A Wolf Pack Optimization Theory Based Improved Density Peaks Clustering Approach

In view of the problem that the Density Peaks Clustering (DPC) algorithm needs to manually set the parameter cut-off distance (dc) we propose a Wolf Pack optimization theory based Density Peaks Clustering approach (WPA-DPC). Firstly, we introduce dc parameter into the Wolf Pack Algorithm (WPA) to speed up the search. Secondly, we introduce the WPA into the DPC algorithm; the cut-off distance is used as the location of the wolf group. Finally, we make silhouette index in the search process as the fitness value, and the optimal location of the wolf group is the parameter value at the end. The simulation results show that compared with the traditional Density Peaks Clustering algorithm, the proposed algorithm is closer to the true clustering number. According to the evaluation results of silhouette and f-measure, the quality of clustering and the accuracy are greatly improved

Optimizing Dynamic Time Warping’s Window Width for Time Series Data Mining Applications

Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is a highly competitive distance measure for most time series data mining problems. Obtaining the best performance from DTW requires setting its only parameter, the maximum amount of warping (w). In the supervised case with ample data, w is typically set by cross-validation in the training stage. However, this method is likely to yield suboptimal results for small training sets. For the unsupervised case, learning via cross-validation is not possible because we do not have access to labeled data. Many practitioners have thus resorted to assuming that “the larger the better”, and they use the largest value of w permitted by the computational resources. However, as we will show, in most circumstances, this is a naïve approach that produces inferior clusterings. Moreover, the best warping window width is generally non-transferable between the two tasks, i.e., for a single dataset, practitioners cannot simply apply the best w learned for classification on clustering or vice versa. In addition, we will demonstrate that the appropriate amount of warping not only depends on the data structure, but also on the dataset size. Thus, even if a practitioner knows the best setting for a given dataset, they will likely be at a lost if they apply that setting on a bigger size version of that data. All these issues seem largely unknown or at least unappreciated in the community. In this work, we demonstrate the importance of setting DTW’s warping window width correctly, and we also propose novel methods to learn this parameter in both supervised and unsupervised settings. The algorithms we propose to learn w can produce significant improvements in classification accuracy and clustering quality. We demonstrate the correctness of our novel observations and the utility of our ideas by testing them with more than one hundred publicly available datasets. Our forceful results allow us to make a perhaps unexpected claim; an underappreciated “low hanging fruit” in optimizing DTW’s performance can produce improvements that make it an even stronger baseline, closing most or all the improvement gap of the more sophisticated methods proposed in recent years

Searching for Needles in the Cosmic Haystack

Searching for pulsar signals in radio astronomy data sets is a difficult task. The data sets are extremely large, approaching the petabyte scale, and are growing larger as instruments become more advanced. Big Data brings with it big challenges. Processing the data to identify candidate pulsar signals is computationally expensive and must utilize parallelism to be scalable. Labeling benchmarks for supervised classification is costly. To compound the problem, pulsar signals are very rare, e.g., only 0.05% of the instances in one data set represent pulsars. Furthermore, there are many different approaches to candidate classification with no consensus on a best practice. This dissertation is focused on identifying and classifying radio pulsar candidates from single pulse searches. First, to identify and classify Dispersed Pulse Groups (DPGs), we developed a supervised machine learning approach that consists of RAPID (a novel peak identification algorithm), feature extraction, and supervised machine learning classification. We tested six algorithms for classification with four imbalance treatments. Results showed that classifiers with imbalance treatments had higher recall values. Overall, classifiers using multiclass RandomForests combined with Synthetic Majority Oversampling TEchnique (SMOTE) were the most efficient; they identified additional known pulsars not in the benchmark, with less false positives than other classifiers. Second, we developed a parallel single pulse identification method, D-RAPID, and introduced a novel automated multiclass labeling (ALM) technique that we combined with feature selection to improve execution performance. D-RAPID improved execution performance over RAPID by a factor of 5. We also showed that the combination of ALM and feature selection sped up the execution performance of RandomForest by 54% on average with less than a 2% average reduction in classification performance. Finally, we proposed CoDRIFt, a novel classification algorithm that is distributed for scalability and employs semi-supervised learning to leverage unlabeled data to inform classification. We evaluated and compared CoDRIFt to eleven other classifiers. The results showed that CoDRIFt excelled at classifying candidates in imbalanced benchmarks with a majority of non-pulsar signals (\u3e95%). Furthermore, CoDRIFt models created with very limited sets of labeled data (as few as 22 labeled minority class instances) were able to achieve high recall (mean = 0.98). In comparison to the other algorithms trained on similar sets, CoDRIFt outperformed them all, with recall 2.9% higher than the next best classifier and a 35% average improvement over all eleven classifiers. CoDRIFt is customizable for other problem domains with very large, imbalanced data sets, such as fraud detection and cyber attack detection