Multigranulation Super-Trust Model for Attribute Reduction

IEEE As big data often contains a significant amount of uncertain, unstructured and imprecise data that are structurally complex and incomplete, traditional attribute reduction methods are less effective when applied to large-scale incomplete information systems to extract knowledge. Multigranular computing provides a powerful tool for use in big data analysis conducted at different levels of information granularity. In this paper, we present a novel multigranulation super-trust fuzzy-rough set-based attribute reduction (MSFAR) algorithm to support the formation of hierarchies of information granules of higher types and higher orders, which addresses newly emerging data mining problems in big data analysis. First, a multigranulation super-trust model based on the valued tolerance relation is constructed to identify the fuzzy similarity of the changing knowledge granularity with multimodality attributes. Second, an ensemble consensus compensatory scheme is adopted to calculate the multigranular trust degree based on the reputation at different granularities to create reasonable subproblems with different granulation levels. Third, an equilibrium method of multigranular-coevolution is employed to ensure a wide range of balancing of exploration and exploitation and can classify super elitists’ preferences and detect noncooperative behaviors with a global convergence ability and high search accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that the MSFAR algorithm achieves a high performance in addressing uncertain and fuzzy attribute reduction problems with a large number of multigranularity variables

Simple and complex spiking neurons : perspectives and analysis in a simple STDP scenario

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are largely inspired by biology and neuroscience, and leverage ideas and theories to create fast and efficient learning systems. Spiking neuron models are adopted as core processing units in neuromorphic systems because they enable event-based processing. The integrate-and-fire (I\&F) models are often adopted as considered more suitable, with the simple Leaky I\&F (LIF) being the most used. The reason for adopting such models is their efficiency or biological plausibility. Nevertheless, rigorous justification for the adoption of LIF over other neuron models for use in artificial learning systems has not yet been studied. This work considers a variety of neuron models in the literature and then selects computational neuron models that are single-variable, efficient, and display different types of complexities. From this selection, we make a comparative study of three simple I\&F neuron models, namely the LIF, the Quadratic I\&F (QIF) and the Exponential I\&F (EIF), to understand whether the use of more complex models increases the performance of the system and whether the choice of a neuron model can be directed by the task to be completed. Neuron models are tested within an SNN trained with Spike-Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) on a classification task on the N-MNIST and DVS Gestures datasets. Experimental results reveal that more complex neurons manifest the same ability as simpler ones to achieve high levels of accuracy on a simple dataset (N-MNIST), albeit requiring comparably more hyper-parameter tuning. However, when the data possess richer spatio-temporal features, the QIF and EIF neuron models steadily achieve better results. This suggests that accurately selecting the model based on the richness of the feature spectrum of the data could improve the performance of the whole system. Finally, the code implementing the spiking neurons in the SpykeTorch framework is made publicly available

High-level automation of custom hardware design for high-performance computing

This dissertation focuses on efficient generation of custom processors from high-level language descriptions. Our work exploits compiler-based optimizations and transformations in tandem with high-level synthesis (HLS) to build high-performance custom processors. The goal is to offer a common multiplatform high-abstraction programming interface for heterogeneous compute systems where the benefits of custom reconfigurable (or fixed) processors can be exploited by the application developers. The research presented in this dissertation supports the following thesis: In an increasingly heterogeneous compute environment it is important to leverage the compute capabilities of each heterogeneous processor efficiently. In the case of FPGA and ASIC accelerators this can be achieved through HLS-based flows that (i) extract parallelism at coarser than basic block granularities, (ii) leverage common high-level parallel programming languages, and (iii) employ high-level source-to-source transformations to generate high-throughput custom processors. First, we propose a novel HLS flow that extracts instruction level parallelism beyond the boundary of basic blocks from C code. Subsequently, we describe FCUDA, an HLS-based framework for mapping fine-grained and coarse-grained parallelism from parallel CUDA kernels onto spatial parallelism. FCUDA provides a common programming model for acceleration on heterogeneous devices (i.e. GPUs and FPGAs). Moreover, the FCUDA framework balances multilevel granularity parallelism synthesis using efficient techniques that leverage fast and accurate estimation models (i.e. do not rely on lengthy physical implementation tools). Finally, we describe an advanced source-to-source transformation framework for throughput-driven parallelism synthesis (TDPS), which appropriately restructures CUDA kernel code to maximize throughput on FPGA devices. We have integrated the TDPS framework into the FCUDA flow to enable automatic performance porting of CUDA kernels designed for the GPU architecture onto the FPGA architecture