Applications of Biological Cell Models in Robotics

In this paper I present some of the most representative biological models applied to robotics. In particular, this work represents a survey of some models inspired, or making use of concepts, by gene regulatory networks (GRNs): these networks describe the complex interactions that affect gene expression and, consequently, cell behaviour

Analysis of Neural Networks in Terms of Domain Functions

Despite their success-story, artificial neural networks have one major disadvantage compared to other techniques: the inability to explain comprehensively how a trained neural network reaches its output; neural networks are not only (incorrectly) seen as a "magic tool" but possibly even more as a mysterious "black box". Although much research has already been done to "open the box," there is a notable hiatus in known publications on analysis of neural networks. So far, mainly sensitivity analysis and rule extraction methods have been used to analyze neural networks. However, these can only be applied in a limited subset of the problem domains where neural network solutions are encountered. In this paper we propose a wider applicable method which, for a given problem domain, involves identifying basic functions with which users in that domain are already familiar, and describing trained neural networks, or parts thereof, in terms of those basic functions. This will provide a comprehensible description of the neural network's function and, depending on the chosen base functions, it may also provide an insight into the neural network' s inner "reasoning." It could further be used to optimize neural network systems. An analysis in terms of base functions may even make clear how to (re)construct a superior system using those base functions, thus using the neural network as a construction advisor

Identifying Real Estate Opportunities using Machine Learning

The real estate market is exposed to many fluctuations in prices because of existing correlations with many variables, some of which cannot be controlled or might even be unknown. Housing prices can increase rapidly (or in some cases, also drop very fast), yet the numerous listings available online where houses are sold or rented are not likely to be updated that often. In some cases, individuals interested in selling a house (or apartment) might include it in some online listing, and forget about updating the price. In other cases, some individuals might be interested in deliberately setting a price below the market price in order to sell the home faster, for various reasons. In this paper, we aim at developing a machine learning application that identifies opportunities in the real estate market in real time, i.e., houses that are listed with a price substantially below the market price. This program can be useful for investors interested in the housing market. We have focused in a use case considering real estate assets located in the Salamanca district in Madrid (Spain) and listed in the most relevant Spanish online site for home sales and rentals. The application is formally implemented as a regression problem that tries to estimate the market price of a house given features retrieved from public online listings. For building this application, we have performed a feature engineering stage in order to discover relevant features that allows for attaining a high predictive performance. Several machine learning algorithms have been tested, including regression trees, k-nearest neighbors, support vector machines and neural networks, identifying advantages and handicaps of each of them.Comment: 24 pages, 13 figures, 5 table

Extracting Boolean rules from CA patterns

A multiobjective genetic algorithm (GA) is introduced to identify both the neighborhood and the rule set in the form of a parsimonious Boolean expression for both one- and two-dimensional cellular automata (CA). Simulation results illustrate that the new algorithm performs well even when the patterns are corrupted by static and dynamic nois