS system to expand the system function, analyzes the needs of the English network teaching system, and constructs the system function modules and logical structure. The data layer, logic layer, and presentation layer in the system constructed in this paper are independent of each other and can be effectively expanded when subsequent requirements change. In addition, this paper solves the problem of acquiring English teaching resources through the WBIETS system. To evaluate the performance of the English network teaching system, this paper performs comprehensive mathematical and experimental analysis. The experimental results show that the system constructed in this paper basically meets the actual teaching requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is devoted to the problem of class imbalance in machine learning, focusing on the intrusion detection of rare classes in computer networks. The problem of class imbalance occurs when one class heavily outnumbers examples from the other classes. In this paper, we are particularly interested in classifiers, as pattern recognition and anomaly detection could be solved as a classification problem. As still a major part of data network traffic of any organization network is benign, and malignant traffic is rare, researchers therefore have to deal with a class imbalance problem. Substantial research has been undertaken in order to identify these methods or data features that allow to accurately identify these attacks. But the usual tactic to deal with the imbalance class problem is to label all malignant traffic as one class and then solve the binary classification problem. In this paper, however, we choose not to group or to drop rare classes but instead investigate what could be done in order to achieve good multi-class classification efficiency. Rare class records were up-sampled using SMOTE method (Chawla et al., 2002) to a preset ratio targets. Experiments with the 3 network traffic datasets, namely CIC-IDS2017, CSE-CIC-IDS2018 (Sharafaldin et al., 2018) and LITNET-2020 (Damasevicius et al., 2020) were performed aiming to achieve reliable recognition of rare malignant classes available in these datasets. Popular machine learning algorithms were chosen for comparison of their readiness to support rare class detection. Related algorithm hyper parameters were tuned within a wide range of values, different data feature selection methods were used and tests were executed with and without over-sampling to test the multiple class problem classification performance of rare classes. Machine learning algorithms ranking based on Precision, Balanced Accuracy Score, G ¯ , and prediction error Bias and Variance decomposition, show that decision tree ensembles (Adaboost, Random Forest Trees and Gradient Boosting Classifier) performed best on the network intrusion datasets used in this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to solve the problems of low learning efficiency and slow convergence speed when mobile robot uses reinforcement learning method for path planning in complex environment, a reinforcement learning method based on each round path planning result is proposed. Firstly, the algorithm adds obstacle learning matrix to improve the success rate of path planning; and introduces heuristic reward to speed up the learning process by reducing the search space; then proposes a method of dynamically adjusting the exploration factor to balance the exploration and utilization in path planning, so as to further improve the performance of the algorithm. Finally, the simulation experiment in grid environment shows that compared with Q-learning algorithm, the improved algorithm not only shortens the average path length of the robot to reach the target position, but also speeds up the learning efficiency of the algorithm, so that the robot can find the optimal path more quickly. The code of EPRQL algorithm proposed in this paper has been published to GitHub: https://github.com/panpanpanguoguoqian/mypaper1.git. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of learning automata from example traces (but no equivalence or membership queries) is fundamental in automata learning theory and practice. In this paper, we study this problem for finite-state machines with inputs and outputs, and in particular for Moore machines. We develop three algorithms for solving this problem: (1) the PTAP algorithm, which transforms a set of input–output traces into an incomplete Moore machine and then completes the machine with self-loops; (2) the PRPNI algorithm, which uses the well-known RPNI algorithm for automata learning to learn a product of automata encoding a Moore machine; and (3) the MooreMI algorithm, which directly learns a Moore machine using PTAP extended with state merging. We prove that MooreMI has the fundamental identification in the limit property. We compare the algorithms experimentally in terms of the size of the learned machine and several notions of accuracy, introduced in this paper. We also carry out a performance comparison against two existing tools (LearnLib and flexfringe). Finally, we compare with OSTIA, an algorithm that learns a more general class of transducers and find that OSTIA generally does not learn a Moore machine, even when fed with a characteristic sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To solve the problem of low accuracy in the traditional FunkSVD recommendation algorithm, an improved FunkSVD algorithm (RM-FS) is proposed. RM-FS is an improvement of the traditional FunkSVD algorithm, using RMSProp, a deep learning optimization algorithm. The RM-FS algorithm can not only solve the problem of reduced accuracy of the traditional FunkSVD algorithm because of iterative oscillations but also alleviate the impact of data sparseness on the accuracy of the algorithm, achieving the effect of improving the accuracy of the traditional algorithm. The experimental results show that the RM-FS algorithm proposed in this paper effectively improves the accuracy of the recommendation algorithm, which is better than the traditional FunkSVD recommendation algorithm and other improved FunkSVD algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multimodal tasks based on attention mechanism and language face numerous problems. Based on multimodal hierarchical attention mechanism and genetic neural