Reinforcement Learning

Brains rule the world, and brain-like computation is increasingly used in computers and electronic devices. Brain-like computation is about processing and interpreting data or directly putting forward and performing actions. Learning is a very important aspect. This book is on reinforcement learning which involves performing actions to achieve a goal. The first 11 chapters of this book describe and extend the scope of reinforcement learning. The remaining 11 chapters show that there is already wide usage in numerous fields. Reinforcement learning can tackle control tasks that are too complex for traditional, hand-designed, non-learning controllers. As learning computers can deal with technical complexities, the tasks of human operators remain to specify goals on increasingly higher levels. This book shows that reinforcement learning is a very dynamic area in terms of theory and applications and it shall stimulate and encourage new research in this field

A Comprehensive Survey on Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm and Its Applications

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a heuristic global optimization method, proposed originally by Kennedy and Eberhart in 1995. It is now one of the most commonly used optimization techniques. This survey presented a comprehensive investigation of PSO. On one hand, we provided advances with PSO, including its modifications (including quantum-behaved PSO, bare-bones PSO, chaotic PSO, and fuzzy PSO), population topology (as fully connected, von Neumann, ring, star, random, etc.), hybridization (with genetic algorithm, simulated annealing, Tabu search, artificial immune system, ant colony algorithm, artificial bee colony, differential evolution, harmonic search, and biogeography-based optimization), extensions (to multiobjective, constrained, discrete, and binary optimization), theoretical analysis (parameter selection and tuning, and convergence analysis), and parallel implementation (in multicore, multiprocessor, GPU, and cloud computing forms). On the other hand, we offered a survey on applications of PSO to the following eight fields: electrical and electronic engineering, automation control systems, communication theory, operations research, mechanical engineering, fuel and energy, medicine, chemistry, and biology. It is hoped that this survey would be beneficial for the researchers studying PSO algorithms

Automatic synthesis of fuzzy systems: An evolutionary overview with a genetic programming perspective

Studies in Evolutionary Fuzzy Systems (EFSs) began in the 90s and have experienced a fast development since then, with applications to areas such as pattern recognition, curve‐fitting and regression, forecasting and control. An EFS results from the combination of a Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) with an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA). This relationship can be established for multiple purposes: fine‐tuning of FIS's parameters, selection of fuzzy rules, learning a rule base or membership functions from scratch, and so forth. Each facet of this relationship creates a strand in the literature, as membership function fine‐tuning, fuzzy rule‐based learning, and so forth and the purpose here is to outline some of what has been done in each aspect. Special focus is given to Genetic Programming‐based EFSs by providing a taxonomy of the main architectures available, as well as by pointing out the gaps that still prevail in the literature. The concluding remarks address some further topics of current research and trends, such as interpretability analysis, multiobjective optimization, and synthesis of a FIS through Evolving methods

Advances in Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a very dynamic area in terms of theory and application. This book brings together many different aspects of the current research on several fields associated to RL which has been growing rapidly, producing a wide variety of learning algorithms for different applications. Based on 24 Chapters, it covers a very broad variety of topics in RL and their application in autonomous systems. A set of chapters in this book provide a general overview of RL while other chapters focus mostly on the applications of RL paradigms: Game Theory, Multi-Agent Theory, Robotic, Networking Technologies, Vehicular Navigation, Medicine and Industrial Logistic

An Optimisation-Driven Prediction Method for Automated Diagnosis and Prognosis

open access articleThis article presents a novel hybrid classification paradigm for medical diagnoses and prognoses prediction. The core mechanism of the proposed method relies on a centroid classification algorithm whose logic is exploited to formulate the classification task as a real-valued optimisation problem. A novel metaheuristic combining the algorithmic structure of Swarm Intelligence optimisers with the probabilistic search models of Estimation of Distribution Algorithms is designed to optimise such a problem, thus leading to high-accuracy predictions. This method is tested over 11 medical datasets and compared against 14 cherry-picked classification algorithms. Results show that the proposed approach is competitive and superior to the state-of-the-art on several occasions

Front Matter - Soft Computing for Data Mining Applications

Efficient tools and algorithms for knowledge discovery in large data sets have been devised during the recent years. These methods exploit the capability of computers to search huge amounts of data in a fast and effective manner. However, the data to be analyzed is imprecise and afflicted with uncertainty. In the case of heterogeneous data sources such as text, audio and video, the data might moreover be ambiguous and partly conflicting. Besides, patterns and relationships of interest are usually vague and approximate. Thus, in order to make the information mining process more robust or say, human-like methods for searching and learning it requires tolerance towards imprecision, uncertainty and exceptions. Thus, they have approximate reasoning capabilities and are capable of handling partial truth. Properties of the aforementioned kind are typical soft computing. Soft computing techniques like Genetic

Machine learning techniques implementation in power optimization, data processing, and bio-medical applications

The rapid progress and development in machine-learning algorithms becomes a key factor in determining the future of humanity. These algorithms and techniques were utilized to solve a wide spectrum of problems extended from data mining and knowledge discovery to unsupervised learning and optimization. This dissertation consists of two study areas. The first area investigates the use of reinforcement learning and adaptive critic design algorithms in the field of power grid control. The second area in this dissertation, consisting of three papers, focuses on developing and applying clustering algorithms on biomedical data. The first paper presents a novel modelling approach for demand side management of electric water heaters using Q-learning and action-dependent heuristic dynamic programming. The implemented approaches provide an efficient load management mechanism that reduces the overall power cost and smooths grid load profile. The second paper implements an ensemble statistical and subspace-clustering model for analyzing the heterogeneous data of the autism spectrum disorder. The paper implements a novel k-dimensional algorithm that shows efficiency in handling heterogeneous dataset. The third paper provides a unified learning model for clustering neuroimaging data to identify the potential risk factors for suboptimal brain aging. In the last paper, clustering and clustering validation indices are utilized to identify the groups of compounds that are responsible for plant uptake and contaminant transportation from roots to plants edible parts --Abstract, page iv

