DATA MINING AND IMAGE CLASSIFICATION USING GENETIC PROGRAMMING

Genetic programming (GP), a capable machine learning and search method, motivated by Darwinian-evolution, is an evolutionary learning algorithm which automatically evolves computer programs in the form of trees to solve problems. This thesis studies the application of GP for data mining and image processing. Knowledge discovery and data mining have been widely used in business, healthcare, and scientific fields. In data mining, classification is supervised learning that identifies new patterns and maps the data to predefined targets. A GP based classifier is developed in order to perform these mappings. GP has been investigated in a series of studies to classify data; however, there are certain aspects which have not formerly been studied. We propose an optimized GP classifier based on a combination of pruning subtrees and a new fitness function. An orthogonal least squares algorithm is also applied in the training phase to create a robust GP classifier. The proposed GP classifier is validated by 10-fold cross validation. Three areas were studied in this thesis. The first investigation resulted in an optimized genetic-programming-based classifier that directly solves multi-class classification problems. Instead of defining static thresholds as boundaries to differentiate between multiple labels, our work presents a method of classification where a GP system learns the relationships among experiential data and models them mathematically during the evolutionary process. Our approach has been assessed on six multiclass datasets. The second investigation was to develop a GP classifier to segment and detect brain tumors on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images. The findings indicated the high accuracy of brain tumor classification provided by our GP classifier. The results confirm the strong ability of the developed technique for complicated image classification problems. The third was to develop a hybrid system for multiclass imbalanced data classification using GP and SMOTE which was tested on satellite images. The finding showed that the proposed approach improves both training and test results when the SMOTE technique is incorporated. We compared our approach in terms of speed with previous GP algorithms as well. The analyzed results illustrate that the developed classifier produces a productive and rapid method for classification tasks that outperforms the previous methods for more challenging multiclass classification problems. We tested the approaches presented in this thesis on publicly available datasets, and images. The findings were statistically tested to conclude the robustness of the developed approaches

Studying elements ofgenetic programming for multiclass classification

Tese de mestrado, Engenharia Informática (Interação e Conhecimento) Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2018Although Genetic Programming (GP) has been very successful in both symbolic regression and binary classification by solving many difficult problems from various domains, it requires improvements in multiclass classification, which due to the high complexity of this kind of problems, requires specialized classifiers. In this project, we explored a multiclass classification GP-based algorithm, the M3GP [4]. The individuals in standard GP only have one node at their root. This means that their output space is in R. Unlike standard GP, M3GP allows each individual to have n nodes at its root. This variation changes the output space to Rn, allowing them to construct clusters of samples and use a cluster-based classification. Although M3GP is capable of creating interpretable models while having competitive results with state-of-the-art classifiers, such as Random Forests and Neural Networks, it has downsides. The focus of this project is to improve the algorithm by exploring two components, the fitness function, and the genetic operators’ selection method. The original fitness function was accuracy-based. Since using this kind of functions does not allow a smooth evolution of the output space, we tried to improve the algorithm by exploring two distance-based fitness functions as an attempt to separate the clusters while bringing the samples closer to their respective centroids. Until now, the genetic operators in M3GP were selected with a fixed probability. Since some operators have a better effect on the fitness at different stages of the evolution, the fixed probabilities allow operators to be selected at the wrong stages of the evolution, slowing down the learning process. In this project, we try to evolve the probability the genetic operators have of being chosen over the generations. On a later stage, we proposed a new crossover genetic operator that uses three individuals for the M3GP algorithm. The results obtained show significantly better results in the training set in half the datasets, while improving the test accuracy in two datasets

