Intelligent Association Exploration and Exploitation of Fuzzy Agents in Ambient Intelligent Environments

This paper presents a novel fuzzy-based intelligent architecture that aims to find relevant and important associations between embedded-agent based services that form Ambient Intelligent Environments (AIEs). The embedded agents are used in two ways; first they monitor the inhabitants of the AIE, learning their behaviours in an online, non-intrusive and life-long fashion with the aim of pre-emptively setting the environment to the users preferred state. Secondly, they evaluate the relevance and significance of the associations to various services with the aim of eliminating redundant associations in order to minimize the agent computational latency within the AIE. The embedded agents employ fuzzy-logic due to its robustness to the uncertainties, noise and imprecision encountered in AIEs. We describe unique real world experiments that were conducted in the Essex intelligent Dormitory (iDorm) to evaluate and validate the significance of the proposed architecture and methods

An Ancient Mosque in Ningbo, China “Historical and Architectural Study”

With the rise of Tang dynasty (618–907), Ningbo was an important commercial city on the Chinese eastern coast. Arab merchants had an important role in trade relations between China and the West. Ningbo mosque was initially built in 1003 during Northern Song period by Muslims traders who had migrated from Arab lands to settle in China. Through ongoing research of representative Muslim architecture, such as Chinese Mosques, this paper seeks to shed light on the artistic features of this mosque. Many of the key characteristics of this distinctive ethnic heritage are based on commonly held religious beliefs and on the relationship between culture and religion. This paper aims to study the characteristics of Chinese mosques architecture, through studying one of the most important planning patterns of the traditional courtyards plan Known as Siheyuan, and it will also make a practical study on Ningbo Yuehu Mosque. The result of this study shows that the Ningbo Yuehu mosque is like Chinese mosques which follows essentially the norms of Chinese planning, layout design, and wooden structures

Comments on: Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Sets are generalization of Interval-Valued Fuzzy Sets: Towards a Wider view on their relationship

This Letter makes some observations about [2] that further support the distinction between an interval type-2 fuzzy set (IT2 FS) and an interval-valued fuzzy set (IV FS), points out that all operations, methods and systems that have been developed and published about IT2 FSs are, so far, only valid in the special case when IT2 FS = IVFS, and suggests some research opportunities

Embedded Interval Type-2 Neuro-Fuzzy Speed Controller for Marine Diesel Engines

Marine diesel engines operate in highly dynamic and uncertain environments, hence they require robust and accurate speed controllers that can handle the uncertainties encountered in these environments. The current speed controllers for marine diesel engines are based on PID and type-1 Fuzzy Logic Controllers (FLCs) which cannot fully handle the uncertainties encountered in such environments. Type-2 FLCs can handle such uncertainties to produce a better control performance. However, manually designing a type-2 FLC is a difficult task. In this paper, we will introduce an embedded type-2 Neuro-Fuzzy Controller (T2NFC) which learns the parameters of interval type-2 FLC to control marine diesel engines. We have performed numerous experiments on a real diesel engine testing platform in which the T2NFC operated on an industrial embedded controller and handled the uncertainties to produce an accurate and robust speed controller that outperformed the currently used commercial engine controller, even though we have trained the T2NFC with data collected from the commercial controlle

A Big Bang–Big Crunch Type-2 Fuzzy Logic System for Machine-Vision-Based Event Detection and Summarization in Real-World Ambient-Assisted Living

The area of ambient-assisted living (AAL) focuses on developing new technologies, which can improve the quality of life and care provided to elderly and disabled people. In this paper, we propose a novel system based on 3-D RGB-D vision sensors and interval type-2 fuzzy-logic-based systems (IT2FLSs) employing the big bang-big crunch algorithm for the real-time automatic detection and summarization of important events and human behaviors from the large-scale data. We will present several real-world experiments, which were conducted for AAL-related behaviors with various users. It will be shown that the proposed BB-BC IT2FLSs outperform the type-1 fuzzy logic system counterparts as well as other conventional nonfuzzy methods, and the performance improves when the number of subjects increases