network, this paper studies the application of image segmentation algorithm in data completion and 3D scene reconstruction. The algorithm refers to the process of concentrating attention that humans subjectively pay attention to and calculates the difference between each pixel in the genetic neural network test image in the color space and the average value of the target image, which solves the problem of static feature maps and dynamic feature maps of image sequences. In addition, in view of the problem that the number of attention enhancement feature extraction modules is too large and the parameters are too large, the recursive mechanism is used as the feature extraction branch, and new model parameters are not added when the network depth is increased. The simulation results show that the accuracy of the improved image saliency detection algorithm based on the attention mechanism reaches 89.7%, and the difference between the average value of the single-point pixel and the target image is reduced to 0.132, which further promotes the practicability and reliability of the image segmentation model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the order picking process of the warehouse center, considering the rapid increase in the volume of orders arriving at the picking center at the time of the promotional festival, a hybrid operation mode with multiple picking tables is used to meet the picking requirements of the huge number of real-time orders. Therefore, in this paper, a hybrid picking mode is proposed, taking into account both the idle degree of picking stations and their order item centers of gravity, and a new reinforcement learning algorithm embedding mechanism (PRL) with placeholder control is designed to solve the problem of a huge number of real-time item orders arriving at the picking center system on promotional holidays and in inconsistent quantities, and numerical simulations are performed for this algorithm. The experimental results show that the PRL algorithm in hybrid picking mode can handle a huge number of orders simultaneously and improve picking efficiency effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose to extend the standard Convolutional Dictionary Learning problem to a tensor representation where the activations are constrained to be “low-rank” through a Canonical Polyadic decomposition. We show that this additional constraint increases the robustness of the CDL with respect to noise and improve the interpretability of the final results. In addition, we discuss in detail the advantages of this representation and introduce two algorithms, based on ADMM or FISTA, that efficiently solve this problem. We show that by exploiting the low rank property of activations, they achieve lower complexity than the main CDL algorithms. Finally, we evaluate our approach on a wide range of experiments, highlighting the modularity and the advantages of this tensorial low-rank formulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stochastic unit commitment is an efficient method for grid operation in the presence of significant uncertainties. An example is an operation during a predicted hurricane with uncertain line out-ages. However, the solution quality comes at the cost of substantial computational burden, which makes its adoption challenging. This paper evaluates some possible ways that machine learning can be used to reduce this computational burden. First, a set of feasibility studies is conducted. Results suggest that using machine learning as an assistant to the stochastic unit commitment solver is more advantageous than using it as a standalone solver. In particular, the machine learning model is trained to facilitate solving the problem by determining the unnecessary constraints that can be removed from the original problem without affecting the final accuracy. The variables that can be used as input features/predictors or outputs for the machine learning model are determined through feasibility studies. Then, an algorithm to train and utilize a machine learning model is proposed. The method is tested on a 500-bus synthetic South Carolina system. Various test cases show an average reduction in solution time by more than 90% by using the trained machine learning model to assist the stochastic unit commitment solver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating set similarity and detecting highly similar sets are fundamental problems in areas such as databases and machine learning. MinHash is a well-known technique for approximating Jaccard similarity of sets and has been successfully used for many applications. Its two compressed versions, $b$ b -bit MinHash and Odd Sketch, can significantly reduce the memory usage of the MinHash, especially for estimating high similarities (i.e., similarities around 1). Although MinHash can be applied to static sets as well as streaming sets, of which elements are given in a streaming fashion, unfortunately, $b$ b -bit MinHash and Odd Sketch fail to deal with streaming data. To solve this problem, we previously designed a memory-efficient sketch method, MaxLogHash, to accurately estimate Jaccard similarities in streaming sets. Compared with MinHash, our method uses smaller sized registers (each register consists of less than 7 bits) to build a compact sketch for each set. In this paper, we further develop a faster method, MaxLogOPH++. Compared with MaxLogHash, MaxLogOPH++ reduces the time complexity for updating each coming element from $O(k)$ O (k) to $O(1)$ O (1) with a small additional memory. We conduct experiments on a variety of datasets, and experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reinforcement learning algorithms based on policy gradient may fall into local optimal due to gradient disappearance during the update process, which in turn affects the exploration ability of the reinforcement learning agent. In order to solve the above problem, in this paper, the cross-entropy method (CEM) in evolution policy, maximum mean difference (MMD), and twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm (TD3) are combined to propose a diversity evolutionary policy deep reinforcement learning (DEPRL) algorithm. By using the maximum mean discrepancy as a measure of the distance between different policies, some of the policies in the population maximize the distance between them and the previous generation of policies while maximizing the cumulative return during the gradient update. Furthermore, combining the cumulative returns and the distance between policies as the fitness of the population encourages more diversity in the offspring policies, which in turn can reduce the risk of falling into local optimal due to the disappearance of the gradient. The results in the MuJoCo test environment show that DEPRL has achieved excellent performance on continuous control tasks; especially in the Ant-v2 environment, the return of DEPRL ultimately achieved a nearly 20% improvement compared to TD3. