An overview of decision table literature.

The present report contains an overview of the literature on decision tables since its origin. The goal is to analyze the dissemination of decision tables in different areas of knowledge, countries and languages, especially showing these that present the most interest on decision table use. In the first part a description of the scope of the overview is given. Next, the classification results by topic are explained. An abstract and some keywords are included for each reference, normally provided by the authors. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. Other examined topics are the theoretical or practical feature of each document, as well as its origin country and language. Finally, the main body of the paper consists of the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.

Menetelmiä mielenkiintoisten solmujen löytämiseen verkostoista

With the increasing amount of graph-structured data available, finding interesting objects, i.e., nodes in graphs, becomes more and more important. In this thesis we focus on finding interesting nodes and sets of nodes in graphs or networks. We propose several definitions of node interestingness as well as different methods to find such nodes. Specifically, we propose to consider nodes as interesting based on their relevance and non-redundancy or representativeness w.r.t. the graph topology, as well as based on their characterisation for a class, such as a given node attribute value. Identifying nodes that are relevant, but non-redundant to each other is motivated by the need to get an overview of different pieces of information related to a set of given nodes. Finding representative nodes is of interest, e.g. when the user needs or wants to select a few nodes that abstract the large set of nodes. Discovering nodes characteristic for a class helps to understand the causes behind that class. Next, four methods are proposed to find a representative set of interesting nodes. The first one incrementally picks one interesting node after another. The second iteratively changes the set of nodes to improve its overall interestingness. The third method clusters nodes and picks a medoid node as a representative for each cluster. Finally, the fourth method contrasts diverse sets of nodes in order to select nodes characteristic for their class, even if the classes are not identical across the selected nodes. The first three methods are relatively simple and are based on the graph topology and a similarity or distance function for nodes. For the second and third, the user needs to specify one parameter, either an initial set of k nodes or k, the size of the set. The fourth method assumes attributes and class attributes for each node, a class-related interesting measure, and possible sets of nodes which the user wants to contrast, such as sets of nodes that represent different time points. All four methods are flexible and generic. They can, in principle, be applied on any weighted graph or network regardless of what nodes, edges, weights, or attributes represent. Application areas for the methods developed in this thesis include word co-occurrence networks, biological networks, social networks, data traffic networks, and the World Wide Web. As an illustrating example, consider a word co-occurrence network. There, finding terms (nodes in the graph) that are relevant