Multiobjective Evolutionary Optimization of Type-2 Fuzzy Rule-Based Systems for Financial Data Classification

Classification techniques are becoming essential in the financial world for reducing risks and possible disasters. Managers are interested in not only high accuracy, but in interpretability and transparency as well. It is widely accepted now that the comprehension of how inputs and outputs are related to each other is crucial for taking operative and strategic decisions. Furthermore, inputs are often affected by contextual factors and characterized by a high level of uncertainty. In addition, financial data are usually highly skewed toward the majority class. With the aim of achieving high accuracies, preserving the interpretability, and managing uncertain and unbalanced data, this paper presents a novel method to deal with financial data classification by adopting type-2 fuzzy rule-based classifiers (FRBCs) generated from data by a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA). The classifiers employ an approach, denoted as scaled dominance, for defining rule weights in such a way to help minority classes to be correctly classified. In particular, we have extended PAES-RCS, an MOEA-based approach to learn concurrently the rule and data bases of FRBCs, for managing both interval type-2 fuzzy sets and unbalanced datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that generates type-2 FRBCs by concurrently maximizing accuracy and minimizing the number of rules and the rule length with the objective of producing interpretable models of real-world skewed and incomplete financial datasets. The rule bases are generated by exploiting a rule and condition selection (RCS) approach, which selects a reduced number of rules from a heuristically generated rule base and a reduced number of conditions for each selected rule during the evolutionary process. The weight associated with each rule is scaled by the scaled dominance approach on the fuzzy frequency of the output class, in order to give a higher weight to the minority class. As regards the data base learning, the membership function parameters of the interval type-2 fuzzy sets used in the rules are learned concurrently to the application of RCS. Unbalanced datasets are managed by using, in addition to complexity, selectivity and specificity as objectives of the MOEA rather than only the classification rate. We tested our approach, named IT2-PAES-RCS, on 11 financial datasets and compared our results with the ones obtained by the original PAES-RCS with three objectives and with and without scaled dominance, the FRBCs, fuzzy association rule-based classification model for high-dimensional dataset (FARC-HD) and fuzzy unordered rules induction algorithm (FURIA), the classical C4.5 decision tree algorithm, and its cost-sensitive version. Using nonparametric statistical tests, we will show that IT2-PAES-RCS generates FRBCs with, on average, accuracy statistically comparable with and complexity lower than the ones generated by the two versions of the original PAES-RCS. Further, the FRBCs generated by FARC-HD and FURIA and the decision trees computed by C4.5 and its cost-sensitive version, despite the highest complexity, result to be less accurate than the FRBCs generated by IT2-PAES-RCS. Finally, we will highlight how these FRBCs are easily interpretable by showing and discussing one of them

Join and Meet Operations for Type-2 Fuzzy Sets With Nonconvex Secondary Memberships

In this paper, we will present two theorems for the join and meet operations for general type-2 fuzzy sets with arbitrary secondary memberships, which can be nonconvex and/or nonnormal type-1 fuzzy sets. These results will be used to derive the join and meet operations of the more general descriptions of interval type-2 fuzzy sets presented in a paper by Bustince Sola et al. ('Interval type-2 fuzzy sets are generalization of interval-valued fuzzy sets: Towards a wider view on their relationship,' IEEE Trans. Fuzzy Syst., vol. 23, pp. 1876-1882, 2015), where the secondary grades can be nonconvex. Hence, this study will help to explore the potential of type-2 fuzzy logic systems which use the general forms of interval type-2 fuzzy sets which are not equivalent to interval-valued fuzzy sets. Several examples for both general type-2 and the more general forms of interval type-2 fuzzy sets are presented

A Multi-Agent Architecture for the Design of Hierarchical Interval Type-2 Beta Fuzzy System