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With growth in the number of smart devices and advancements in their hardware, in recent years, data-driven machine learning techniques have drawn significant attention. However, due to privacy and communication issues, it is not possible to collect this data at a centralized location. Federated learning is a machine learning setting where the centralized location trains a learning model over remote devices. Federated learning algorithms cannot be employed in the real world scenarios unless they consider unreliable and resource-constrained nature of the wireless medium. In this paper, we propose a federated learning algorithm that is suitable for cellular wireless networks. We prove its convergence, and provide a sub-optimal scheduling policy that improves the convergence rate. We also study the effect of local computation steps and communication steps on the convergence of the proposed algorithm. We prove, in practice, federated learning algorithms may solve a different problem than the one that they have been employed for if the unreliability of wireless channels is neglected. Finally, through numerous experiments on real and synthetic datasets, we demonstrate the convergence of our proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection is one of the main steps in preprocessing data in machine learning, and its goal is to reduce features by removing additional and noisy features. Feature selection methods and feature reduction in a dataset must consider the accuracy of the classifying algorithms. Meta-heuristic algorithms serve as the most successful and promising methods to solve this problem. Symbiotic Organisms Search (SOS) is one of the most successful meta-heuristic algorithms inspired by organisms' interaction in nature called mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism. In this paper, three SOS-based binary approaches are offered to solve the feature selection problem. In the first and second approaches, several S-shaped transfer functions and several Chaotic Tent Function-based V-shaped transfer functions called BSOSST and BSOSVT are used to make the binary SOS (BSOS). In the third approach, an advanced BSOS based on changing SOS and the chaotic Tent function operators called EBCSOS is provided. The EBCSOS algorithm uses the chaotic Tent function and the Gaussian mutation to increase usefulness and exploration. Moreover, two new operators, i.e., BMPT and BCPT, are suggested to make the commensalism and mutualism stage binary based on a chaotic function to solve the feature selection problem. Finally, the proposed BSOSST and BSOSVT methods and the advanced version of EBCSOS were implemented on 25 datasets than the basic algorithm's binary meta-heuristic algorithms. Various experiments demonstrated that the proposed EBCSOS algorithm outperformed other methods in terms of several features and accuracy. To further confirm the proposed EBCSOS algorithm, the problem of detecting spam E-mails was applied, with the results of this experiment indicating that the proposed EBCSOS algorithm significantly improved the accuracy and speed of all categories in detecting spam E-mails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared with the traditional negative selection algorithms produce detectors randomly in whole state space, the boundary-fixed negative selection algorithm (FB-NSA) non-randomly produces a layer of detectors closely surrounding the self space. However, the false alarm rate of FB-NSA is higher than many anomaly detection methods. Its detection rate is very low when normal data close to the boundary of state space. This paper proposed an improved FB-NSA (IFB-NSA) to solve these problems. IFB-NSA enlarges the state space and adds auxiliary detectors in appropriate places to improve the detection rate, and uses variable-sized training samples to reduce the false alarm rate. We present experiments on synthetic datasets and the UCI Iris dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. The results show that IFB-NSA outperforms FB-NSA and the other anomaly detection methods in most of the cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multigranulation rough set (MGRS) theory provides an effective manner for the problem solving by making use of multiple equivalence relations. As the information systems always dynamically change over time due to the addition or deletion of multiple objects, how to efficiently update the approximations in multigranulation spaces by making fully utilize the previous results becomes a crucial challenge. Incremental learning provides an efficient manner because of the incorporation of both the current information and previously obtained knowledge. In spite of the success of incremental learning, well-studied findings performed to update approximations in multigranulation spaces have relatively been scarce. