EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS LEARNING METHODS IN STUDENT EDUCATION

Teaching experience shows that during educational process student perceive graphical information better than analytical relationships. As a possible solution, there could be the use of package Matlab in realization of different algorithms for IT studies. Students are very interested in modern data mining methods, such as artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic, clustering and evolution methods. Series of research were carried out in order to demonstrate the suitability of the Matlab for the purpose of visualization of various simulation models of some data mining disciplines – particularly genetic algorithms. Nowadays the possibilities of evolutionary algorithms are widely used in many optimization and classification tasks. There are four paradigms in the world of evolutionary algorithms: evolutionary programming, evolution strategies, genetic algorithms and genetic programming. This paper analyses present-day approaches of genetic algorithms and genetic programming and examines the possibilities of genetic programming that will be used in further research. Genetic algorithm learning methods are often undeservedly forgotten, although the implementation of their algorithms is relatively strong and can be implemented even for students. In the research part of the study the modelling capabilities in data mining studies were demonstrated based on genetic algorithms and real examples. We assume that students already have prior knowledge of genetic algorithms.

Applications of Evolutionary Computation

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation, EvoApplications 2015, held in Copenhagen, Spain, in April 2015, colocated with the Evo* 2015 events EuroGP, EvoCOP, and EvoMUSART. The 72 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 submissions. EvoApplications 2015 consisted of the following 13 tracks: EvoBIO (evolutionary computation, machine learning and data mining in computational biology), EvoCOMNET (nature-inspired techniques for telecommunication networks and other parallel and distributed systems), EvoCOMPLEX (evolutionary algorithms and complex systems), EvoENERGY (evolutionary computation in energy applications), EvoFIN (evolutionary and natural computation in finance and economics), EvoGAMES (bio-inspired algorithms in games), EvoIASP (evolutionary computation in image analysis, signal processing, and pattern recognition), EvoINDUSTRY (nature-inspired techniques in industrial settings), EvoNUM (bio-inspired algorithms for continuous parameter optimization), EvoPAR (parallel implementation of evolutionary algorithms), EvoRISK (computational intelligence for risk management, security and defence applications), EvoROBOT (evolutionary computation in robotics), and EvoSTOC (evolutionary algorithms in stochastic and dynamic environments)

Data Mining with Newton\u27s Method.

Capable and well-organized data mining algorithms are essential and fundamental to helpful, useful, and successful knowledge discovery in databases. We discuss several data mining algorithms including genetic algorithms (GAs). In addition, we propose a modified multivariate Newton\u27s method (NM) approach to data mining of technical data. Several strategies are employed to stabilize Newton\u27s method to pathological function behavior. NM is compared to GAs and to the simplex evolutionary operation algorithm (EVOP). We find that GAs, NM, and EVOP all perform efficiently for well-behaved global optimization functions with NM providing an exponential improvement in convergence rate. For local optimization problems, we find that GAs and EVOP do not provide the desired convergence rate, accuracy, or precision compared to NM for technical data. We find that GAs are favored for their simplicity while NM would be favored for its performance

Evolutionary algorithms and weighting strategies for feature selection in predictive data mining

The improvements in Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) microarray technology mean that thousands of genes can be profiled simultaneously in a quick and efficient manner. DNA microarrays are increasingly being used for prediction and early diagnosis in cancer treatment. Feature selection and classification play a pivotal role in this process. The correct identification of an informative subset of genes may directly lead to putative drug targets. These genes can also be used as an early diagnosis or predictive tool. However, the large number of features (many thousands) present in a typical dataset present a formidable barrier to feature selection efforts. Many approaches have been presented in literature for feature selection in such datasets. Most of them use classical statistical approaches (e.g. correlation). Classical statistical approaches, although fast, are incapable of detecting non-linear interactions between features of interest. By default, Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are capable of taking non-linear interactions into account. Therefore, EAs are very promising for feature selection in such datasets. It has been shown that dimensionality reduction increases the efficiency of feature selection in large and noisy datasets such as DNA microarray data. The two-phase Evolutionary Algorithm/k-Nearest Neighbours (EA/k-NN) algorithm is a promising approach that carries out initial dimensionality reduction as well as feature selection and classification. This thesis further investigates the two-phase EA/k-NN algorithm and also introduces an adaptive weights scheme for the k-Nearest Neighbours (k-NN) classifier. It also introduces a novel weighted centroid classification technique and a correlation guided mutation approach. Results show that the weighted centroid approach is capable of out-performing the EA/k-NN algorithm across five large biomedical datasets. It also identifies promising new areas of research that would complement the techniques introduced and investigated

Knowledge-Based Fast Evaluation for Evolutionary Learning

The increasing amount of information available is encouraging the search for efficient techniques to improve the data mining methods, especially those which consume great computational resources, such as evolutionary computation.Efficacy and efficiency are two critical aspects for knowledge-based techniques.The incorporation of knowledge into evolutionary algorithms (EAs) should provide either better solutions (efficacy) or the equivalent solutions in shorter time (efficiency), regarding the same evolutionary algorithm without incorporating such knowledge. In this paper, we categorize and summarize some of the incorporation of knowledge techniques for evolutionary algorithms and present a novel data structure, called efficient evaluation structure (EES), which helps the evolutionary algorithm to provide decision rules using less computational resources.The EES-based EA is tested and compared to another EA system and the experimental results show the quality of our approach, reducing the computational cost about 50%, maintaining the global accuracy of the final set of decision rules.CICYT TIN2004-0015

Evolution of neural networks for classification and regression

Although Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are important Data Mining techniques, the search for the optimal ANN is a challenging task: the ANN should learn the input-output mapping without overfitting the data and training algorithms may get trapped in local minima. The use of Evolutionary Computation (EC) is a promising alternative for ANN optimization. This work presents two hybrid EC/ANN algorithms: the first evolves neural topologies while the latter performs simultaneous optimization of architectures and weights. Sixteen real-world tasks were used to test these strategies. Competitive results were achieved when compared with a heuristic model selection and other Data Mining algorithms.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - projecto POSI/EIA/59899/2004