A case study of predicting banking customers behaviour by using data mining

Data Mining (DM) is a technique that examines information stored in large database or data warehouse and find the patterns or trends in the data that are not yet known or suspected. DM techniques have been applied to a variety of different domains including Customer Relationship Management CRM). In this research, a new Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) framework based on data mining is proposed. The proposed data mining framework in this study manages relationships between banking organizations and their customers. Two typical data mining techniques - Neural Network and Association Rules - are applied to predict the behavior of customers and to increase the decision-making processes for recalling valued customers in banking industries. The experiments on the real world dataset are conducted and the different metrics are used to evaluate the performances of the two data mining models. The results indicate that the Neural Network model achieves better accuracy but takes longer time to train the model

Capturing player enjoyment in computer games

The current state-of-the-art in intelligent game design using Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques is mainly focused on generating human-like and intelligent characters. Even though complex opponent behaviors emerge through various machine learning techniques, there is generally no further analysis of whether these behaviors contribute to the satisfaction of the player. The implicit hypothesis motivating this research is that intelligent opponent behaviors enable the player to gain more satisfaction from the game. This hypothesis may well be true; however, since no notion of entertainment or enjoyment is explicitly defined, there is therefore no evidence that a specific opponent behavior generates enjoyable games.peer-reviewe

Fouille de séquences temporelles pour la maintenance prédictive : application aux données de véhicules traceurs ferroviaires

In order to meet the mounting social and economic demands, railway operators and manufacturers are striving for a longer availability and a better reliability of railway transportation systems. Commercial trains are being equipped with state-of-the-art onboard intelligent sensors monitoring various subsystems all over the train. These sensors provide real-time flow of data, called floating train data, consisting of georeferenced events, along with their spatial and temporal coordinates. Once ordered with respect to time, these events can be considered as long temporal sequences which can be mined for possible relationships. This has created a neccessity for sequential data mining techniques in order to derive meaningful associations rules or classification models from these data. Once discovered, these rules and models can then be used to perform an on-line analysis of the incoming event stream in order to predict the occurrence of target events, i.e, severe failures that require immediate corrective maintenance actions. The work in this thesis tackles the above mentioned data mining task. We aim to investigate and develop various methodologies to discover association rules and classification models which can help predict rare tilt and traction failures in sequences using past events that are less critical. The investigated techniques constitute two major axes: Association analysis, which is temporal and Classification techniques, which is not temporal. The main challenges confronting the data mining task and increasing its complexity are mainly the rarity of the target events to be predicted in addition to the heavy redundancy of some events and the frequent occurrence of data bursts. The results obtained on real datasets collected from a fleet of trains allows to highlight the effectiveness of the approaches and methodologies usedDe nos jours, afin de répondre aux exigences économiques et sociales, les systèmes de transport ferroviaire ont la nécessité d'être exploités avec un haut niveau de sécurité et de fiabilité. On constate notamment un besoin croissant en termes d'outils de surveillance et d'aide à la maintenance de manière à anticiper les défaillances des composants du matériel roulant ferroviaire. Pour mettre au point de tels outils, les trains commerciaux sont équipés de capteurs intelligents envoyant des informations en temps réel sur l'état de divers sous-systèmes. Ces informations se présentent sous la forme de longues séquences temporelles constituées d'une succession d'événements. Le développement d'outils d'analyse automatique de ces séquences permettra d'identifier des associations significatives entre événements dans un but de prédiction d'événement signant l'apparition de défaillance grave. Cette thèse aborde la problématique de la fouille de séquences temporelles pour la prédiction d'événements rares et s'inscrit dans un contexte global de développement d'outils d'aide à la décision. Nous visons à étudier et développer diverses méthodes pour découvrir les règles d'association entre événements d'une part et à construire des modèles de classification d'autre part. Ces règles et/ou ces classifieurs peuvent ensuite être exploités pour analyser en ligne un flux d'événements entrants dans le but de prédire l'apparition d'événements cibles correspondant à des défaillances. Deux méthodologies sont considérées dans ce travail de thèse: La première est basée sur la recherche des règles d'association, qui est une approche temporelle et une approche à base de reconnaissance de formes. Les principaux défis auxquels est confronté ce travail sont principalement liés à la rareté des événements cibles à prédire, la redondance importante de certains événements et à la présence très fréquente de "bursts". Les résultats obtenus sur des données réelles recueillies par des capteurs embarqués sur une flotte de trains commerciaux permettent de mettre en évidence l'efficacité des approches proposée

Modeling and augmenting game entertainment through challenge and curiosity

This paper presents quantitative measurements/metrics of qualitative entertainment features within computer game environments and proposes artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for optimizing entertainment in such interactive systems. A human-verified metric of interest (i.e. player entertainment in real-time) for predator/prey games and a neuro-evolution on-line learning (i.e. during play) approach have already been reported in the literature to serve this purpose. In this paper, an alternative quantitative approach to entertainment modeling based on psychological studies in the field of computer games is introduced and a comparative study of the two approaches is presented. Feedforward neural networks (NNs) and fuzzy-NNs are used to model player satisfaction (interest) in real-time and investigate quantitatively how the qualitative factors of challenge and curiosity contribute to human entertainment. We demonstrate that appropriate non-extreme levels of challenge and curiosity generate high values of entertainment and we project the extensibility of the approach to other genres of digital entertainment (e.g. mixed-reality interactive playgrounds).peer-reviewe

Enhancing the scalability of a genetic algorithm to discover quantitative association rules in large-scale datasets

Association rule mining is a well-known methodology to discover significant and apparently hidden relations among attributes in a subspace of instances from datasets. Genetic algorithms have been extensively used to find interesting association rules. However, the rule-matching task of such techniques usually requires high computational and memory requirements. The use of efficient computational techniques has become a task of the utmost importance due to the high volume of generated data nowadays. Hence, this paper aims at improving the scalability of quantitative association rule mining techniques based on genetic algorithms to handle large-scale datasets without quality loss in the results obtained. For this purpose, a new representation of the individuals, new genetic operators and a windowing-based learning scheme are proposed to achieve successfully such challenging task. Specifically, the proposed techniques are integrated into the multi-objective evolutionary algorithm named QARGA-M to assess their performances. Both the standard version and the enhanced one of QARGA-M have been tested in several datasets that present different number of attributes and instances. Furthermore, the proposed methodologies have been integrated into other existing techniques based in genetic algorithms to discover quantitative association rules. The comparative analysis performed shows significant improvements of QARGA-M and other existing genetic algorithms in terms of computational costs without losing quality in the results when the proposed techniques are applied.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2011- 28956-C02-02Junta de Andalucía TIC-7528Junta de Andalucía P12-TIC-1728Universidad Pablo de Olavide APPB81309