This paper presents a new methodology for building and evolving hierarchical fuzzy systems. For the system design, a tree-based encoding method is adopted to hierarchically link low dimensional fuzzy systems. Such tree structural representation has by nature a flexible design offering more adjustable and modifiable structures. The proposed hierarchical structure employs a type-2 beta fuzzy system to cope with the faced uncertainties, and the resulting system is called the Hierarchical Interval Type-2 Beta Fuzzy System (HT2BFS). For the system optimization, two main tasks of structure learning and parameter tuning are applied. The structure learning phase aims to evolve and learn the structures of a population of HT2BFS in a multiobjective context taking into account the optimization of both the accuracy and the interpretability metrics. The parameter tuning phase is applied to refine and adjust the parameters of the system. To accomplish these two tasks in the most optimal and faster way, we further employ a multi-agent architecture to provide both a distributed and a cooperative management of the optimization tasks. Agents are divided into two different types based on their functions: a structure agent and a parameter agent. The main function of the structure agent is to perform a multi-objective evolutionary structure learning step by means of the Multi-Objective Immune Programming algorithm (MOIP). The parameter agents have the function of managing different hierarchical structures simultaneously to refine their parameters by means of the Hybrid Harmony Search algorithm (HHS). In this architecture, agents use cooperation and communication concepts to create high-performance HT2BFSs. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated by several comparisons with various state of art approaches on noise-free and noisy time series prediction data sets and regression problems. The results clearly demonstrate a great improvement in the accuracy rate, the convergence speed and the number of used rules as compared with other existing approaches

A Survey of Artificial Intelligence Techniques Employed for Adaptive Educational Systems within E-Learning Platforms

Abstract The adaptive educational systems within e-learning platforms are built in response to the fact that the learning process is different for each and every learner. In order to provide adaptive e-learning services and study materials that are tailor-made for adaptive learning, this type of educational approach seeks to combine the ability to comprehend and detect a person’s specific needs in the context of learning with the expertise required to use appropriate learning pedagogy and enhance the learning process. Thus, it is critical to create accurate student profiles and models based upon analysis of their affective states, knowledge level, and their individual personality traits and skills. The acquired data can then be efficiently used and exploited to develop an adaptive learning environment. Once acquired, these learner models can be used in two ways. The first is to inform the pedagogy proposed by the experts and designers of the adaptive educational system. The second is to give the system dynamic self-learning capabilities from the behaviors exhibited by the teachers and students to create the appropriate pedagogy and automatically adjust the e-learning environments to suit the pedagogies. In this respect, artificial intelligence techniques may be useful for several reasons, including their ability to develop and imitate human reasoning and decision-making processes (learning-teaching model) and minimize the sources of uncertainty to achieve an effective learning-teaching context. These learning capabilities ensure both learner and system improvement over the lifelong learning mechanism. In this paper, we present a survey of raised and related topics to the field of artificial intelligence techniques employed for adaptive educational systems within e-learning, their advantages and disadvantages, and a discussion of the importance of using those techniques to achieve more intelligent and adaptive e-learning environments.</jats:p

Forecasting the Real Estate Housing Prices Using a Novel Deep Learning Machine Model

There is an urgent need to forecast real estate unit prices because the average price of residential real estate is always fluctuating. This paper provides a real estate price prediction model based on supervised regression deep learning with 3 hidden layers, a Relu activation function, 100 neurons, and a Root Mean Square Propagation optimizer (RMS Prop). The model was developed using actual data collected from 28 Egyptian cities between 2014 and 2022. The model can forecast the price of a real estate unit based on 27 different variables. The model is created in two stages: adjusting the parameters to obtain the best ones using a sensitivity k-fold technique, then optimizing the result. 85 percent of the real estate unit data gathered was used in training and developing the model, while the other 15 percent was used in validating and testing. By using a dropout regularization technique of 0.60 on the model layers, the final developed model had a maximum error of 10.58%. After validation, the model had a maximum error of about 9.50%. A graphical user interface (GUI) tool is developed to make use of the final predictive model, which is very simple for real estate developers and decision-makers to use. Doi: 10.28991/CEJ-SP2023-09-04 Full Text: PD