to some given nodes, e.g. branch and root, may help to identify different, shared contexts such as botanics, mathematics, and linguistics. A real life application lies in biology where finding nodes (biological entities, e.g. biological processes or pathways) that are relevant to other, given nodes (e.g. some genes or proteins) may help in identifying biological mechanisms that are possibly shared by both the genes and proteins.Väitöskirja käsittelee verkostojen louhinnan menetelmiä. Sen tavoitteena on löytää mielenkiintoisia tietoja painotetuista verkoista. Painotettuna verkkona voi tarkastella esim. tekstiainestoja, biologisia ainestoja, ihmisten välisiä yhteyksiä tai internettiä. Tällaisissa verkoissa solmut edustavat käsitteitä (esim. sanoja, geenejä, ihmisiä tai internetsivuja) ja kaaret niiden välisiä suhteita (esim. kaksi sanaa esiintyy samassa lauseessa, geeni koodaa proteiinia, ihmisten ystävyyksiä tai internetsivu viittaa toiseen internetsivuun). Kaarten painot voivat vastata esimerkiksi yhteyden voimakuutta tai luotettavuutta. Väitöskirjassa esitetään erilaisia verkon rakenteeseen tai solmujen attribuutteihin perustuvia määritelmiä solmujen mielenkiintoisuudelle sekä useita menetelmiä mielenkiintoisten solmujen löytämiseksi. Mielenkiintoisuuden voi määritellä esim. merkityksellisyytenä suhteessa joihinkin annettuihin solmuihin ja toisaalta mielenkiintoisten solmujen keskinäisenä erilaisuutena. Esimerkiksi ns. ahneella menetelmällä voidaan löytää keskenään erilaisia solmuja yksi kerrallaan. Väitöskirjan tuloksia voidaan soveltaa esimerkiksi tekstiaineistoa käsittelemällä saatuun sanojen väliseen verkostoon, jossa kahden sanan välillä on sitä voimakkaampi yhteys mitä useammin ne tapaavat esiintyä keskenään samoissa lauseissa. Sanojen erilaisia käyttöyhteyksiä ja jopa merkityksiä voidaan nyt löytää automaattisesti. Jos kohdesanaksi otetaan vaikkapa "juuri", niin siihen liittyviä mutta keskenään toisiinsa liittymättömiä sanoja ovat "puu" (biologinen merkitys: kasvin juuri), "yhtälö" (matemaattinen merkitys: yhtälön ratkaisu eli juuri) sekä "indoeurooppalainen" (kielitieteellinen merkitys: sanan vartalo eli juuri). Tällaisia menetelmiä voidaan soveltaa esimerkiksi hakukoneessa: sanalla "juuri" tehtyihin hakutuloksiin sisällytetään tuloksia mahdollisimman erilaisista käyttöyhteyksistä, jotta käyttäjän tarkoittama merkitys tulisi todennäköisemmin katetuksi hakutuloksissa. Merkittävä sovelluskohde väitöskirjan menetelmille ovat biologiset verkot, joissa solmut edustavat biologisia käsitteitä (esim. geenejä, proteiineja tai sairauksia) ja kaaret niiden välisiä suhteita (esim. geeni koodaa proteiinia tai proteiini on aktiivinen tietyssä sairauksessa). Menetelmillä voidaan etsiä esimerkiksi sairauksiin vaikuttavia biologisia mekanismeja paikantamalla edustava joukko sairauteen ja siihen mahdollisesti liittyviin geeneihin verkostossa kytkeytyviä muita solmuja. Nämä voivat auttaa biologeja ymmärtämään geenien ja sairauden mahdollisia kytköksiä ja siten kohdentamaan jatkotutkimustaan lupaavimpiin geeneihin, proteiineihin tms. Väitöskirjassa esitetyt solmujen mielenkiintoisuuden määritelmät sekä niiden löytämiseen ehdotetut menetelmät ovat yleispäteviä ja niitä voi soveltaa periaatteessa mihin tahansa verkkoon riippumatta siitä, mitä solmut, kaaret tai painot edustavat. Kokeet erilaisilla verkoilla osoittavat että ne löytävät mielenkiintoisia solmuja