Analysis of Microarray Data using Machine Learning Techniques on Scalable Platforms

Microarray-based gene expression profiling has been emerged as an efficient technique for classification, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of cancer disease. Frequent changes in the behavior of this disease, generate a huge volume of data. The data retrieved from microarray cover its veracities, and the changes observed as time changes (velocity). Although, it is a type of high-dimensional data which has very large number of features rather than number of samples. Therefore, the analysis of microarray high-dimensional dataset in a short period is very much essential. It often contains huge number of data, only a fraction of which comprises significantly expressed genes. The identification of the precise and interesting genes which are responsible for the cause of cancer is imperative in microarray data analysis. Most of the existing schemes employ a two phase process such as feature selection/extraction followed by classification. Our investigation starts with the analysis of microarray data using kernel based classifiers followed by feature selection using statistical t-test. In this work, various kernel based classifiers like Extreme learning machine (ELM), Relevance vector machine (RVM), and a new proposed method called kernel fuzzy inference system (KFIS) are implemented. The proposed models are investigated using three microarray datasets like Leukemia, Breast and Ovarian cancer. Finally, the performance of these classifiers are measured and compared with Support vector machine (SVM). From the results, it is revealed that the proposed models are able to classify the datasets efficiently and the performance is comparable to the existing kernel based classifiers. As the data size increases, to handle and process these datasets becomes very bottleneck. Hence, a distributed and a scalable cluster like Hadoop is needed for storing (HDFS) and processing (MapReduce as well as Spark) the datasets in an efficient way. The next contribution in this thesis deals with the implementation of feature selection methods, which are able to process the data in a distributed manner. Various statistical tests like ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis, and Friedman tests are implemented using MapReduce and Spark frameworks which are executed on the top of Hadoop cluster. The performance of these scalable models are measured and compared with the conventional system. From the results, it is observed that the proposed scalable models are very efficient to process data of larger dimensions (GBs, TBs, etc.), as it is not possible to process with the traditional implementation of those algorithms. After selecting the relevant features, the next contribution of this thesis is the scalable viii implementation of the proximal support vector machine classifier, which is an efficient variant of SVM. The proposed classifier is implemented on the two scalable frameworks like MapReduce and Spark and executed on the Hadoop cluster. The obtained results are compared with the results obtained using conventional system. From the results, it is observed that the scalable cluster is well suited for the Big data. Furthermore, it is concluded that Spark is more efficient than MapReduce due to its an intelligent way of handling the datasets through Resilient distributed dataset (RDD) as well as in-memory processing and conventional system to analyze the Big datasets. Therefore, the next contribution of the thesis is the implementation of various scalable classifiers base on Spark. In this work various classifiers like, Logistic regression (LR), Support vector machine (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and Radial basis function network (RBFN) with two variants hybrid and gradient descent learning algorithms are proposed and implemented using Spark framework. The proposed scalable models are executed on Hadoop cluster as well as conventional system and the results are investigated. From the obtained results, it is observed that the execution of the scalable algorithms are very efficient than conventional system for processing the Big datasets. The efficacy of the proposed scalable algorithms to handle Big datasets are investigated and compared with the conventional system (where data are not distributed, kept on standalone machine and processed in a traditional manner). The comparative analysis shows that the scalable algorithms are very efficient to process Big datasets on Hadoop cluster rather than the conventional system

Scaling reinforcement learning to the unconstrained multi-agent domain

Reinforcement learning is a machine learning technique designed to mimic the way animals learn by receiving rewards and punishment. It is designed to train intelligent agents when very little is known about the agent’s environment, and consequently the agent’s designer is unable to hand-craft an appropriate policy. Using reinforcement learning, the agent’s designer can merely give reward to the agent when it does something right, and the algorithm will craft an appropriate policy automatically. In many situations it is desirable to use this technique to train systems of agents (for example, to train robots to play RoboCup soccer in a coordinated fashion). Unfortunately, several significant computational issues occur when using this technique to train systems of agents. This dissertation introduces a suite of techniques that overcome many of these difficulties in various common situations. First, we show how multi-agent reinforcement learning can be made more tractable by forming coalitions out of the agents, and training each coalition separately. Coalitions are formed by using information-theoretic techniques, and we find that by using a coalition-based approach, the computational complexity of reinforcement-learning can be made linear in the total system agent count. Next we look at ways to integrate domain knowledge into the reinforcement learning process, and how this can signifi-cantly improve the policy quality in multi-agent situations. Specifically, we find that integrating domain knowledge into a reinforcement learning process can overcome training data deficiencies and allow the learner to converge to acceptable solutions when lack of training data would have prevented such convergence without domain knowledge. We then show how to train policies over continuous action spaces, which can reduce problem complexity for domains that require continuous action spaces (analog controllers) by eliminating the need to finely discretize the action space. Finally, we look at ways to perform reinforcement learning on modern GPUs and show how by doing this we can tackle significantly larger problems. We find that by offloading some of the RL computation to the GPU, we can achieve almost a 4.5 speedup factor in the total training process