An Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering with Various Distance Measurements for Ground Level Ozone Clustering in Putrajaya, Malaysia

Ground level ozone is one of the common pollution issues that has a negative influence on human health. The key characteristic behind ozone level analysis lies on the complex representation of such data which can be shown by time series. Clustering is one of the common techniques that have been used for time series metrological and environmental data. The way that clustering technique groups the similar sequences relies on a distance or similarity criteria. Several distance measures have been integrated with various types of clustering techniques. However, identifying an appropriate distance measure for a particular field is a challenging task. Since the hierarchical clustering has been considered as the state of the art for metrological and climate change data, this paper proposes an agglomerative hierarchical clustering for ozone level analysis in Putrajaya, Malaysia using three distance measures i.e. Euclidean, Minkowski and Dynamic Time Warping. Results shows that Dynamic Time Warping has outperformed the other two distance measures

Remaja bercinta: kajian terhadap tiga jenis sekolah menengah kebangsaan, agama dan agama swasta

Remaja bercinta adalah fenomena percintaan antara dua pasangan berlainan jantina di alam persekolahan. Fenomena remaja bercinta yang tidak terkawal boleh membawa kepada permasalahan gejala sosial remaja seperti lari rumah, buang anak, keruntuhan akhlak, dan lemah dalam pelajaran. Kebanyakan kehidupan zaman remaja dihabiskan di alam persekolahan. Di samping peranan ibu bapa, sekolah adalah tempat yang penting untuk memberi pendidikan berkesan terhadap remaja. Selain daripada memberi penekanan terhadap akademik, sekolah juga bertanggungjawab memberi pendidikan tentang isu percintaan dalam kalangan remaja, agar mereka memahami hakikat bercinta. Oleh itu kajian dilakukan terhadap tiga jenis sekolah menengah; sekolah menengah kebangsaan, sekolah menengah agama dan sekolah menengah agama persendirian bertujuan untuk mengenalpasti sejauhmana remaja bercinta, faktor remaja bercinta dan hubungannya terhadap pencapaian akademik. Sebanyak 431 soal selidik telah diterima dari 6 buah sekolah, 2 sekolah mewakili setiap jenis sekolah. Tiga jenis sekolah ini mempunyai persamaan dari aspek kandungan pembelajaran akademik, persekitaran fizikal seperti kemudahan, sekolah jenis campuran jantina dan guru yang bertauliah. Manakala ia mempunyai perbezaan dari perlaksanaan pendidikan, aktiviti kerohanian dan suasana sekolah yang diwujudkan oleh pihak pengurusan. Hasil dapatan mendapati sekolah menengah agama swasta mempunyai paling kurang peratusan remaja bercinta (<10%) berbanding sekolah menengah agama (50%) dan sekolah menengah kebangsaan (80%). Hasil kajian juga mendapati bahawa remaja bercinta tidak memberi pengaruh terhadap akademik mereka. Kelima-lima faktor seperti diri, rakan, keluarga, media dan internet dikenalpasti mempengaruhi remaja bercinta, bagaimanapun kajian mendapati terdapat perbezaan yang ketara pada jenis sekolah. Hasil kajian dapat disimpulkan bahawa perlaksanaan pendidikan, jenis aktiviti kerohanian dan suasana sekolah sangat mempengaruhi sikap remaja dan secara tidak langsung memberi kesedaran kepada remaja akan hakikat bercinta yang sebenar dan seterusnya menghindarkan mereka terjebak cinta dalam zaman remaja

Cheapest Insertion Constructive Heuristic based on Two Combination Seed Customer Criterion for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

The heuristic method is a well-known constructive method for initialize trail quality solutions in capacitated vehicle routing problem. Cheapest insertion heuristic is a popular construction heuristic known for being fast, producing decent solutions, simple to implement and easy to extend handling complicated constraints. However, in previous work, there was less focus on diverse initial quality solutions. Therefore, this study proposed an extension to the cheapest insertion heuristic which consider various combinations of seed customer criteria (the first customer inserted on a route) to preserve solutions diversification. Three seed customer criteria proposed which based on the combination of two criteria based on (farthest, nearest and random criteria). The best performing criteria selected and tested on benchmark dataset, later compared with Clarke and Wright saving heuristic. The results shown that the combination of (farthest and random) criteria obtained the best initial solution which preserve balance between the quality and diversity, with less time when compared to Clarke and wright saving heuristic. This approach is for generating diverse and quality starting solutions for the capacitated vehicle routing problem

Using software abstraction to develop an agent based system.