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose matrix-based incremental approaches for updating approximations from the perspective of multigranulation when multiple objects vary over time. Based on the matrix characterization of multigranulation approximations, the incremental mechanisms for relevant matrices are systematically investigated while adding or deleting multiple objects. Subsequently, in accordance with the incremental mechanisms, the corresponding incremental algorithms for maintaining multigranulation approximations are developed to reduce the redundant computations. Finally, extensive experiments on eight datasets available from the University of California at Irvine (UCI) are conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed incremental algorithms in comparison with the existing non-incremental algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider first-order convergence theory and algorithms for solving a class of non-convex non-concave min-max saddle-point problems, whose objective function is weakly convex in the variables of minimization and weakly concave in the variables of maximization. It has many important applications in machine learning including training Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs). We propose an algorithmic framework motivated by the inexact proximal point method, where the weakly monotone variational inequality (VI) corresponding to the original min-max problem is solved through approximately solving a sequence of strongly monotone VIs constructed by adding a strongly monotone mapping to the original gradient mapping. We prove first-order convergence to a nearly stationary solution of the original min-max problem of the generic algorithmic framework and establish different rates by employing different algorithms for solving each strongly monotone VI. Experiments verify the convergence theory and also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods on training GANs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The qualities of new data used in the sequential learning phase of the online sequential extreme learning machine algorithm (OS-ELM) have a significant impact on the performance of OS-ELM. This paper proposes a novel data filter mechanism for OS-ELM from the perspective of fuzziness and a fuzziness-based online sequential extreme learning machine algorithm (FOS-ELM). In FOS-ELM, when new data arrive, a fuzzy classifier first picks out the meaningful data according to the fuzziness of each sample. Specifically, the new samples with high-output fuzziness are selected and then used in sequential learning. The experimental results on eight binary classification problems and three multiclass classification problems have shown that FOS-ELM updated by the new samples with high-output fuzziness has better generalization performance than OS-ELM. Since the unimportant data are discarded before sequential learning, FOS-ELM can save more memory and have higher computational efficiency. In addition, FOS-ELM can handle data one-by-one or chunk-by-chunk with fixed or varying sizes. The relationship between the fuzziness of new samples and the model performance is also studied in this paper, which is expected to provide some useful guidelines for improving the generalization ability of online sequential learning algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel distributed elastic random weights network (DERWN) is proposed to achieve robust surface reconstruction from highly noisy point clouds sampled from real surface. The designed elastic regularization with l 1 and l 2 penalty items makes the network more resilient to noise and effectively capture the intrinsic shape of surface. Sparsity constraints of output weight vectors and threshold-based nodes removal are conducive to determining appropriate number of hidden nodes of network and optimizing the distribution of hidden nodes. The distributed optimization manner in DERWN on the basis of alternating direction method of multipliers solves the problem that traditional RWN learning algorithm suffers from the limitation of memory with large-scale data. The proposed DERWN achieves a solution to global problem by solving local subproblems coordinately. Experimental results show that the proposed DERWN algorithm can robustly reconstruct the unknown surface in case of highly noisy data with satisfying accuracy and smoothness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The usefulness of machine learning algorithms has led to their widespread adoption prior to the development of a conceptual framework for making sense of them. One common response to this situation is to say that machine learning suffers from a "black box problem." That is, machine learning algorithms are "opaque" to human users, failing to be "interpretable" or "explicable" in terms that would render categorization procedures "understandable." The purpose of this paper is to challenge the widespread agreement about the existence and importance of a black box problem. The first section argues that "interpretability" and cognates lack precise meanings when applied to algorithms. This makes the concepts difficult to use when trying to solve the problems that have motivated the call for interpretability (etc.). Furthermore, since there is no adequate account of the concepts themselves, it is not possible to assess whether particular technical features supply formal definitions of those concepts. The second section argues that there are ways of being a responsible user of these algorithms that do not require interpretability (etc.). In many cases in which a black box problem is cited, interpretability is a means to a further end such as justification or non-discrimination. Since addressing these problems need not involve something that looks like an "interpretation" (etc.) of an algorithm, the focus on interpretability artificially constrains the solution space by characterizing one possible solution as the problem itself. Where possible, discussion should be reformulated in terms of the ends of interpretability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been successfully applied in many fields. In MARL, the policy evaluation problem is one of crucial problems. In order to solve this problem, distributed Temporal-Difference (TD) learning algorithm is one of the most popular methods in a cooperative manner. Despite its empirical success, however, the theory of the adaptive variant of distributed TD learning still remain limited. To fill this gap, we propose an adaptive distributed temporal-difference algorithm (referred to as MS - ADTD) under Markovian sampling over time-varying networks. Furthermore, we rigorously analyze the convergence of MS - ADTD , the theoretical results show that the local estimation can converge linearly to the optimal neighborhood. Meanwhile, the theoretical results are verified by simulation experiments. • This paper proposes a distributed adaptive TD learning algorithm under Markovian sampling. • It theoretically analyzes the non-asymptotic convergence performance of the proposed algorithm. • It verifies the performance of the proposed algorithm by experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In reinforcement learning (RL), the exploration/exploitation (E/E) dilemma is a very crucial issue, which can be described as searching between the exploration of the environment to find more profitable actions, and the exploitation of the best empirical actions for the current state. We focus on the single trajectory RL problem where an agent is interacting with a partially unknown MDP over single trajectories, and try to deal with the E/E in this setting. Given the reward function, we try to find a good E/E strategy to address the MDPs under some MDP distribution. This is achieved by selecting the best strategy in mean over a potential MDP distribution from a large set of candidate strategies, which is done by exploiting single trajectories drawn from plenty of MDPs. In this paper, we mainly make the following contributions: (1) We discuss the strategy-selector algorithm based on formula set and polynomial function. (2) We provide the theoretical and experimental regret analysis of the learned strategy under an given MDP distribution. (3) We compare these methods with the 'state-of-the-art' Bayesian RL method experimentally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on non-iterative approaches in training feed-forward neural networks, this special issue includes 12 papers to share the latest progress, current challenges, and potential applications of this topic. This editorial presents a background of the special issue and a brief introduction to the 12 contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning from categorical data is a critical yet challenging task. Current research focuses on either leveraging the complex interaction between and within categorical values to generate a numerical representation, or designing a model that can tackle this types of data directly. However, both of these paradigms overlook the relation between the data characteristics and learning model hypothesis. In this paper, we propose a model-aware categorical data embedding framework that jointly reveals the intrinsic categorical data characteristics and optimizes the fitness of the representation for the follow-up learning model. An ELM-aware and a SVM-aware representation methods have been instantiated under this framework. Extensive experiments of classification with the embedded representation on 17 data sets demonstrate that the proposed framework can significantly improve the categorical data representation performance compared with state-of-the-art competitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithms are shown to have enormous potential in solving multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs). However, most MOPSO is difficult to balance the exploration and exploitation, which may cause some problems to find true Pareto fronts when tackling some complex MOPs. A multi-objective decomposition particle swarm optimization based on completion-checking (C-DMOPSO) is improved in this paper. The updating mode of velocity is changed dynamically according to the algorithm's evolutionary process, which balances the exploration and exploitation effectively. In addition, simulated binary crossover and opposition-based learning are adopted to improve the diversity, and the archive set strategy is added to store the optimal solutions. Furthermore, polynomial mutation is performed in archive. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is tested by nineteen standard functions, including ZDT, DTLZ and UF, and the experimental results show that C-DMOPSO performs better on most of test problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Incremental learning of neural networks has attracted much interest in recent years due to its wide applicability to large scale data sets and to distributed learning scenarios. Moreover, nonstationary learning paradigms have also emerged as a subarea of study in Machine Learning literature due to the problems of classical methods when dealing with data set shifts. In this paper we present an algorithm to train single layer neural networks with nonlinear output functions that take into account incremental, nonstationary and distributed learning scenarios. Moreover, it is demonstrated that introducing a regularization term into the proposed model is equivalent to choosing a particular initialization for the devised training algorithm, which may be suitable for real time systems that have to work under noisy conditions. In addition, the algorithm includes some previous models as special cases and can be used as a block component to build more complex models such as multilayer perceptrons, extending the capacity of these models to incremental, nonstationary and distributed learning paradigms. In this paper, the proposed algorithm is tested with standard data sets and compared with previous approaches, demonstrating its higher accuracy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Support vector machines (SVMs), with their roots in Statistical Learning Theory (SLT) and optimization methods, have become powerful tools for problem solution in machine learning. SVMs reduce most machine learning problems to optimization problems and optimization lies at the heart of SVMs. Lots of SVM algorithms involve solving not only convex problems, such as linear programming, quadratic programming, second order cone programming, semi-definite programming, but also non-convex and more general optimization problems, such as integer programming, semi-infinite programming, bi-level programming and so on. The purpose of this paper is to understand SVM from the optimization point of view, review several representative optimization models in SVMs, their applications in economics, in order to promote the research interests in both optimization-based SVMs theory and economics applications. This paper starts with summarizing and explaining the nature of SVMs. It then proceeds to discuss optimization models for SVM following three major themes. First, least squares SVM, twin SVM, AUC Maximizing SVM, and fuzzy SVM are discussed for standard problems. Second, support vector ordinal machine, semisupervised SVM, Universum SVM, robust SVM, knowledge based SVM and multi-instance SVM are then presented for nonstandard problems. Third, we explore other important issues such as lp-norm SVM for feature selection, LOOSVM