Automated design of genetic programming of classification algorithms.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.Over the past decades, there has been an increase in the use of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) for data mining and knowledge discovery in a wide range of application domains. Data classification, a real-world application problem is one of the areas EAs have been widely applied. Data classification has been extensively researched resulting in the development of a number of EA based classification algorithms. Genetic programming (GP) in particular has been shown to be one of the most effective EAs at inducing classifiers. It is widely accepted that the effectiveness of a parameterised algorithm like GP depends on its configuration. Currently, the design of GP classification algorithms is predominantly performed manually. Manual design follows an iterative trial and error approach which has been shown to be a menial, non-trivial time-consuming task that has a number of vulnerabilities. The research presented in this thesis is part of a large-scale initiative by the machine learning community to automate the design of machine learning techniques. The study investigates the hypothesis that automating the design of GP classification algorithms for data classification can still lead to the induction of effective classifiers. This research proposes using two evolutionary algorithms,namely,ageneticalgorithm(GA)andgrammaticalevolution(GE)toautomatethe design of GP classification algorithms. The proof-by-demonstration research methodology is used in the study to achieve the set out objectives. To that end two systems namely, a genetic algorithm system and a grammatical evolution system were implemented for automating the design of GP classification algorithms. The classification performance of the automated designed GP classifiers, i.e., GA designed GP classifiers and GE designed GP classifiers were compared to manually designed GP classifiers on real-world binary class and multiclass classification problems. The evaluation was performed on multiple domain problems obtained from the UCI machine learning repository and on two specific domains, cybersecurity and financial forecasting. The automated designed classifiers were found to outperform the manually designed GP classifiers on all the problems considered in this study. GP classifiers evolved by GE were found to be suitable for classifying binary classification problems while those evolved by a GA were found to be suitable for multiclass classification problems. Furthermore, the automated design time was found to be less than manual design time. Fitness landscape analysis of the design spaces searched by a GA and GE were carried out on all the class of problems considered in this study. Grammatical evolution found the search to be smoother on binary classification problems while the GA found multiclass problems to be less rugged than binary class problems

Progressive insular cooperative genetic programming algorithm for multiclass classification

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced AnalyticsIn contrast to other types of optimisation algorithms, Genetic Programming (GP) simultaneously optimises a group of solutions for a given problem. This group is named population, the algorithm iterations are named generations and the optimisation is named evolution as a reference o the algorithm’s inspiration in Darwin’s theory on the evolution of species. When a GP algorithm uses a one-vs-all class comparison for a multiclass classification (MCC) task, the classifiers for each target class (specialists) are evolved in a subpopulation and the final solution of the GP is a team composed of one specialist classifier of each class. In this scenario, an important question arises: should these subpopulations interact during the evolution process or should they evolve separately? The current thesis presents the Progressively Insular Cooperative (PIC) GP, a MCC GP in which the level of interaction between specialists for different classes changes through the evolution process. In the first generations, the different specialists can interact more, but as the algorithm evolves, this level of interaction decreases. At a later point in the evolution process, controlled through algorithm parameterisation, these interactions can be eliminated. Thus, in the beginning of the algorithm there is more cooperation among specialists of different classes, favouring search space exploration. With elimination of cooperation, search space exploitation is favoured. In this work, different parameters of the proposed algorithm were tested using the Iris dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. The results showed that cooperation among specialists of different classes helps the improvement of classifiers specialised in classes that are more difficult to discriminate. Moreover, the independent evolution of specialist subpopulations further benefits the classifiers when they already achieved good performance. A combination of the two approaches seems to be beneficial when starting with subpopulations of differently performing classifiers. The PIC GP also presented great performance for the more complex Thyroid and Yeast datasets of the same repository, achieving similar accuracy to the best values found in literature for other MCC models.Diferente de outros algoritmos de otimiação computacional, o algoritmo de Programação Genética PG otimiza simultaneamente um grupo de soluções para um determinado problema. Este grupo de soluções é chamado população, as iterações do algoritmo são chamadas de gerações e a otimização é chamada de evolução em alusão à inspiração do algoritmo na teoria da evolução das espécies de Darwin. Quando o algoritmo GP utiliza a abordagem de comparação de classes um-vs-todos para uma classificação multiclasses (CMC), os classificadores específicos para cada classe (especialistas) são evoluídos em subpopulações e a solução final do PG é uma equipe composta por um especialista de cada classe. Neste cenário, surge uma importante questão: estas subpopulações devem interagir durante o processo evolutivo ou devem evoluir separadamente? A presente tese apresenta o algoritmo Cooperação Progressivamente Insular (CPI) PG, um PG CMC em que o grau de interação entre especialistas em diferentes classes varia ao longo do processo evolutivo. Nas gerações iniciais, os especialistas de diferentes classes interagem mais. Com a evolução do algoritmo, estas interações diminuem e mais tarde, dependendo da parametriação do algoritmo, elas podem ser eliminadas. Assim, no início do processo evolutivo há mais cooperação entre os especialistas de diferentes classes, o que favorece uma exploração mais ampla do espaço de busca. Com a eliminação da cooperação, favorece-se uma exploração mais local e detalhada deste espaço. Foram testados diferentes parâmetros do PG CPl utilizando o conjunto de dados iris do UCI Machine Learning Repository. Os resultados mostraram que a cooperação entre especialistas de diferentes classes ajudou na melhoria dos classificadores de classes mais difíceis de modelar. Além disso, que a evolução sem a interação entre as classes de diferentes especialidades beneficiou os classificadores quando eles já apresentam boa performance Uma combinação destes dois modos pode ser benéfica quando o algoritmo começa com classificadores que apresentam qualidades diferentes. O PG CPI também apresentou ótimos resultados para outros dois conjuntos de dados mais complexos o thyroid e o yeast, do mesmo repositório, alcançando acurácia similar aos melhores valores encontrados na literatura para outros modelos de CMC

