Problem representation for refinement

In this paper we attempt to develop a problem representation technique which enables the decomposition of a problem into subproblems such that their solution in sequence constitutes a strategy for solving the problem. An important issue here is that the subproblems generated should be easier than the main problem. We propose to represent a set of problem states by a statement which is true for all the members of the set. A statement itself is just a set of atomic statements which are binary predicates on state variables. Then, the statement representing the set of goal states can be partitioned into its subsets each of which becomes a subgoal of the resulting strategy. The techniques involved in partitioning a goal into its subgoals are presented with examples

Voting Features based Classifier with Feature Construction and its Application to Predicting Financial Distress

Voting features based classifiers, shortly VFC, have been shown to perform well on most real-world data sets. They are robust to irrelevant features and missing feature values. In this paper, we introduce an extension to VFC, called voting features based classifier with feature construction, VFCC for short, and show its application to the problem of predicting if a bank will encounter financial distress, by analyzing current financial statements. The previously developed VFC learn a set of rules that contain a single condition based on a single feature in their antecedent. The VFCC algorithm proposed in this work, on the other hand, constructs rules whose antecedents may contain conjuncts based on several features. Experimental results on recent financial ratios of banks in Turkey show that the VFCC algorithm achieves better accuracy than other well-known rule learning classification algorithms

Voting Features based Classifier with Feature Construction and its Application to Predicting Financial Distress

Voting features based classifiers, shortly VFC, have been shown to perform well on most real-world data sets. They are robust to irrelevant features and missing feature values. In this paper, we introduce an extension to VFC, called voting features based classifier with feature construction, VFCC for short, and show its application to the problem of predicting if a bank will encounter financial distress, by analyzing current financial statements. The previously developed VFC learn a set of rules that contain a single condition based on a single feature in their antecedent. The VFCC algorithm proposed in this work, on the other hand, constructs rules whose antecedents may contain conjuncts based on several features. Experimental results on recent financial ratios of banks in Turkey show that the VFCC algorithm achieves better accuracy than other well-known rule learning classification algorithms

Abstract Regression on feature projections

called Regression on Feature Projections (RFP), for predicting a real-valued target feature, given the values of multiple predictive features. In RFP training is based on simply storing the projections of the training instances on each feature separately. Prediction of the target value for a query point is obtained through two averaging procedures executed sequentially. The ®rst averaging process is to ®nd the individual predictions of features by using the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithm. The second averaging process combines the predictions of all features. During the ®rst averaging step, each feature is associated with a weight in order to determine the prediction ability of the feature at the local query point. The weights, found for each local query point, are used in the second prediction step and enforce the method to have an adaptive or context-sensitive nature. We have compared RFP with KNN and the rule based-regression algorithms. Results on real data sets show that RFP achieves better or comparable accuracy and is faster than both KNN an