based on minimizing LOO error bound, probabilistic outputs for SVM, and rule extraction from SVM. At last, several applications of SVMs to financial forecasting, bankruptcy prediction, credit risk analysis are introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the loopy belief propagation (LBP) algorithm applied to Gaussian graphical models. It is known for Gaussian belief propagation that, if LBP converges, LBP computes the exact posterior means but incorrect variances. In this paper, we analytically derive the posterior variances for some special structured graphs and clarify the accuracy of LBP. For the graphs of a single cycle, we derive a rigorous solution for the posterior variances and thereby find the quantity that determines the accuracy of LBP. Based on this result, we state a necessary condition for LBP convergence. The quantity above also plays an important role in graphs of a single cycle with arbitrary trees. For arbitrary topological graphs, we consider the situation where correlations between any pair of nodes are comparatively small and show analytically the principal values that determine the accuracy of LBP. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper features the study of global optimization problems and numerical methods of their solution. Such problems are computationally expensive since the objective function can be multi-extremal, nondifferentiable, and, as a rule, given in the form of a "black box". This study used a deterministic algorithm for finding the global extremum. This algorithm is based neither on the concept of multistart, nor nature-inspired algorithms. The article provides computational rules of the one-dimensional algorithm and the nested optimization scheme which could be applied for solving multidimensional problems. Please note that the solution complexity of global optimization problems essentially depends on the presence of multiple local extrema. In this paper, we apply machine learning methods to identify regions of attraction of local minima. The use of local optimization algorithms in the selected regions can significantly accelerate the convergence of global search as it could reduce the number of search trials in the vicinity of local minima. The results of computational experiments carried out on several hundred global optimization problems of different dimensionalities presented in the paper confirm the effect of accelerated convergence (in terms of the number of search trials required to solve a problem with a given accuracy). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dictionary learning problem has become an active topic for decades. Most existing learning methods train the dictionary to adapt to a particular class of signals. But as the number of the dictionary atoms is increased to represent the signals much more sparsely, the coherence between the atoms becomes higher. According to the greedy and compressed sensing theories, this goes against the implementation of sparse coding. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to learn the dictionary that minimizes the sparse representation error according to the training signals with the coherence taken into consideration. The coherence is constrained by making the Gram matrix of the desired dictionary approximate to an identity matrix of proper dimension. The method for handling the proposed model is mainly based on the alternating minimization procedure and, in each step, the closed-form solution is derived. A series of experiments on synthetic data and audio signals is executed to demonstrate the promising performance of the learnt incoherent dictionary and the superiority of the learning method to the existing ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generally, training images are essential for a computer vision model to classify specific object class accurately. Unfortunately, there exist countless number of different object classes in real world, and it is almost impossible for a computer vision model to obtain a complete training images for each of the different object class. To overcome this problem, zero-shot learning algorithm was emerged to learn unknown object classes from a set of known object classes information. Among these methods, attributes and image hierarchy are the widely used methods. In this paper, we combine both the strength of attributes and image hierarchy by proposing Attributes Relationship Model (ARM) to perform zero-shot learning. We tested the efficiency of the proposed algorithm on Animals with Attributes (AwA) dataset and manage to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy (50.61%) compare to other recent methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning from imbalanced data is a problem which arises in many real-world scenarios, so does the need to build classifiers able to predict more than one class label simultaneously (multilabel classification). Dealing with imbalance by means of resampling methods is an approach that has been deeply studied lately, primarily in the context of traditional (non-multilabel) classification. In this paper the process of synthetic instance generation for multilabel datasets (MLDs) is studied and MLSMOTE (Multilabel Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique), a new algorithm aimed to produce synthetic instances for imbalanced MLDs, is proposed. An extensive review on how imbalance in the multilabel context has been tackled in the past is provided, along with a thorough experimental study aimed to verify the benefits of the proposed algorithm. Several multilabel classification algorithms and other multilabel oversampling methods are considered, as well as ensemble-based algorithms for imbalanced multilabel classification. The empirical analysis shows that MLSMOTE is able to improve the classification results produced by existent proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Application of evolutionary computation techniques is relatively novel for machine learning. Motivated by different types of evolutionary computation techniques, different types of automatic programming were proposed. Biogeography-Based Optimization (BBO) is a new evolutionary algorithm that is inspired by the science of biogeography and has been shown to be competitive to other population-based algorithms. Inspired by biogeography theory and previous results, in this paper Biogeography-Based Programming (BBP) is proposed as a new type of automatic programming for creating polynomial regression models. