Particle Swarm Optimization

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a population based stochastic optimization technique influenced by the social behavior of bird flocking or fish schooling.PSO shares many similarities with evolutionary computation techniques such as Genetic Algorithms (GA). The system is initialized with a population of random solutions and searches for optima by updating generations. However, unlike GA, PSO has no evolution operators such as crossover and mutation. In PSO, the potential solutions, called particles, fly through the problem space by following the current optimum particles. This book represents the contributions of the top researchers in this field and will serve as a valuable tool for professionals in this interdisciplinary field

A review of clustering techniques and developments

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. This paper presents a comprehensive study on clustering: exiting methods and developments made at various times. Clustering is defined as an unsupervised learning where the objects are grouped on the basis of some similarity inherent among them. There are different methods for clustering the objects such as hierarchical, partitional, grid, density based and model based. The approaches used in these methods are discussed with their respective states of art and applicability. The measures of similarity as well as the evaluation criteria, which are the central components of clustering, are also presented in the paper. The applications of clustering in some fields like image segmentation, object and character recognition and data mining are highlighted

Advances in Meta-Heuristic Optimization Algorithms in Big Data Text Clustering

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the meta-heuristic optimization algorithms on the text clustering applications and highlights its main procedures. These Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms are recognized as promising swarm intelligence methods due to their successful ability to solve machine learning problems, especially text clustering problems. This paper reviews all of the relevant literature on meta-heuristic-based text clustering applications, including many variants, such as basic, modified, hybridized, and multi-objective methods. As well, the main procedures of text clustering and critical discussions are given. Hence, this review reports its advantages and disadvantages and recommends potential future research paths. The main keywords that have been considered in this paper are text, clustering, meta-heuristic, optimization, and algorithm

A Generalized Enhanced Quantum Fuzzy Approach for Efficient Data Clustering

© 2013 IEEE. Data clustering is a challenging task to gain insights into data in various fields. In this paper, an Enhanced Quantum-Inspired Evolutionary Fuzzy C-Means (EQIE-FCM) algorithm is proposed for data clustering. In the EQIE-FCM, quantum computing concept is utilized in combination with the FCM algorithm to improve the clustering process by evolving the clustering parameters. The improvement in the clustering process leads to improvement in the quality of clustering results. To validate the quality of clustering results achieved by the proposed EQIE-FCM approach, its performance is compared with the other quantum-based fuzzy clustering approaches and also with other evolutionary clustering approaches. To evaluate the performance of these approaches, extensive experiments are being carried out on various benchmark datasets and on the protein database that comprises of four superfamilies. The results indicate that the proposed EQIE-FCM approach finds the optimal value of fitness function and the fuzzifier parameter for the reported datasets. In addition to this, the proposed EQIE-FCM approach also finds the optimal number of clusters and more accurate location of initial cluster centers for these benchmark datasets. Thus, it can be regarded as a more efficient approach for data clustering

Improving K-means clustering with enhanced Firefly Algorithms

In this research, we propose two variants of the Firefly Algorithm (FA), namely inward intensified exploration FA (IIEFA) and compound intensified exploration FA (CIEFA), for undertaking the obstinate problems of initialization sensitivity and local optima traps of the K-means clustering model. To enhance the capability of both exploitation and exploration, matrix-based search parameters and dispersing mechanisms are incorporated into the two proposed FA models. We first replace the attractiveness coefficient with a randomized control matrix in the IIEFA model to release the FA from the constraints of biological law, as the exploitation capability in the neighbourhood is elevated from a one-dimensional to multi-dimensional search mechanism with enhanced diversity in search scopes, scales, and directions. Besides that, we employ a dispersing mechanism in the second CIEFA model to dispatch fireflies with high similarities to new positions out of the close neighbourhood to perform global exploration. This dispersing mechanism ensures sufficient variance between fireflies in comparison to increase search efficiency. The ALL-IDB2 database, a skin lesion data set, and a total of 15 UCI data sets are employed to evaluate efficiency of the proposed FA models on clustering tasks. The minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance (mRMR)-based feature selection method is also adopted to reduce feature dimensionality. The empirical results indicate that the proposed FA models demonstrate statistically significant superiority in both distance and performance measures for clustering tasks in comparison with conventional K-means clustering, five classical search methods, and five advanced FA variants

