Evolving a rule system controller for automatic driving in a car racing competition

IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games. Perth, Australia, 15-18 December 2008.The techniques and the technologies supporting Automatic Vehicle Guidance are important issues. Automobile manufacturers view automatic driving as a very interesting product with motivating key features which allow improvement of the car safety, reduction in emission or fuel consumption or optimization of driver comfort during long journeys. Car racing is an active research field where new advances in aerodynamics, consumption and engine power are critical each season. Our proposal is to research how evolutionary computation techniques can help in this field. For this work we have designed an automatic controller that learns rules with a genetic algorithm. This paper is a report of the results obtained by this controller during the car racing competition held in Hong Kong during the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2008).Publicad

Evolutionary design of nearest prototype classifiers

In pattern classification problems, many works have been carried out with the aim of designing good classifiers from different perspectives. These works achieve very good results in many domains. However, in general they are very dependent on some crucial parameters involved in the design. These parameters have to be found by a trial and error process or by some automatic methods, like heuristic search and genetic algorithms, that strongly decrease the performance of the method. For instance, in nearest prototype approaches, main parameters are the number of prototypes to use, the initial set, and a smoothing parameter. In this work, an evolutionary approach based on Nearest Prototype Classifier (ENPC) is introduced where no parameters are involved, thus overcoming all the problems that classical methods have in tuning and searching for the appropiate values. The algorithm is based on the evolution of a set of prototypes that can execute several operators in order to increase their quality in a local sense, and with a high classification accuracy emerging for the whole classifier. This new approach has been tested using four different classical domains, including such artificial distributions as spiral and uniform distibuted data sets, the Iris Data Set and an application domain about diabetes. In all the cases, the experiments show successfull results, not only in the classification accuracy, but also in the number and distribution of the prototypes achieved.Publicad

Local feature weighting in nearest prototype classification

The distance metric is the corner stone of nearest neighbor (NN)-based methods, and therefore, of nearest prototype (NP) algorithms. That is because they classify depending on the similarity of the data. When the data is characterized by a set of features which may contribute to the classification task in different levels, feature weighting or selection is required, sometimes in a local sense. However, local weighting is typically restricted to NN approaches. In this paper, we introduce local feature weighting (LFW) in NP classification. LFW provides each prototype its own weight vector, opposite to typical global weighting methods found in the NP literature, where all the prototypes share the same one. Providing each prototype its own weight vector has a novel effect in the borders of the Voronoi regions generated: They become nonlinear. We have integrated LFW with a previously developed evolutionary nearest prototype classifier (ENPC). The experiments performed both in artificial and real data sets demonstrate that the resulting algorithm that we call LFW in nearest prototype classification (LFW-NPC) avoids overfitting on training data in domains where the features may have different contribution to the classification task in different areas of the feature space. This generalization capability is also reflected in automatically obtaining an accurate and reduced set of prototypes.Publicad

New results on the genetic cryptanalysis of TEA and reduced-round versions of XTEA

Congress on Evolutionary Computation. Portland, USA, 19-23 June 2004Recently, a simple way of creating very efficient distinguishers for cryptographic primitives such as block ciphers or hash functions, was presented by the authors. Here, this cryptanalysis attack is shown to be successful when applied over reduced round versions of the block cipher XTEA. Additionally, a variant of this genetic attack is introduced and its results over TEA shown to be the most powerful published to date

PNNARMA model: an alternative to phenomenological models in chemical reactors

This paper is focused on the development of non-linear neural models able to provide appropriate predictions when acting as process simulators. Parallel identification models can be used for this purpose. However, in this work it is shown that since the parameters of parallel identification models are estimated using multilayer feed-forward networks, the approximation of dynamic systems could be not suitable. The solution proposed in this work consists of building up parallel models using a particular recurrent neural network. This network allows to identify the parameter sets of the parallel model in order to generate process simulators. Hence, it is possible to guarantee better dynamic predictions. The dynamic behaviour of the heat transfer fluid temperature in a jacketed chemical reactor has been selected as a case study. The results suggest that parallel models based on the recurrent neural network proposed in this work can be seen as an alternative to phenomenological models for simulating the dynamic behaviour of the heating/cooling circuits.Publicad

A comparison between the Pittsburgh and Michigan approaches for the binary PSO algorithm

IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. Edimburgo, 5 september 2005This paper shows the performance of the binary PSO algorithm as a classification system. These systems are classified in two different perspectives: the Pittsburgh and the Michigan approaches. In order to implement the Michigan approach binary PSO algorithm, the standard PSO dynamic equations are modified, introducing a repulsive force to favor particle competition. A dynamic neighborhood, adapted to classification problems, is also defined. Both classifiers are tested using a reference set of problems, where both classifiers achieve better performance than many classification techniques. The Michigan PSO classifier shows clear advantages over the Pittsburgh one both in terms of success rate and speed. The Michigan PSO can also be generalized to the continuous version of the PSO

Learning to solve planning problems efficiently by means of genetic programming

Declarative problem solving, such as planning, poses interesting challenges for Genetic Programming (GP). There have been recent attempts to apply GP to planning that fit two approaches: (a) using GP to search in plan space or (b) to evolve a planner. In this article, we propose to evolve only the heuristics to make a particular planner more efficient. This approach is more feasible than (b) because it does not have to build a planner from scratch but can take advantage of already existing planning systems. It is also more efficient than (a) because once the heuristics have been evolved, they can be used to solve a whole class of different planning problems in a planning domain, instead of running GP for every new planning problem. Empirical results show that our approach (EVOCK) is able to evolve heuristics in two planning domains (the blocks world and the logistics domain) that improve PRODIGY4.0 performance. Additionally, we experiment with a new genetic operator - Instance-Based Crossover - that is able to use traces of the base planner as raw genetic material to be injected into the evolving population.Publicad

Finding efficient nonlinear functions by means of genetic programming

7th International Conference, KES 2003. Proceedings, Part I. Oxford, UK, September 3-5, 2003The design of highly nonlinear functions is relevant for a number of different applications, ranging from database hashing to message authentication. But, apart from useful, it is quite a challenging task. In this work, we propose the use of genetic programming for finding functions that optimize a particular nonlinear criteria, the avalanche effect, using only very efficient operations, so that the resulting functions are extremely efficient both in hardware and in software.Supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia research project TIC2002-04498-C05-4Publicad