Network intrusion detection using genetic programming.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.Network intrusion detection is a real-world problem that involves detecting intrusions on a computer network. Detecting whether a network connection is intrusive or non-intrusive is essentially a binary classification problem. However, the type of intrusive connections can be categorised into a number of network attack classes and the task of associating an intrusion to a particular network type is multiclass classification. A number of artificial intelligence techniques have been used for network intrusion detection including Evolutionary Algorithms. This thesis investigates the application of evolutionary algorithms namely, Genetic Programming (GP), Grammatical Evolution (GE) and Multi-Expression Programming (MEP) in the network intrusion detection domain. Grammatical evolution and multi-expression programming are considered to be variants of GP. In this thesis, a comparison of the effectiveness of classifiers evolved by the three EAs within the network intrusion detection domain is performed. The comparison is performed on the publicly available KDD99 dataset. Furthermore, the effectiveness of a number of fitness functions is evaluated. From the results obtained, standard genetic programming performs better than grammatical evolution and multi-expression programming. The findings indicate that binary classifiers evolved using standard genetic programming outperformed classifiers evolved using grammatical evolution and multi-expression programming. For evolving multiclass classifiers different fitness functions used produced classifiers with different characteristics resulting in some classifiers achieving higher detection rates for specific network intrusion attacks as compared to other intrusion attacks. The findings indicate that classifiers evolved using multi-expression programming and genetic programming achieved high detection rates as compared to classifiers evolved using grammatical evolution

Improving land cover classification using genetic programming for feature construction

Batista, J. E., Cabral, A. I. R., Vasconcelos, M. J. P., Vanneschi, L., & Silva, S. (2021). Improving land cover classification using genetic programming for feature construction. Remote Sensing, 13(9), [1623]. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13091623Genetic programming (GP) is a powerful machine learning (ML) algorithm that can produce readable white-box models. Although successfully used for solving an array of problems in different scientific areas, GP is still not well known in the field of remote sensing. The M3GP algorithm, a variant of the standard GP algorithm, performs feature construction by evolving hyperfeatures from the original ones. In this work, we use the M3GP algorithm on several sets of satellite images over different countries to create hyperfeatures from satellite bands to improve the classification of land cover types. We add the evolved hyperfeatures to the reference datasets and observe a significant improvement of the performance of three state-of-the-art ML algorithms (decision trees, random forests, and XGBoost) on multiclass classifications and no significant effect on the binary classifications. We show that adding the M3GP hyperfeatures to the reference datasets brings better results than adding the well-known spectral indices NDVI, NDWI, and NBR. We also compare the performance of the M3GP hyperfeatures in the binary classification problems with those created by other feature construction methods such as FFX and EFS.publishersversionpublishe

