Knowledge management overview of feature selection problem in high-dimensional financial data: Cooperative co-evolution and Map Reduce perspectives

The term big data characterizes the massive amounts of data generation by the advanced technologies in different domains using 4Vs volume, velocity, variety, and veracity-to indicate the amount of data that can only be processed via computationally intensive analysis, the speed of their creation, the different types of data, and their accuracy. High-dimensional financial data, such as time-series and space-Time data, contain a large number of features (variables) while having a small number of samples, which are used to measure various real-Time business situations for financial organizations. Such datasets are normally noisy, and complex correlations may exist between their features, and many domains, including financial, lack the al analytic tools to mine the data for knowledge discovery because of the high-dimensionality. Feature selection is an optimization problem to find a minimal subset of relevant features that maximizes the classification accuracy and reduces the computations. Traditional statistical-based feature selection approaches are not adequate to deal with the curse of dimensionality associated with big data. Cooperative co-evolution, a meta-heuristic algorithm and a divide-And-conquer approach, decomposes high-dimensional problems into smaller sub-problems. Further, MapReduce, a programming model, offers a ready-To-use distributed, scalable, and fault-Tolerant infrastructure for parallelizing the developed algorithm. This article presents a knowledge management overview of evolutionary feature selection approaches, state-of-The-Art cooperative co-evolution and MapReduce-based feature selection techniques, and future research directions

Evolutionary Computation and QSAR Research

[Abstract] The successful high throughput screening of molecule libraries for a specific biological property is one of the main improvements in drug discovery. The virtual molecular filtering and screening relies greatly on quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) analysis, a mathematical model that correlates the activity of a molecule with molecular descriptors. QSAR models have the potential to reduce the costly failure of drug candidates in advanced (clinical) stages by filtering combinatorial libraries, eliminating candidates with a predicted toxic effect and poor pharmacokinetic profiles, and reducing the number of experiments. To obtain a predictive and reliable QSAR model, scientists use methods from various fields such as molecular modeling, pattern recognition, machine learning or artificial intelligence. QSAR modeling relies on three main steps: molecular structure codification into molecular descriptors, selection of relevant variables in the context of the analyzed activity, and search of the optimal mathematical model that correlates the molecular descriptors with a specific activity. Since a variety of techniques from statistics and artificial intelligence can aid variable selection and model building steps, this review focuses on the evolutionary computation methods supporting these tasks. Thus, this review explains the basic of the genetic algorithms and genetic programming as evolutionary computation approaches, the selection methods for high-dimensional data in QSAR, the methods to build QSAR models, the current evolutionary feature selection methods and applications in QSAR and the future trend on the joint or multi-task feature selection methods.Instituto de Salud Carlos III, PIO52048Instituto de Salud Carlos III, RD07/0067/0005Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo; TSI-020110-2009-53)Galicia. Consellería de Economía e Industria; 10SIN105004P

Ensemble of heterogeneous flexible neural trees using multiobjective genetic programming

Machine learning algorithms are inherently multiobjective in nature, where approximation error minimization and model's complexity simplification are two conflicting objectives. We proposed a multiobjective genetic programming (MOGP) for creating a heterogeneous flexible neural tree (HFNT), tree-like flexible feedforward neural network model. The functional heterogeneity in neural tree nodes was introduced to capture a better insight of data during learning because each input in a dataset possess different features. MOGP guided an initial HFNT population towards Pareto-optimal solutions, where the final population was used for making an ensemble system. A diversity index measure along with approximation error and complexity was introduced to maintain diversity among the candidates in the population. Hence, the ensemble was created by using accurate, structurally simple, and diverse candidates from MOGP final population. Differential evolution algorithm was applied to fine-tune the underlying parameters of the selected candidates. A comprehensive test over classification, regression, and time-series datasets proved the efficiency of the proposed algorithm over other available prediction methods. Moreover, the heterogeneous creation of HFNT proved to be efficient in making ensemble system from the final population

