Meta-heuristic algorithms in car engine design: a literature survey

Meta-heuristic algorithms are often inspired by natural phenomena, including the evolution of species in Darwinian natural selection theory, ant behaviors in biology, flock behaviors of some birds, and annealing in metallurgy. Due to their great potential in solving difficult optimization problems, meta-heuristic algorithms have found their way into automobile engine design. There are different optimization problems arising in different areas of car engine management including calibration, control system, fault diagnosis, and modeling. In this paper we review the state-of-the-art applications of different meta-heuristic algorithms in engine management systems. The review covers a wide range of research, including the application of meta-heuristic algorithms in engine calibration, optimizing engine control systems, engine fault diagnosis, and optimizing different parts of engines and modeling. The meta-heuristic algorithms reviewed in this paper include evolutionary algorithms, evolution strategy, evolutionary programming, genetic programming, differential evolution, estimation of distribution algorithm, ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, memetic algorithms, and artificial immune system

Evolutionary Computation and QSAR Research

[Abstract] The successful high throughput screening of molecule libraries for a specific biological property is one of the main improvements in drug discovery. The virtual molecular filtering and screening relies greatly on quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) analysis, a mathematical model that correlates the activity of a molecule with molecular descriptors. QSAR models have the potential to reduce the costly failure of drug candidates in advanced (clinical) stages by filtering combinatorial libraries, eliminating candidates with a predicted toxic effect and poor pharmacokinetic profiles, and reducing the number of experiments. To obtain a predictive and reliable QSAR model, scientists use methods from various fields such as molecular modeling, pattern recognition, machine learning or artificial intelligence. QSAR modeling relies on three main steps: molecular structure codification into molecular descriptors, selection of relevant variables in the context of the analyzed activity, and search of the optimal mathematical model that correlates the molecular descriptors with a specific activity. Since a variety of techniques from statistics and artificial intelligence can aid variable selection and model building steps, this review focuses on the evolutionary computation methods supporting these tasks. Thus, this review explains the basic of the genetic algorithms and genetic programming as evolutionary computation approaches, the selection methods for high-dimensional data in QSAR, the methods to build QSAR models, the current evolutionary feature selection methods and applications in QSAR and the future trend on the joint or multi-task feature selection methods.Instituto de Salud Carlos III, PIO52048Instituto de Salud Carlos III, RD07/0067/0005Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo; TSI-020110-2009-53)Galicia. Consellería de Economía e Industria; 10SIN105004P

EEG-based brain-computer interfaces using motor-imagery: techniques and challenges.

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), particularly those using motor-imagery (MI) data, have the potential to become groundbreaking technologies in both clinical and entertainment settings. MI data is generated when a subject imagines the movement of a limb. This paper reviews state-of-the-art signal processing techniques for MI EEG-based BCIs, with a particular focus on the feature extraction, feature selection and classification techniques used. It also summarizes the main applications of EEG-based BCIs, particularly those based on MI data, and finally presents a detailed discussion of the most prevalent challenges impeding the development and commercialization of EEG-based BCIs

Metaheuristic Design Patterns: New Perspectives for Larger-Scale Search Architectures

Design patterns capture the essentials of recurring best practice in an abstract form. Their merits are well established in domains as diverse as architecture and software development. They offer significant benefits, not least a common conceptual vocabulary for designers, enabling greater communication of high-level concerns and increased software reuse. Inspired by the success of software design patterns, this chapter seeks to promote the merits of a pattern-based method to the development of metaheuristic search software components. To achieve this, a catalog of patterns is presented, organized into the families of structural, behavioral, methodological and component-based patterns. As an alternative to the increasing specialization associated with individual metaheuristic search components, the authors encourage computer scientists to embrace the ‘cross cutting' benefits of a pattern-based perspective to optimization algorithms. Some ways in which the patterns might form the basis of further larger-scale metaheuristic component design automation are also discussed

Evolutionary Algorithms in Decision Tree Induction

One of the biggest problem that many data analysis techniques have to deal with nowadays is Combinatorial Optimization that, in the past, has led many methods to be taken apart. Actually, the (still not enough!) higher computing power available makes it possible to apply such techniques within certain bounds. Since other research fields like Artificial Intelligence have been (and still are) dealing with such problems, their contribute to statistics has been very significant. This chapter tries to cast the Combinatorial Optimization methods into the Artificial Intelligence framework, particularly with respect Decision Tree Induction, which is considered a powerful instrument for the knowledge extraction and the decision making support. When the exhaustive enumeration and evaluation of all the possible candidate solution to a Tree-based Induction problem is not computationally affordable, the use of Nature Inspired Optimization Algorithms, which have been proven to be powerful instruments for attacking many combinatorial optimization problems, can be of great help. In this respect, the attention is focused on three main problems involving Decision Tree Induction by mainly focusing the attention on the Classification and Regression Tree-CART (Breiman et al., 1984) algorithm. First, the problem of splitting complex predictors such a multi-attribute ones is faced through the use of Genetic Algorithms. In addition, the possibility of growing “optimal” exploratory trees is also investigated by making use of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm. Finally, the derivation of a subset of decision trees for modelling multi-attribute response on the basis of a data-driven heuristic is also described. The proposed approaches might be useful for knowledge extraction from large databases as well as for data mining applications. The solution they offer for complicated data modelling and data analysis problems might be considered for a possible implementation in a Decision Support System (DSS). The remainder of the chapter is as follows. Section 2 describes the main features and the recent developments of Decision Tree Induction. An overview of Combinatorial Optimization with a particular focus on Genetic Algorithms and Ant Colony Optimization is presented in section 3. The use of these two algorithms within the Decision Tree Induction Framework is described in section 4, together with the description of the algorithm for modelling multi-attribute response. Section 5 summarizes the results of the proposed method on real and simulated datasets. Concluding remarks are presented in section 6. The chapter also includes an appendix that presents J-Fast, a Java-based software for Decision Tree that currently implements Genetic Algorithms and Ant Colony Optimization

MISSEL: a method to identify a large number of small species-specific genomic subsequences and its application to viruses classification

Continuous improvements in next generation sequencing technologies led to ever-increasing collections of genomic sequences, which have not been easily characterized by biologists, and whose analysis requires huge computational effort. The classification of species emerged as one of the main applications of DNA analysis and has been addressed with several approaches, e.g., multiple alignments-, phylogenetic trees-, statistical- and character-based methods