A Genetic Programming Approach for Computer Vision: Classifying High-level Image Features from Convolutional Layers with an Evolutionary Algorithm

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced Analytics, specialization in Data ScienceComputer Vision is a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence that provides a visual perception component to computers, mimicking human intelligence. One of its tasks is image classification and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been the most implemented algorithm in the last few years, with few changes made to the fully-connected layer of those neural networks. Nonetheless, recent research has been showing their accuracy could be improved in certain cases by implementing other algorithms for the classification of high-level image features from convolutional layers. Thus, the main research question for this document is: To what extent does the substitution of the fully-connected layer in Convolutional Neural Networks for an evolutionary algorithm affect the performance of those CNN models? The proposed two-step approach in this study does the classification of high-level image features with a state-of-the-art GP-based algorithm for multiclass classification called M4GP. This is conducted using secondary data with different characteristics, to better benchmark the implementation and to carefully investigate different outcomes. Results indicate the new learning approach yielded similar performance in the dataset with a low number of output classes. However, none of the M4GP models was able to surpass the results of the fully-connected layers in terms of test accuracy. Even so, this might be an interesting route if one has a powerful computer and needs a very light classifier in terms of model size. The results help to understand in which situation it might be beneficial to perform a similar experimental setup, either in the context of a work project or concerning a novel research topic

Feature selection for modular GA-based classification

Genetic algorithms (GAs) have been used as conventional methods for classifiers to adaptively evolve solutions for classification problems. Feature selection plays an important role in finding relevant features in classification. In this paper, feature selection is explored with modular GA-based classification. A new feature selection technique, Relative Importance Factor (RIF), is proposed to find less relevant features in the input domain of each class module. By removing these features, it is aimed to reduce the classification error and dimensionality of classification problems. Benchmark classification data sets are used to evaluate the proposed approach. The experiment results show that RIF can be used to find less relevant features and help achieve lower classification error with the feature space dimension reduced

Data classification using genetic programming.

Master of Science in Computer Science.Genetic programming (GP), a field of artificial intelligence, is an evolutionary algorithm which evolves a population of trees which represent programs. These programs are used to solve problems. This dissertation investigates the use of genetic programming for data classification. In machine learning, data classification is the process of allocating a class label to an instance of data. A classifier is created in order to perform these allocations. Several studies have investigated the use of GP to solve data classification problems. These studies have shown that GP is able to create classifiers with high classification accuracies. However, there are certain aspects which have not previously been investigated. Five areas were investigated in this dissertation. The first was an investigation into how discretisation could be incorporated into a GP algorithm. An adaptive discretisation algorithm was proposed, and outperformed certain existing methods. The second was a comparison of GP representations for binary data classification. The findings indicated that from the representations examined (arithmetic trees, decision trees, and logical trees), the decision trees performed the best. The third was to investigate the use of the encapsulation genetic operator and its effect on data classification. The findings revealed that an improvement in both training and test results was achieved when encapsulation was incorporated. The fourth was an investigative analysis of several hybridisations of a GP algorithm with a genetic algorithm in order to evolve a population of ensembles. Four methods were proposed and these methods outperformed certain existing GP and ensemble methods. Finally, the fifth area was to investigate an ensemble construction method for classification. In this approach GP evolved a single ensemble. The proposed method resulted in an improvement in training and test accuracy when compared to the standard GP algorithm. The methods proposed in this dissertation were tested on publicly available data sets, and the results were statistically tested in order to determine the effectiveness of the proposed approaches