Novel Semi-Supervised Learning Models to Balance Data Inclusivity and Usability in Healthcare Applications

abstract: Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is sub-field of statistical machine learning that is useful for problems that involve having only a few labeled instances with predictor (X) and target (Y) information, and abundance of unlabeled instances that only have predictor (X) information. SSL harnesses the target information available in the limited labeled data, as well as the information in the abundant unlabeled data to build strong predictive models. However, not all the included information is useful. For example, some features may correspond to noise and including them will hurt the predictive model performance. Additionally, some instances may not be as relevant to model building and their inclusion will increase training time and potentially hurt the model performance. The objective of this research is to develop novel SSL models to balance data inclusivity and usability. My dissertation research focuses on applications of SSL in healthcare, driven by problems in brain cancer radiomics, migraine imaging, and Parkinson’s Disease telemonitoring. The first topic introduces an integration of machine learning (ML) and a mechanistic model (PI) to develop an SSL model applied to predicting cell density of glioblastoma brain cancer using multi-parametric medical images. The proposed ML-PI hybrid model integrates imaging information from unbiopsied regions of the brain as well as underlying biological knowledge from the mechanistic model to predict spatial tumor density in the brain. The second topic develops a multi-modality imaging-based diagnostic decision support system (MMI-DDS). MMI-DDS consists of modality-wise principal components analysis to incorporate imaging features at different aggregation levels (e.g., voxel-wise, connectivity-based, etc.), a constrained particle swarm optimization (cPSO) feature selection algorithm, and a clinical utility engine that utilizes inverse operators on chosen principal components for white-box classification models. The final topic develops a new SSL regression model with integrated feature and instance selection called s2SSL (with “s2” referring to selection in two different ways: feature and instance). s2SSL integrates cPSO feature selection and graph-based instance selection to simultaneously choose the optimal features and instances and build accurate models for continuous prediction. s2SSL was applied to smartphone-based telemonitoring of Parkinson’s Disease patients.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Industrial Engineering 201

Challenges in biomedical data science: data-driven solutions to clinical questions

Data are influencing every aspect of our lives, from our work activities, to our spare time and even to our health. In this regard, medical diagnosis and treatments are often supported by quantitative measures and observations, such as laboratory tests, medical imaging or genetic analysis. In medicine, as well as in several other scientific domains, the amount of data involved in each decision-making process has become overwhelming. The complexity of the phenomena under investigation and the scale of modern data collections has long superseded human analysis and insights potential

Parameter reduction in deep learning and classification

The goal of this thesis is to develop methods to reduce model and problem complexity in the area of classification tasks. Whether it is a traditional or a deep learning classification task, decreasing complexity helps to greatly improve efficiency, and also adds regularization to the models. In traditional machine learning, high-dimensionality can cause models to over-fit the training data, and hence not generalize well, while in deep learning, neural networks have shown to achieve state-of-the-art results, especially in the area of image recognition, in their current state cannot be easily deployed on memory restricted Internet-of-Things devices. Although much work has been carried out on dimensionality reduction, the first part of our work focuses on using dominancy between features in the aim to select a relevant subset of informative features. We propose 3 variations, with different benefits, including fast filter features selection and a hybrid filter-wrapper approach. In the second section, dedicated to deep learning, our work focuses on pruning methods to extract an overall much more efficient neural network. We show that our proposed techniques outperform previous state-of-the-art methods, across the different classification areas on a number of benchmark datasets using various classifiers and neural networks

