Evolving interval-based representation for multiple classifier fusion.

Designing an ensemble of classifiers is one of the popular research topics in machine learning since it can give better results than using each constituent member. Furthermore, the performance of ensemble can be improved using selection or adaptation. In the former, the optimal set of base classifiers, meta-classifier, original features, or meta-data is selected to obtain a better ensemble than using the entire classifiers and features. In the latter, the base classifiers or combining algorithms working on the outputs of the base classifiers are made to adapt to a particular problem. The adaptation here means that the parameters of these algorithms are trained to be optimal for each problem. In this study, we propose a novel evolving combining algorithm using the adaptation approach for the ensemble systems. Instead of using numerical value when computing the representation for each class, we propose to use the interval-based representation for the class. The optimal value of the representation is found through Particle Swarm Optimization. During classification, a test instance is assigned to the class with the interval-based representation that is closest to the base classifiers’ prediction. Experiments conducted on a number of popular dataset confirmed that the proposed method is better than the well-known ensemble systems using Decision Template and Sum Rule as combiner, L2-loss Linear Support Vector Machine, Multiple Layer Neural Network, and the ensemble selection methods based on GA-Meta-data, META-DES, and ACO

Using Gamification to Enhance Self-directed, Open Learning in Higher Education

This paper reviews the literature on games based learning in the fields of psychology, education and video games, with a focus on the disparity of opinion regarding intrinsic motivation. Work in the field of education has shown that a state of optimal learning (flow) can be encouraged and sustained using a variety of reward based techniques. In contrast, psychological studies have shown that intrinsic motivation is inhibited by external reward techniques. The author’s experience as a professional game developer is that there are large commercial benefits and efficacy in a range of reward-based game mechanics. By identifying game design features that could cross over into education this paper will outline a range of techniques that could be implemented using a mobile device platform for use in the classroom within a higher education setting. An experiment is proposed to investigate the impact of this approach to games based learning and a software design is presented to support the experiment’s aims. A meta-game is described that links into normal student activities, gamifying them to enhance the student experience. Keywords: Game-Based Learning, motivation, mobile, gamification, software desig

Pairwise meta-rules for better meta-learning-based algorithm ranking

In this paper, we present a novel meta-feature generation method in the context of meta-learning, which is based on rules that compare the performance of individual base learners in a one-against-one manner. In addition to these new meta-features, we also introduce a new meta-learner called Approximate Ranking Tree Forests (ART Forests) that performs very competitively when compared with several state-of-the-art meta-learners. Our experimental results are based on a large collection of datasets and show that the proposed new techniques can improve the overall performance of meta-learning for algorithm ranking significantly. A key point in our approach is that each performance figure of any base learner for any specific dataset is generated by optimising the parameters of the base learner separately for each dataset

Feature Selection for Document Classification : Case Study of Meta-heuristic Intelligence and Traditional Approaches

Doctor of Philosophy (Computer Engineering), 2020Nowadays, the culture for accessing news around the world is changed from paper to electronic format and the rate of publication for newspapers and magazines on website are increased dramatically. Meanwhile, text feature selection for the automatic document classification (ADC) is becoming a big challenge because of the unstructured nature of text feature, which is called “multi-dimension feature problem”. On the other hand, various powerful schemes dealing with text feature selection are being developed continuously nowadays, but there still exists a research gap for “optimization of feature selection problem (OFSP)”, which can be looked for the global optimal features. Meanwhile, the capacity of meta-heuristic intelligence for knowledge discovery process (KDP) is also become the critical role to overcome NP-hard problem of OFSP by providing effective performance and efficient computation time. Therefore, the idea of meta-heuristic based approach for optimization of feature selection is proposed in this research to search the global optimal features for ADC. In this thesis, case study of meta-heuristic intelligence and traditional approaches for feature selection optimization process in document classification is observed. It includes eleven meta-heuristic algorithms such as Ant Colony search, Artificial Bee Colony search, Bat search, Cuckoo search, Evolutionary search, Elephant search, Firefly search, Flower search, Genetic search, Rhinoceros search, and Wolf search, for searching the optimal feature subset for document classification. Then, the results of proposed model are compared with three traditional search algorithms like Best First search (BFS), Greedy Stepwise (GS), and Ranker search (RS). In addition, the framework of data mining is applied. It involves data preprocessing, feature engineering, building learning model and evaluating the performance of proposed meta-heuristic intelligence-based feature selection using various performance and computation complexity evaluation schemes. In data processing, tokenization, stop-words handling, stemming and lemmatizing, and normalization are applied. In feature engineering process, n-gram TF-IDF feature extraction is used for implementing feature vector and both filter and wrapper approach are applied for observing different cases. In addition, three different classifiers like J48, Naïve Bayes, and Support Vector Machine, are used for building the document classification model. According to the results, the proposed system can reduce the number of selected features dramatically that can deteriorate learning model performance. In addition, the selected global subset features can yield better performance than traditional search according to single objective function of proposed model

Hyperparameter Learning via Distributional Transfer

Bayesian optimisation is a popular technique for hyperparameter learning but typically requires initial exploration even in cases where similar prior tasks have been solved. We propose to transfer information across tasks using learnt representations of training datasets used in those tasks. This results in a joint Gaussian process model on hyperparameters and data representations. Representations make use of the framework of distribution embeddings into reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. The developed method has a faster convergence compared to existing baselines, in some cases requiring only a few evaluations of the target objective