Novel particle swarm optimization algorithms with applications to healthcare data analysis

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London.Optimization problem is a fundamental research topic which has been receiving increasing interest according to its application potential in almost all real-world systems including engineering systems, large-scaled complex networks, healthcare management systems and so on. A large number of heuristic algorithms have been developed with the purpose of effectively solving the optimization problems during the past few decades. Served as a powerful family of heuristic algorithms, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm has been successfully employed in a variety of practical applications in dealing with optimization problems. The PSO algorithm has exhibited more competitive performance than many popular evolutionary computation approaches because of its easy implementation, fast convergence and comprehensive ability of converging to a satisfactory solution. Nevertheless, there is still much room to improve the PSO algorithm in terms of both the convergence rate and the population diversity. To summarize, there are three challenging problems in developing new variant PSO algorithms with hope to further improve the convergence rate of the PSO algorithm and maintain the population diversity: 1) how to adjust the control parameters of the PSO algorithm; 2) how to achieve the balance between the local search and the global search during the evolution process; and 3) how to guarantee the search ability of the particles and avoid premature convergence. In this thesis, we address the above mentioned challenging problems and aim to design effective variant PSO algorithms with applications in intelligent data analysis. It should be pointed out that all the developed PSO algorithms in this thesis have been evaluated by comparing with some currently popular variant PSO algorithms. • With the aim to improve the convergence rate of the optimizer, an adaptive weighting PSO algorithm is put forward where a sigmoid-function-based weighting strategy is introduced to adjust the acceleration coefficients. With this weighting strategy, the distances from the particle to the global best position and from the particle to its personal best position are both taken into consideration, thereby having the distinguishing feature of enhancing the convergence rate. • As with other evolutionary computation approaches, the modification of parameters is an efficient method for improving the search ability of the algorithm. We present a randomised PSO algorithm where Gaussian white noise with adjustable intensity is utilized to randomly perturb the acceleration coefficients in order to explore and exploit the problem space thoroughly. • To further develop a novel PSO algorithm with promising search ability, we propose a randomly occurring distributedly delayed particle swarm optimization (RODDPSO) algorithm which demonstrates competitive performance in seeking the optimal solution. The randomly occurring distributed time delays not only contribute to a thorough exploration of the search space but also achieve a proper balance between the local exploitation and the global exploration. • To fully investigate the application potential of the developed PSO algorithms, we apply the RODDPSO algorithm to intelligent data analysis (including data clustering and classification problems). We optimize the initial cluster centroids of the K-means clustering algorithm and the hyperparameters of the deep neural network by using the RODDPSO algorithm. The developed PRODDPSO-based algorithms are successfully employed in patients’ triage categorization and patient attendance disposal problems with satisfactory performanc

Identification of pathway and gene markers using enhanced directed random walk for multiclass cancer expression data

