Towards a framework for designing full model selection and optimization systems

People from a variety of industrial domains are beginning to realise that appropriate use of machine learning techniques for their data mining projects could bring great benefits. End-users now have to face the new problem of how to choose a combination of data processing tools and algorithms for a given dataset. This problem is usually termed the Full Model Selection (FMS) problem. Extended from our previous work [10], in this paper, we introduce a framework for designing FMS algorithms. Under this framework, we propose a novel algorithm combining both genetic algorithms (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) named GPS (which stands for GA-PSO-FMS), in which a GA is used for searching the optimal structure for a data mining solution, and PSO is used for searching optimal parameters for a particular structure instance. Given a classification dataset, GPS outputs a FMS solution as a directed acyclic graph consisting of diverse data mining operators that are available to the problem. Experimental results demonstrate the benefit of the algorithm. We also present, with detailed analysis, two model-tree-based variants for speeding up the GPS algorithm

Detecting compact galactic binaries using a hybrid swarm-based algorithm

Compact binaries in our galaxy are expected to be one of the main sources of gravitational waves for the future eLISA mission. During the mission lifetime, many thousands of galactic binaries should be individually resolved. However, the identification of the sources, and the extraction of the signal parameters in a noisy environment are real challenges for data analysis. So far, stochastic searches have proven to be the most successful for this problem. In this work we present the first application of a swarm-based algorithm combining Particle Swarm Optimization and Differential Evolution. These algorithms have been shown to converge faster to global solutions on complicated likelihood surfaces than other stochastic methods. We first demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm for the case of a single binary in a 1 mHz search bandwidth. This interesting problem gave the algorithm plenty of opportunity to fail, as it can be easier to find a strong noise peak rather than the signal itself. After a successful detection of a fictitious low-frequency source, as well as the verification binary RXJ0806.3+1527, we then applied the algorithm to the detection of multiple binaries, over different search bandwidths, in the cases of low and mild source confusion. In all cases, we show that we can successfully identify the sources, and recover the true parameters within a 99\% credible interval.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figure

Submodular memetic approximation for multiobjective parallel test paper generation

Parallel test paper generation is a biobjective distributed resource optimization problem, which aims to generate multiple similarly optimal test papers automatically according to multiple user-specified assessment criteria. Generating high-quality parallel test papers is challenging due to its NP-hardness in both of the collective objective functions. In this paper, we propose a submodular memetic approximation algorithm for solving this problem. The proposed algorithm is an adaptive memetic algorithm (MA), which exploits the submodular property of the collective objective functions to design greedy-based approximation algorithms for enhancing steps of the multiobjective MA. Synergizing the intensification of submodular local search mechanism with the diversification of the population-based submodular crossover operator, our algorithm can jointly optimize the total quality maximization objective and the fairness quality maximization objective. Our MA can achieve provable near-optimal solutions in a huge search space of large datasets in efficient polynomial runtime. Performance results on various datasets have shown that our algorithm has drastically outperformed the current techniques in terms of paper quality and runtime efficiency

Thread-Modular Static Analysis for Relaxed Memory Models

We propose a memory-model-aware static program analysis method for accurately analyzing the behavior of concurrent software running on processors with weak consistency models such as x86-TSO, SPARC-PSO, and SPARC-RMO. At the center of our method is a unified framework for deciding the feasibility of inter-thread interferences to avoid propagating spurious data flows during static analysis and thus boost the performance of the static analyzer. We formulate the checking of interference feasibility as a set of Datalog rules which are both efficiently solvable and general enough to capture a range of hardware-level memory models. Compared to existing techniques, our method can significantly reduce the number of bogus alarms as well as unsound proofs. We implemented the method and evaluated it on a large set of multithreaded C programs. Our experiments showthe method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in terms of accuracy with only moderate run-time overhead.Comment: revised version of the ESEC/FSE 2017 pape

Posing 3D Models from Drawing

Inferring the 3D pose of a character from a drawing is a complex and under-constrained problem. Solving it may help automate various parts of an animation production pipeline such as pre-visualisation. In this paper, a novel way of inferring the 3D pose from a monocular 2D sketch is proposed. The proposed method does not make any external assumptions about the model, allowing it to be used on different types of characters. The inference of the 3D pose is formulated as an optimisation problem and a parallel variation of the Particle Swarm Optimisation algorithm called PARAC-LOAPSO is utilised for searching the minimum. Testing in isolation as well as part of a larger scene, the presented method is evaluated by posing a lamp, a horse and a human character. The results show that this method is robust, highly scalable and is able to be extended to various types of models

A survey of QoS-aware web service composition techniques

Web service composition can be briefly described as the process of aggregating services with disparate functionalities into a new composite service in order to meet increasingly complex needs of users. Service composition process has been accurate on dealing with services having disparate functionalities, however, over the years the number of web services in particular that exhibit similar functionalities and varying Quality of Service (QoS) has significantly increased. As such, the problem becomes how to select appropriate web services such that the QoS of the resulting composite service is maximized or, in some cases, minimized. This constitutes an NP-hard problem as it is complicated and difficult to solve. In this paper, a discussion of concepts of web service composition and a holistic review of current service composition techniques proposed in literature is presented. Our review spans several publications in the field that can serve as a road map for future research

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