28,738 research outputs found
Neural Networks for Target Selection in Direct Marketing
Partly due to a growing interest in direct marketing, it has become an important application field for data mining. Many techniques have been applied to select the targets in commercial applications, such as statistical regression, regression trees, neural computing, fuzzy clustering and association rules. Modeling of charity donations has also recently been considered. The availability of a large number of techniques for analyzing the data may look overwhelming and ultimately unnecessary at first. However, the amount of data used in direct marketing is tremendous. Further, there are different types of data and likely strong nonlinear relations amongst different groups within the data. Therefore, it is unlikely that there will be a single method that can be used under all circumstances. For that reason, it is important to have access to a range of different target selection methods that can be used in a complementary fashion. In this respect, learning systems such as neural networks have the advantage that they can adapt to the nonlinearity in the data to capture the complex relations. This is an important motivation for applying neural networks for target selection. In this report, neural networks are applied to target selection in modeling of charity donations. Various stages of model building are described by using data from a large Dutch charity organization as a case. The results are compared with the results of more traditional methods for target selection such as logistic regression and CHAID.neural networks;data mining;direct mail;direct marketing;target selection
A kernel-based framework for learning graded relations from data
Driven by a large number of potential applications in areas like
bioinformatics, information retrieval and social network analysis, the problem
setting of inferring relations between pairs of data objects has recently been
investigated quite intensively in the machine learning community. To this end,
current approaches typically consider datasets containing crisp relations, so
that standard classification methods can be adopted. However, relations between
objects like similarities and preferences are often expressed in a graded
manner in real-world applications. A general kernel-based framework for
learning relations from data is introduced here. It extends existing approaches
because both crisp and graded relations are considered, and it unifies existing
approaches because different types of graded relations can be modeled,
including symmetric and reciprocal relations. This framework establishes
important links between recent developments in fuzzy set theory and machine
learning. Its usefulness is demonstrated through various experiments on
synthetic and real-world data.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication.
Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no
longer be accessibl
Comparison of different strategies of utilizing fuzzy clustering in structure identification
Fuzzy systems approximate highly nonlinear systems by means of fuzzy "if-then"
rules. In the literature, various algorithms are proposed for mining. These algorithms commonly utilize fuzzy clustering in structure identification. Basically, there are three different approaches in which one can utilize fuzzy clustering; the �first one is based on input space clustering, the second one considers clustering realized in the output space, while the third one is concerned with clustering realized in the combined input-output space. In this study, we analyze these three approaches. We discuss each of the algorithms in great detail and o¤er a thorough comparative analysis. Finally, we compare the performances of these algorithms in a medical diagnosis classi�cation problem, namely Aachen Aphasia Test. The experiment and the results provide a valuable insight about the merits and the shortcomings of these three clustering approaches
A Deep Spatio-Temporal Fuzzy Neural Network for Passenger Demand Prediction
In spite of its importance, passenger demand prediction is a highly
challenging problem, because the demand is simultaneously influenced by the
complex interactions among many spatial and temporal factors and other external
factors such as weather. To address this problem, we propose a Spatio-TEmporal
Fuzzy neural Network (STEF-Net) to accurately predict passenger demands
incorporating the complex interactions of all known important factors. We
design an end-to-end learning framework with different neural networks modeling
different factors. Specifically, we propose to capture spatio-temporal feature
interactions via a convolutional long short-term memory network and model
external factors via a fuzzy neural network that handles data uncertainty
significantly better than deterministic methods. To keep the temporal relations
when fusing two networks and emphasize discriminative spatio-temporal feature
interactions, we employ a novel feature fusion method with a convolution
operation and an attention layer. As far as we know, our work is the first to
fuse a deep recurrent neural network and a fuzzy neural network to model
complex spatial-temporal feature interactions with additional uncertain input
features for predictive learning. Experiments on a large-scale real-world
dataset show that our model achieves more than 10% improvement over the
state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/1.9781611975673.1
Energy performance forecasting of residential buildings using fuzzy approaches
The energy consumption used for domestic purposes in Europe is, to a considerable extent, due to heating and cooling. This energy is produced mostly by burning fossil fuels, which has a high negative environmental impact. The characteristics of a building are an important factor to determine the necessities of heating and cooling loads. Therefore, the study of the relevant characteristics of the buildings, regarding the heating and cooling needed to maintain comfortable indoor air conditions, could be very useful in order to design and construct energy-efficient buildings. In previous studies, different machine-learning approaches have been used to predict heating and cooling loads from the set of variables: relative compactness, surface area, wall area, roof area, overall height, orientation, glazing area and glazing area distribution. However, none of these methods are based on fuzzy logic. In this research, we study two fuzzy logic approaches, i.e., fuzzy inductive reasoning (FIR) and adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), to deal with the same problem. Fuzzy approaches obtain very good results, outperforming all the methods described in previous studies except one. In this work, we also study the feature selection process of FIR methodology as a pre-processing tool to select the more relevant variables before the use of any predictive modelling methodology. It is proven that FIR feature selection provides interesting insights into the main building variables causally related to heating and cooling loads. This allows better decision making and design strategies, since accurate cooling and heating load estimations and correct identification of parameters that affect building energy demands are of high importance to optimize building designs and equipment specifications.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Statistical relational learning with soft quantifiers
Quantification in statistical relational learning (SRL) is either existential or universal, however humans might be more inclined to express knowledge using soft quantifiers, such as ``most'' and ``a few''. In this paper, we define the syntax and semantics of PSL^Q, a new SRL framework that supports reasoning with soft quantifiers, and present its most probable explanation (MPE) inference algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, PSL^Q is the first SRL framework that combines soft quantifiers with first-order logic rules for modelling uncertain relational data. Our experimental results for link prediction in social trust networks demonstrate that the use of soft quantifiers not only allows for a natural and intuitive formulation of domain knowledge, but also improves the accuracy of inferred results
An empirical learning-based validation procedure for simulation workflow
Simulation workflow is a top-level model for the design and control of
simulation process. It connects multiple simulation components with time and
interaction restrictions to form a complete simulation system. Before the
construction and evaluation of the component models, the validation of
upper-layer simulation workflow is of the most importance in a simulation
system. However, the methods especially for validating simulation workflow is
very limit. Many of the existing validation techniques are domain-dependent
with cumbersome questionnaire design and expert scoring. Therefore, this paper
present an empirical learning-based validation procedure to implement a
semi-automated evaluation for simulation workflow. First, representative
features of general simulation workflow and their relations with validation
indices are proposed. The calculation process of workflow credibility based on
Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is then introduced. In order to make full use
of the historical data and implement more efficient validation, four learning
algorithms, including back propagation neural network (BPNN), extreme learning
machine (ELM), evolving new-neuron (eNFN) and fast incremental gaussian mixture
model (FIGMN), are introduced for constructing the empirical relation between
the workflow credibility and its features. A case study on a landing-process
simulation workflow is established to test the feasibility of the proposed
procedure. The experimental results also provide some useful overview of the
state-of-the-art learning algorithms on the credibility evaluation of
simulation models
- …