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed BBP, a number of experiments were carried out on a suite set of benchmark functions and the results were also compared with several existing automatic programming algorithms. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis was performed for the parameter settings of the proposed BBP. The results indicate that the proposed model is promising in terms of success rate and accuracy and it performs better than other algorithms investigated in this consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new sequential learning algorithm is constructed by combining the Online Sequential Extreme Learning Machine (OS-ELM) and Kalman filter regression. The Kalman Online Sequential Extreme Learning Machine (KOSELM) handles the problem of multicollinearity of the OS-ELM, which can generate poor predictions and unstable models. The KOSELM learns the training data one-by-one or chunk-by-chunk by adjusting the variance of the output weights through the Kalman filter. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been validated on benchmark regression datasets, and the results show that KOSELM can achieve a higher learning accuracy than OS-ELM and its related extensions. A statistical validation for the differences of the accuracy for all algorithms is performed, and the results confirm that KOSELM has better stability than ReOS-ELM, TOSELM and LS-IELM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community structure is a common and important property of complex networks. The detection of communities has great significance for understanding the function and organization of networks. Generally, community detection can be formulated as a modularity optimization problem. However, traditional modularity optimization based algorithms have the resolution limit that they may fail to find communities which are smaller than a certain size. In this paper, we propose a cellular learning automata based algorithm for detecting communities in complex networks. Our algorithm models the whole network as an irregular cellular learning automata (ICLA) and reveals the optimal community structure through the evolution of the cellular learning automata. By interacting with both the global and local environments, our algorithm effectively solves the resolution limit problem of modularity optimization. The experiments on both synthetic and real-world networks demonstrate that our algorithm is effective and efficient at detecting community structure in complex networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both cost-sensitive classification and online learning have been extensively studied in data mining and machine learning communities, respectively. However, very limited study addresses an important intersecting problem, that is, “Cost-Sensitive Online Classification”. In this paper, we formally study this problem, and propose a new framework for Cost-Sensitive Online Classification by directly optimizing cost-sensitive measures using online gradient descent techniques. Specifically, we propose two novel cost-sensitive online classification algorithms, which are designed to directly optimize two well-known cost-sensitive measures: (i) maximization of weighted sum of sensitivity and specificity, and (ii) minimization of weighted misclassification cost. We analyze the theoretical bounds of the cost-sensitive measures made by the proposed algorithms, and extensively examine their empirical performance on a variety of cost-sensitive online classification tasks. Finally, we demonstrate the application of the proposed technique for solving several online anomaly detection tasks, showing that the proposed technique could be a highly efficient and effective tool to tackle cost-sensitive online classification tasks in various application domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instance selection is one of the most important preprocessing steps in many machine learning tasks. Due to the increasing size of the problems, removing useless, erroneous or noisy instances is frequently an initial step that is performed before other data mining algorithms are applied. Instance selection as part of this data reduction task is one of the most relevant problems in current data mining research. Over the past decades, many different instance selection algorithms have been proposed, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. However, as in the case of classification, it is unlikely that a single instance selection algorithm would be able to achieve good results across many different datasets and application fields. In classification, one of the most successful ways of consistently improving the performance of a single learner is the construction of ensembles using boosting methods. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for instance selection based on boosting instance selection algorithms in the same way boosting is applied to classification. The proposed approach opens a new field of research in which to apply the many techniques developed for boosting classifiers, for instance selection and other data reduction techniques such as feature selection and simultaneous instance and feature selection. Using 60 datasets for balanced problems and 45 datasets for class-imbalanced problems, the experiments reported show a clear improvement in several state-of-the-art instance selection algorithms using the proposed methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection (FS) is recognized as one of the majority public and challenging problems in the Machine Learning domain. FS can be examined as an optimization problem that needs an effective optimizer to determine its optimal subset of more informative features. This paper proposes a wrapper FS method that combines chaotic maps (CMs) and binary Group Search Optimizer (GSO) called CGSO, which is used to solve the FS problem. In this method, five chaotic maps are incorporated with the GSO algorithm's main procedures, namely, Logistic, Piecewise, Singer, Sinusoidal, and Tent. The GSO algorithm is used as a search strategy, while k-NN is employed as an induction algorithm. The objective function is to