Blind separation of underdetermined mixtures with additive white and pink noises

This paper presents an approach for underdetermined blind source separation in the case of additive Gaussian white noise and pink noise. Likewise, the proposed approach is applicable in the case of separating I + 3 sources from I mixtures with additive two kinds of noises. This situation is more challenging and suitable to practical real world problems. Moreover, unlike to some conventional approaches, the sparsity conditions are not imposed. Firstly, the mixing matrix is estimated based on an algorithm that combines short time Fourier transform and rough-fuzzy clustering. Then, the mixed signals are normalized and the source signals are recovered using modified Gradient descent Local Hierarchical Alternating Least Squares Algorithm exploiting the mixing matrix obtained from the previous step as an input and initialized by multiplicative algorithm for matrix factorization based on alpha divergence. The experiments and simulation results show that the proposed approach can separate I + 3 source signals from I mixed signals, and it has superior evaluation performance compared to some conventional approaches

Study of dynamics of structured knowledge: Qualitative analysis of different mapping approaches

The authors compared three methods of mapping, considering the maps as a visual interface for the exploration of scientific articles related to computer science. Data were classified according to the original Computing Classification System (CCS) classification and co-categories were used for similarity metrics calculation. The authors’ approach based on MDS was enriched by algorithm mapping to spherical topology. Three other methods were based on VOS, VxOrd and SOM mapping techniques. Visualization of the classified collection was done for three different decades. Tracking the changes in visualization patterns, the authors sought the method that would reveal the real evolution of the CCS scheme, which is still being updated by the editorial board. Comparative analysis is based on qualitative methods. Changes in those properties over two decades were evaluated for the benefit of the authors’ method of mapping. The qualitative analysis shows clustering of proper categories and overlapping of other ones in the authors’ approach, which corresponds to the current changes in the classification scheme and computer science literature

A Hybrid Method for Modeling and Solving Supply Chain Optimization Problems with Soft and Logical Constraints

This paper presents a hybrid method for modeling and solving supply chain optimization problems with soft, hard, and logical constraints. Ability to implement soft and logical constraints is a very important functionality for supply chain optimization models. Such constraints are particularly useful for modeling problems resulting from commercial agreements, contracts, competition, technology, safety, and environmental conditions. Two programming and solving environments, mathematical programming (MP) and constraint logic programming (CLP), were combined in the hybrid method. This integration, hybridization, and the adequate multidimensional transformation of the problem (as a presolving method) helped to substantially reduce the search space of combinatorial models for supply chain optimization problems. The operation research MP and declarative CLP, where constraints are modeled in different ways and different solving procedures are implemented, were linked together to use the strengths of both. This approach is particularly important for the decision and combinatorial optimization models with the objective function and constraints, there are many decision variables, and these are summed (common in manufacturing, supply chain management, project management, and logistic problems). The ECLiPSe system with Eplex library was proposed to implement a hybrid method. Additionally, the proposed hybrid transformed model is compared with the MILP-Mixed Integer Linear Programming model on the same data instances. For illustrative models, its use allowed finding optimal solutions eight to one hundred times faster and reducing the size of the combinatorial problem to a significant extent

A review on initialization methods for nonnegative matrix factorization: Towards omics data experiments

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) has acquired a relevant role in the panorama of knowledge extraction, thanks to the peculiarity that non-negativity applies to both bases and weights, which allows meaningful interpretations and is consistent with the natural human part-based learning process. Nevertheless, most NMF algorithms are iterative, so initialization methods affect convergence behaviour, the quality of the final solution, and NMF performance in terms of the residual of the cost function. Studies on the impact of NMF initialization techniques have been conducted for text or image datasets, but very few considerations can be found in the literature when biological datasets are studied, even though NMFs have largely demonstrated their usefulness in better understanding biological mechanisms with omic datasets. This paper aims to present the state-of-the-art on NMF initialization schemes along with some initial considerations on the impact of initialization methods when microarrays (a simple instance of omic data) are evaluated with NMF mechanisms. Using a series of measures to qualitatively examine the biological information extracted by a given NMF scheme, it preliminary appears that some information (e.g., represented by genes) can be extracted regardless of the initialization scheme used