Energy performance forecasting of residential buildings using fuzzy approaches

The energy consumption used for domestic purposes in Europe is, to a considerable extent, due to heating and cooling. This energy is produced mostly by burning fossil fuels, which has a high negative environmental impact. The characteristics of a building are an important factor to determine the necessities of heating and cooling loads. Therefore, the study of the relevant characteristics of the buildings, regarding the heating and cooling needed to maintain comfortable indoor air conditions, could be very useful in order to design and construct energy-efficient buildings. In previous studies, different machine-learning approaches have been used to predict heating and cooling loads from the set of variables: relative compactness, surface area, wall area, roof area, overall height, orientation, glazing area and glazing area distribution. However, none of these methods are based on fuzzy logic. In this research, we study two fuzzy logic approaches, i.e., fuzzy inductive reasoning (FIR) and adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), to deal with the same problem. Fuzzy approaches obtain very good results, outperforming all the methods described in previous studies except one. In this work, we also study the feature selection process of FIR methodology as a pre-processing tool to select the more relevant variables before the use of any predictive modelling methodology. It is proven that FIR feature selection provides interesting insights into the main building variables causally related to heating and cooling loads. This allows better decision making and design strategies, since accurate cooling and heating load estimations and correct identification of parameters that affect building energy demands are of high importance to optimize building designs and equipment specifications.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Decision Making in the Medical Domain: Comparing the Effectiveness of GP-Generated Fuzzy Intelligent Structures

ABSTRACT: In this work, we examine the effectiveness of two intelligent models in medical domains. Namely, we apply grammar-guided genetic programming to produce fuzzy intelligent structures, such as fuzzy rule-based systems and fuzzy Petri nets, in medical data mining tasks. First, we use two context-free grammars to describe fuzzy rule-based systems and fuzzy Petri nets with genetic programming. Then, we apply cellular encoding in order to express the fuzzy Petri nets with arbitrary size and topology. The models are examined thoroughly in four real-world medical data sets. Results are presented in detail and the competitive advantages and drawbacks of the selected methodologies are discussed, in respect to the nature of each application domain. Conclusions are drawn on the effectiveness and efficiency of the presented approach

Application of Computational Intelligence Techniques to Process Industry Problems

In the last two decades there has been a large progress in the computational intelligence research field. The fruits of the effort spent on the research in the discussed field are powerful techniques for pattern recognition, data mining, data modelling, etc. These techniques achieve high performance on traditional data sets like the UCI machine learning database. Unfortunately, this kind of data sources usually represent clean data without any problems like data outliers, missing values, feature co-linearity, etc. common to real-life industrial data. The presence of faulty data samples can have very harmful effects on the models, for example if presented during the training of the models, it can either cause sub-optimal performance of the trained model or in the worst case destroy the so far learnt knowledge of the model. For these reasons the application of present modelling techniques to industrial problems has developed into a research field on its own. Based on the discussion of the properties and issues of the data and the state-of-the-art modelling techniques in the process industry, in this paper a novel unified approach to the development of predictive models in the process industry is presented

A weighted goal programming approach to fuzzy linear regression with quasi type-2 fuzzy input-output data

This study attempts to develop a regression model when both input data and output data are quasi type-2 fuzzy numbers. To estimate the crisp parameters of the regression model, a linear programming model is proposed based on goal programming. To handle the outlier problem, an omission approach is proposed. This approach examines the behavior of value changes in the objective function of proposed model when observations are omitted. In order to illustrate the proposed model, some numerical examples are presented. The applicability of the proposed method is tested on a real data set on soil science. The predictive performance of the model is examined by cross-validation.Publisher's Versio

Theoretical Interpretations and Applications of Radial Basis Function Networks

Medical applications usually used Radial Basis Function Networks just as Artificial Neural Networks. However, RBFNs are Knowledge-Based Networks that can be interpreted in several way: Artificial Neural Networks, Regularization Networks, Support Vector Machines, Wavelet Networks, Fuzzy Controllers, Kernel Estimators, Instanced-Based Learners. A survey of their interpretations and of their corresponding learning algorithms is provided as well as a brief survey on dynamic learning algorithms. RBFNs' interpretations can suggest applications that are particularly interesting in medical domains

Insecticidal and repellant activities of Southeast Asia plants towards insect pests: a review

Crops are being damaged by several plant pests. Several strategies have been developed to restrict the damage of cultivated plants by using synthetic pesticides and repellants. However, the use to control these insects is highly discouraged because of their risks on humans. Therefore, several alternatives have been developed from plant extracts to protect crops from plant pests. Accordingly, this review focuses on outlining the insecticidal and repellant activities of Southeast Asia plants towards insect pests. Several extracts of plants from Southeast Asia were investigated to explore their insecticidal and repellant activities. Azadiracha indica (neem) and Piper species were highly considered for their insecticidal and repellant activities compared to other plants. This review also addressed the investigation on extracts of other plant species that were reported to exert insecticidal and repellant activities. Most of the conducted studies have been still in the primarily stage of investigation, lacking a focus on the insecticidal and repellant spectrum and the identification of the active constituents which are responsible for the insecticidal and repellant activity