integrate three main objectives: maximizing the classification accuracy value, minimizing the number of selected features, and minimizing the complexity of generated k-NN models. To evaluate the proposed methods' performance, twenty well-known UCI datasets are used and compared with other well-known published methods in the literature. The obtained results reveal the superiority of the proposed methods in outperforming other well-known methods, especially when using binary GSO with Tent CM. Finally, it is a beneficial method to be utilized in systems that require FS pre-processing. • A novel feature selection method is proposed for classification task. • Five Chaotic Group Search Optimizers are investigated. • Twenty UCI datasets were used in the experiments. • Our methods got a higher accuracy results using a fewer number of features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Similarity learning plays a fundamental role in the problem of database retrieval and nearest classification problem. Traditional pairwise similarity measure ignores the contextual information, and the Graph Transduction (GT) has been proposed as a contextual similarity learning algorithm to utilize the contextual information, which is embedded in a nearest neighbor graph. On main shortage of this method is that it is difficult to choose the optimal graph since different graphs may focus on different aspects of the objects. Co-Transduction (CT) is lately proposed by fusing two different graphs. In this paper, we generalize this problem by using the ensemble of many candidate graphs with different models and parameters for transduction, by assuming that the optimal graph could be obtained by the weighted linear ensemble of these candidate graphs. The similarities and graph weights are modeled within one unified objective function, and optimized alternately in an iterative algorithm. The new proposed algorithm, named as Ensemble Transduction (ET), is tested on two challenging tasks and the experimental results show that it can outperform both the GT and CT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm to solve the problem of object tracking across multiple non-overlapping cameras by learning inter-camera transfer models. The transfer models are divided into two parts according to different kinds of cues, i.e. spatio-temporal cues and appearance cues. To learn spatio-temporal transfer models across cameras, an unsupervised topology recovering approach based on N-neighbor accumulated cross-correlations is proposed, which estimates the topology of a non-overlapping multi-camera network. Different from previous methods, the proposed topology recovering method can deal with large amounts of data without considering the size of time window. To learn inter-camera appearance transfer models, a color transfer method is used to model the changes of color characteristics across cameras, which has an advantage of low requirements to training samples, making update efficient when illumination conditions change. The experiments are performed on different datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Traditional cross-domain learning methods transfer learning from a source domain to a target domain. In this paper, we propose the multiple-domain learning problem for several equally treated domains. The multiple-domain learning problem assumes that samples from different domains have different distributions, but share the same feature and class label spaces. Each domain could be a target domain, while also be a source domain for other domains. A novel multiple-domain representation method is proposed for the multiple-domain learning problem. This method is based on nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), and tries to learn a basis matrix and coding vectors for samples, so that the domain distribution mismatch among different domains will be reduced under an extended variation of the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) criterion. The novel algorithm — multiple-domain NMF (MDNMF) — was evaluated on two challenging multiple-domain learning problems — multiple user spam email detection and multiple-domain glioma diagnosis. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is experimentally verified. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] This paper proposes a Column Generation Newton (CGN) algorithm for finding solution of the kernel 1-norm SVM. [•] CGN is combining the Column Generation and the Newton Linear Programming SVM method. [•] CGN is fast when solving the kernel 1-norm SVM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• In order to solve the problem of unbalanced sample, a new Tradaboost algorithm is designed. • An industrial control anomaly detection system based on transfer learning is constructed. • The identification performance of both source and target domains is improved. • The experimental results show that the improved algorithm has higher performance. In industrial control systems, industrial infrastructure is often attacked by hackers. Due to the serious sample imbalance in industrial control data, the traditional machine learning method has poor performance in anomaly detection. In this paper, TrAdaboost algorithm is applied to industrial control anomaly detection. The samples that are easy to classify are taken as the source domain data, and the samples with poor classification effect are taken as the target domain. The source domain data is used to guide the target domain data training. Then, we improve the traditional TrAdaboost algorithm from two aspects of initial weight and final classifier, and apply it to industrial control anomaly detection. Finally, the performance of the algorithm on two different industrial control data sets is verified. And the improved algorithm is compared with other traditional algorithms. The experimental results show that the improved TrAdaboost algorithm has a significant advantage in predicting categories with a small sample size. This algorithm can accurately identify a few abnormal samples. Moreover, the F1 value, recall and precision value of the improved TrAdaboost algorithm on the two data sets have been significantly improved. This indicates that the improved TrAdaboost algorithm greatly improves the overall prediction accuracy of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]