The main contribution of the thesis is to present a systematic process to develop an agent-based system that assists a system developer to construct the required system, through a series of modelling activities, employing several levels of abstraction to show the milestones and produce intermediate deliverables. Current practice emphasises "downstream activities" such as implementation at the expense of "upstream activities" such as "modelling". The research has found that the development process for an agent system consists of three phases: agent system development, agent environment development and agent system deployment. The first and second phases represent an intertwined spiral model. All three phases themselves consist of three stages. Each phase employs different development techniques and each stage uses appropriate models and tools such as problem domain model, agent use cases, scenarios, agent system architecture, plan model and individual agent model.The proposed agent development method is applied to two case studies: a Filtering Agent System and Diabetic Consultation System. Both systems have been implemented and tested. Three distinct ways were used to evaluate the proposed method. First, comparing with the criteria of a methodology. Second, comparing it with the current agent-oriented methodologies. Third, informal observations from a potential user community.In conclusion, the research has demonstrated an effective synthesising process to build a set of agent concepts, development life-cycle and modelling to show a systematic process for developing agent systems. Moreover, by employing a whole host of software abstraction tools and techniques in the process, two benefits accrue: the introduction of more 'up stream' activities as well as placing modelling at the heart of the process. Illustratively, we could say that the modelling presented here does for agent systems what data flow diagram and data entity diagram have done for structured methodologies, i.e. raise the level of abstraction employed

A Hybrid Water Flow-Like Algorithm and Variable Neighbourhood Search for Traveling Salesman Problem

Various metaheuristic methods have been proposed earlier and applied for solving the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). Water Flow Algorithm (WFA) is one of the recent population-based metaheuristic optimization techniques used for solving this problem. Past research has shown that improving WFA local search strategy has a significant impact on the algorithm performance. Therefore, this paper aims to solve TSP by enhancing WFA searching strategy based on a Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) known as hybrid WFA-VNS. It is a mixture of the exploration of WFA and the exploitation capability of VNS. This study is conducted in two stages: Pre-experiment and initial experiment. The objective of doing pre-experiment is to select four neighborhood structures to be used for the initial experiment. At the first stage, three instances are used, and there are five neighborhood structures involved. Those neighborhood structures are two opt, three opt, four opt, swapping, and insertion move. Because of pre-experiment, it discovers four best neighborhood structures, which are two opt, three opt, exchanging and insertion move. These neighborhood structures will be used in the initial experiment, which an improvement approach is employed. In an initial experiment, the performance of the proposed hybrid WFA-VNS is further studied and tested on 26 established benchmarked symmetric TSP datasets using four neighborhood structures selected in pre-experiment earlier. The TSP datasets involved are categorized into three types: small datasets, medium datasets, and large datasets. Selected neighborhood structures obtained in pre-experiment are applied and generated randomly to intensify the initial solution achieved at an earlier stage of hybrid WFA-VNS. The results of the comparison show that this hybrid approach represents an improvement and able to produce competitive results

A Novel DNA Sequence Approach for Network Intrusion Detection System Based on Cryptography Encoding Method

Abstract— A novel method for Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) has been proposed, based on the concept of how DNA sequence detects disease as both domains have similar conceptual method of detection. Three important steps have been proposed to apply DNA sequence for NIDS: convert the network traffic data into a form of DNA sequence using Cryptography encoding method; discover patterns of Short Tandem Repeats (STR) sequence for each network traffic attack using Teiresias algorithm; and conduct classification process depends upon STR sequence based on Horspool algorithm. 10% KDD Cup 1999 data set is used for training phase. Correct KDD Cup 1999 data set is used for testing phase to evaluate the proposed method. The current experiment results show that the proposed system has obtained good results and these results are equal to 86.36%, 49.69%, and 77.65% for detection rate, false alarm rate and accuracy respectively. These results are considered as a better result when it is compared with the other previous basic algorithms. It is possible to conclude that DNA sequence has potential for NIDS solution and it has potential improvement using a better encoding method

Water Flow-Like Algorithm with Simulated Annealing for Travelling Salesman Problems

Water Flow-like Algorithm (WFA) has been proved its ability obtaining a fast and quality solution for solving Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). The WFA uses the insertion move with 2-neighbourhood search to get better flow splitting and moving decision. However, the algorithms can be improved by making a good balance between its solution search exploitation and exploration. Such improvement can be achieved by hybridizing good search algorithm with WFA.  This paper presents a hybrid of WFA with various three neighbourhood search in Simulated Annealing (SA) for TSP problem. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using 18 large TSP benchmark datasets. The experimental result shows that the hybrid method has improved the solution quality compare with the basic WFA and state of art algorithm for TSP