Language-independent pre-processing of large document bases for text classification

Text classification is a well-known topic in the research of knowledge discovery in databases. Algorithms for text classification generally involve two stages. The first is concerned with identification of textual features (i.e. words andlor phrases) that may be relevant to the classification process. The second is concerned with classification rule mining and categorisation of "unseen" textual data. The first stage is the subject of this thesis and often involves an analysis of text that is both language-specific (and possibly domain-specific), and that may also be computationally costly especially when dealing with large datasets. Existing approaches to this stage are not, therefore, generally applicable to all languages. In this thesis, we examine a number of alternative keyword selection methods and phrase generation strategies, coupled with two potential significant word list construction mechanisms and two final significant word selection mechanisms, to identify such words andlor phrases in a given textual dataset that are expected to serve to distinguish between classes, by simple, language-independent statistical properties. We present experimental results, using common (large) textual datasets presented in two distinct languages, to show that the proposed approaches can produce good performance with respect to both classification accuracy and processing efficiency. In other words, the study presented in this thesis demonstrates the possibility of efficiently solving the traditional text classification problem in a language-independent (also domain-independent) manner

Credit Scoring Using Machine Learning

For financial institutions and the economy at large, the role of credit scoring in lending decisions cannot be overemphasised. An accurate and well-performing credit scorecard allows lenders to control their risk exposure through the selective allocation of credit based on the statistical analysis of historical customer data. This thesis identifies and investigates a number of specific challenges that occur during the development of credit scorecards. Four main contributions are made in this thesis. First, we examine the performance of a number supervised classification techniques on a collection of imbalanced credit scoring datasets. Class imbalance occurs when there are significantly fewer examples in one or more classes in a dataset compared to the remaining classes. We demonstrate that oversampling the minority class leads to no overall improvement to the best performing classifiers. We find that, in contrast, adjusting the threshold on classifier output yields, in many cases, an improvement in classification performance. Our second contribution investigates a particularly severe form of class imbalance, which, in credit scoring, is referred to as the low-default portfolio problem. To address this issue, we compare the performance of a number of semi-supervised classification algorithms with that of logistic regression. Based on the detailed comparison of classifier performance, we conclude that both approaches merit consideration when dealing with low-default portfolios. Third, we quantify the differences in classifier performance arising from various implementations of a real-world behavioural scoring dataset. Due to commercial sensitivities surrounding the use of behavioural scoring data, very few empirical studies which directly address this topic are published. This thesis describes the quantitative comparison of a range of dataset parameters impacting classification performance, including: (i) varying durations of historical customer behaviour for model training; (ii) different lengths of time from which a borrower’s class label is defined; and (iii) using alternative approaches to define a customer’s default status in behavioural scoring. Finally, this thesis demonstrates how artificial data may be used to overcome the difficulties associated with obtaining and using real-world data. The limitations of artificial data, in terms of its usefulness in evaluating classification performance, are also highlighted. In this work, we are interested in generating artificial data, for credit scoring, in the absence of any available real-world data

Conception d'une légende interactive et forable pour le SOLAP

Afin de palier au manque d'efficacité des SIG en tant qu'outil d'aide à la décision (granularités multiples, rapidité, convivialité, temporalité), différentes saveurs d'outils SOLAP (Spatial OLAP) ont vu le jour dans les centres de recherche et fournisseurs de logiciels (CRG/Kheops/Syntell, SFU/DBMiner, Proclarity, Cognos, Microsoft, Beyond 20/20, ESRI, MapInfo, etc.). Combinant des fonctions SIG avec l'informatique décisionnelle (entrepôts de données, OLAP, data mining), le SOLAP est décrit comme un "logiciel de navigation rapide et facile dans les bases de données spatiales qui offre plusieurs niveaux de granularité d'information, plusieurs époques, plusieurs thèmes et plusieurs modes de visualisation synchronisés ou non: cartes, tableaux et graphiques statistiques (Bédard 2004). Le SOLAP facilite l'exploration volontaire des données spatiales pour aider l'utilisateur à détecter les corrélations d'informations, les regroupements potentiels, les tendances dissimulées dans un amas de données à référence spatiale, etc. Le tout se fait par simple sélection/click de souris (pas de langage SQL) et des opérations simples comme : le forage, le remontage ou le forage latéral. Il permet à l'utilisateur de se focaliser sur les résultats des opérations au lieu de l'analyse du processus de navigation. Le SOLAP étant amené à prendre de l'essor au niveau des fonctions qu'il propose, il devient important de proposer des améliorations à son interface à l'usager de manière à conserver sa facilité d'utilisation. Le développement d'une légende interactive et forable fut la première solution en ce genre proposée par Bédard (Bédard 1997). Nous avons donc retenu cette piste pour la présente recherche, étudié la sémiologie graphique et son applicabilité à l'analyse multidimensionnelle, analysé ce qui existait dans des domaines connexes, exploré différentes alternatives permettant de résoudre le problème causé par l'enrichissement des fonctions de navigation, construit un prototype, recueilli des commentaires d'utilisateurs SOLAP et proposé une solution. Tout au long de cette recherche, nous avons été confrontés à une absence de littérature portant explicitement sur le sujet (les SOLAP étant trop nouveaux), à des corpus théoriques qu'il fallait adapter (sémiologie, interface homme-machine, visualisation scientifique, cartographie dynamique) et à des besoins en maquettes et prototypes pour illustrer les solutions envisagées. Finalement, cette recherche propose une solution parmi plusieurs; cependant, son principal intérêt est davantage l'ensemble des réflexions et considérations mises de l'avant tout au long du mémoire pour arriver au résultat proposé que la solution proposée en elle-même. Ce sont ces réflexions théoriques et pratiques qui permettront d'améliorer l'interface à l'usager de tout outil SOLAP grâce au nouveau concept de légende interactive et forable