Cancer markers play a significant role in the diagnosis of the origin of cancers and in the detection of cancers from initial treatments. This is a challenging task owing to the heterogeneity nature of cancers. Identification of these markers could help in improving the survival rate of cancer patients, in which dedicated treatment can be provided according to the diagnosis or even prevention. Previous investigations show that the use of pathway topology information could help in the detection of cancer markers from gene expression. Such analysis reduces its complexity from thousands of genes to a few hundreds of pathways. However, most of the existing methods group different cancer subtypes into just disease samples, and consider all pathways contribute equally in the analysis process. Meanwhile, the interaction between multiple genes and the genes with missing edges has been ignored in several other methods, and hence could lead to the poor performance of the identification of cancer markers from gene expression. Thus, this research proposes enhanced directed random walk to identify pathway and gene markers for multiclass cancer gene expression data. Firstly, an improved pathway selection with analysis of variances (ANOVA) that enables the consideration of multiple cancer subtypes is performed, and subsequently the integration of k-mean clustering and average silhouette method in the directed random walk that considers the interaction of multiple genes is also conducted. The proposed methods are tested on benchmark gene expression datasets (breast, lung, and skin cancers) and biological pathways. The performance of the proposed methods is then measured and compared in terms of classification accuracy and area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC). The results indicate that the proposed methods are able to identify a list of pathway and gene markers from the datasets with better classification accuracy and AUC. The proposed methods have improved the classification performance in the range of between 1% and 35% compared with existing methods. Cell cycle and p53 signaling pathway were found significantly associated with breast, lung, and skin cancers, while the cell cycle was highly enriched with squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma

A Hybrid Chimp Optimization Algorithm and Generalized Normal Distribution Algorithm with Opposition-Based Learning Strategy for Solving Data Clustering Problems

This paper is concerned with data clustering to separate clusters based on the connectivity principle for categorizing similar and dissimilar data into different groups. Although classical clustering algorithms such as K-means are efficient techniques, they often trap in local optima and have a slow convergence rate in solving high-dimensional problems. To address these issues, many successful meta-heuristic optimization algorithms and intelligence-based methods have been introduced to attain the optimal solution in a reasonable time. They are designed to escape from a local optimum problem by allowing flexible movements or random behaviors. In this study, we attempt to conceptualize a powerful approach using the three main components: Chimp Optimization Algorithm (ChOA), Generalized Normal Distribution Algorithm (GNDA), and Opposition-Based Learning (OBL) method. Firstly, two versions of ChOA with two different independent groups' strategies and seven chaotic maps, entitled ChOA(I) and ChOA(II), are presented to achieve the best possible result for data clustering purposes. Secondly, a novel combination of ChOA and GNDA algorithms with the OBL strategy is devised to solve the major shortcomings of the original algorithms. Lastly, the proposed ChOAGNDA method is a Selective Opposition (SO) algorithm based on ChOA and GNDA, which can be used to tackle large and complex real-world optimization problems, particularly data clustering applications. The results are evaluated against seven popular meta-heuristic optimization algorithms and eight recent state-of-the-art clustering techniques. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed work significantly outperforms other existing methods in terms of the achievement in minimizing the Sum of Intra-Cluster Distances (SICD), obtaining the lowest Error Rate (ER), accelerating the convergence speed, and finding the optimal cluster centers.Comment: 48 pages, 14 Tables, 12 Figure

Computational intelligence techniques for HVAC systems: a review

Buildings are responsible for 40% of global energy use and contribute towards 30% of the total CO2 emissions. The drive to reduce energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions from buildings has acted as a catalyst in the development of advanced computational methods for energy efficient design, management and control of buildings and systems. Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are the major source of energy consumption in buildings and an ideal candidate for substantial reductions in energy demand. Significant advances have been made in the past decades on the application of computational intelligence (CI) techniques for HVAC design, control, management, optimization, and fault detection and diagnosis. This article presents a comprehensive and critical review on the theory and applications of CI techniques for prediction, optimization, control and diagnosis of HVAC systems.The analysis of trends reveals the minimization of energy consumption was the key optimization objective in the reviewed research, closely followed by the optimization of thermal comfort, indoor air quality and occupant preferences. Hardcoded Matlab program was the most widely used simulation tool, followed by TRNSYS, EnergyPlus, DOE–2, HVACSim+ and ESP–r. Metaheuristic algorithms were the preferred CI method for solving HVAC related problems and in particular genetic algorithms were applied in most of the studies. Despite the low number of studies focussing on MAS, as compared to the other CI techniques, interest in the technique is increasing due to their ability of dividing and conquering an HVAC optimization problem with enhanced overall performance. The paper also identifies prospective future advancements and research directions