Computational Pathology: A Survey Review and The Way Forward

Computational Pathology CPath is an interdisciplinary science that augments developments of computational approaches to analyze and model medical histopathology images. The main objective for CPath is to develop infrastructure and workflows of digital diagnostics as an assistive CAD system for clinical pathology, facilitating transformational changes in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer that are mainly address by CPath tools. With evergrowing developments in deep learning and computer vision algorithms, and the ease of the data flow from digital pathology, currently CPath is witnessing a paradigm shift. Despite the sheer volume of engineering and scientific works being introduced for cancer image analysis, there is still a considerable gap of adopting and integrating these algorithms in clinical practice. This raises a significant question regarding the direction and trends that are undertaken in CPath. In this article we provide a comprehensive review of more than 800 papers to address the challenges faced in problem design all-the-way to the application and implementation viewpoints. We have catalogued each paper into a model-card by examining the key works and challenges faced to layout the current landscape in CPath. We hope this helps the community to locate relevant works and facilitate understanding of the field's future directions. In a nutshell, we oversee the CPath developments in cycle of stages which are required to be cohesively linked together to address the challenges associated with such multidisciplinary science. We overview this cycle from different perspectives of data-centric, model-centric, and application-centric problems. We finally sketch remaining challenges and provide directions for future technical developments and clinical integration of CPath (https://github.com/AtlasAnalyticsLab/CPath_Survey).Comment: Accepted in Elsevier Journal of Pathology Informatics (JPI) 202

Técnicas big data para el procesamiento de flujos de datos masivos en tiempo real

Programa de Doctorado en Biotecnología, Ingeniería y Tecnología QuímicaLínea de Investigación: Ingeniería, Ciencia de Datos y BioinformáticaClave Programa: DBICódigo Línea: 111Machine learning techniques have become one of the most demanded resources by companies due to the large volume of data that surrounds us in these days. The main objective of these technologies is to solve complex problems in an automated way using data. One of the current perspectives of machine learning is the analysis of continuous flows of data or data streaming. This approach is increasingly requested by enterprises as a result of the large number of information sources producing time-indexed data at high frequency, such as sensors, Internet of Things devices, social networks, etc. However, nowadays, research is more focused on the study of historical data than on data received in streaming. One of the main reasons for this is the enormous challenge that this type of data presents for the modeling of machine learning algorithms. This Doctoral Thesis is presented in the form of a compendium of publications with a total of 10 scientific contributions in International Conferences and journals with high impact index in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The research developed during the PhD Program focuses on the study and analysis of real-time or streaming data through the development of new machine learning algorithms. Machine learning algorithms for real-time data consist of a different type of modeling than the traditional one, where the model is updated online to provide accurate responses in the shortest possible time. The main objective of this Doctoral Thesis is the contribution of research value to the scientific community through three new machine learning algorithms. These algorithms are big data techniques and two of them work with online or streaming data. In this way, contributions are made to the development of one of the current trends in Artificial Intelligence. With this purpose, algorithms are developed for descriptive and predictive tasks, i.e., unsupervised and supervised learning, respectively. Their common idea is the discovery of patterns in the data. The first technique developed during the dissertation is a triclustering algorithm to produce three-dimensional data clusters in offline or batch mode. This big data algorithm is called bigTriGen. In a general way, an evolutionary metaheuristic is used to search for groups of data with similar patterns. The model uses genetic operators such as selection, crossover, mutation or evaluation operators at each iteration. The goal of the bigTriGen is to optimize the evaluation function to achieve triclusters of the highest possible quality. It is used as the basis for the second technique implemented during the Doctoral Thesis. The second algorithm focuses on the creation of groups over three-dimensional data received in real-time or in streaming. It is called STriGen. Streaming modeling is carried out starting from an offline or batch model using historical data. As soon as this model is created, it starts receiving data in real-time. The model is updated in an online or streaming manner to adapt to new streaming patterns. In this way, the STriGen is able to detect concept drifts and incorporate them into the model as quickly as possible, thus producing triclusters in real-time and of good quality. The last algorithm developed in this dissertation follows a supervised learning approach for time series forecasting in real-time. It is called StreamWNN. A model is created with historical data based on the k-nearest neighbor or KNN algorithm. Once the model is created, data starts to be received in real-time. The algorithm provides real-time predictions of future data, keeping the model always updated in an incremental way and incorporating streaming patterns identified as novelties. The StreamWNN also identifies anomalous data in real-time allowing this feature to be used as a security measure during its application. The developed algorithms have been evaluated with real data from devices and sensors. These new techniques have demonstrated to be very useful, providing meaningful triclusters and accurate predictions in real time.Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla. Departamento de Deporte e informátic