Sharif Digital Repository

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In this paper, we propose an optimization framework to retrieve an optimal group of experts to perform a multi-aspect task. While a diverse set of skills are needed to perform a multi-aspect task, the group of assigned experts should be able to collectively cover all these required skills. We consider three types of multi-aspect expert group formation problems and propose a unified framework to solve these problems accurately and efficiently. The first problem is concerned with finding the top k experts for a given task, while the required skills of the task are implicitly described. In the second problem, the required skills of the tasks are explicitly described using some keywords but each... 

This paper examines active selection of clustering constraints, which has become a topic of significant interest in constrained clustering. Active selection of clustering constraints, which is known as minimizing the cost of acquiring constraints, also includes quantifying utility of a given constraint set. A sequential method is proposed in this paper to select the most beneficial set of constraints actively. The proposed method uses information of boundary points and transition regions extracted by data description methods to introduce a utility measure for constraints. Since previously selected constraints affect the utility of remaining candidate constraints, a method is proposed to... 

Estimation of distribution algorithms have evolved as a technique for estimating population distribution in evolutionary algorithms. They estimate the distribution of the candidate solutions and then sample the next generation from the estimated distribution. Bayesian optimization algorithm is an estimation of distribution algorithm, which uses a Bayesian network to estimate the distribution of candidate solutions and then generates the next generation by sampling from the constructed network. The experimental results show that the Bayesian optimization algorithms are capable of identifying correct linkage between the variables of optimization problems. Since the problem of finding the... 

Image segmentation is one of the fundamental problems in image processing and computer vision, since it is the first step in many image analysis systems. This paper presents a new perspective to image segmentation, namely, segmenting input images by applying efficient community detection algorithms common in social and complex networks. First, a common segmentation algorithm is used to fragment the image into small initial regions. A weighted network is then constructed. Each initial region is mapped to a vertex, and all these vertices are connected to each other. The similarity between two regions is calculated from colour information. This similarity is then used to assign weights to the... 

Localization is a crucial problem in wireless sensor networks and most of the localization algorithms given in the literature are non-adaptive and designed for fixed sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a learning based localization algorithm for mobile wireless sensor networks. By this technique, mobility in the network will be discovered by two crucial methods in the beacons: position and distance checks methods. These two methods help to have accurate localization and constrain communication just when it is necessary. The proposed method localizes the nodes based on connectivity information (hop count), which doesn't need extra hardware and is cost efficient. The experimental... 

One of the challenging problems in artificial intelligence is credit assignment which simply means distributing the credit among a group, such as a group of agents. We made an attempt to meet this problem with the aid of the reinforcement learning paradigm. In this paper, expertness framework is defined and applied to the multi-agent credit assignment problem. In the expertness framework, the critic agent, who is responsible for distributing credit among agents, is equipped with learning capability, and the proposed credit assignment solution is based on the critic to learn to assign a proportion of the credit to each agent, and the used proportion should be learned by reinforcement... 

Nowadays developing autonomous systems, which can act in various environments and interactively perform their assigned tasks, are intensively desirable. These systems would be ready to be applied in different fields such as medicine, controller robots and social life. Reinforcement learning is an attractive area of machine learning which addresses these concerns. In large scales, learning performance of an agent can be improved by using hierarchical Reinforcement Learning techniques and temporary extended actions. The higher level of abstraction helps the learning agent approach lifelong learning goals. In this paper a new method is presented for discovering subgoal states and constructing... 

Recent researches on automatic skill acquisition in reinforcement learning have focused on subgoal discovery methods. Among them, algorithms based on graph partitioning have achieved higher performance. In this paper, we propose a new automatic skill acquisition framework based on graph partitioning approach. The main steps of this framework are identifying subgoals and discovering useful skills. We propose two subgoal discovery algorithms, which use spectral analysis on the transition graph of the learning agent. The first proposed algorithm, incorporates k′-means algorithm with spectral clustering. In the second algorithm, eigenvector centrality measure is utilized and options are... 

Studying biological networks helps to gain a better understanding of cellular behaviors. One of the prominent models to study complex interactions in biological networks is the Nested Effects Model (NEM). Based on the Nested Effects Model, we propose two methods for inferring signaling pathways from interventional data. In the first method, we search the space of all feasible solutions with an evolutionary approach to maximize a standard Bayesian score. In the second method, sub-models are constructed with informative features and then combined using an averaging method to make the analysis of larger networks computationally possible. We tested our proposed methods in various noise levels on... 

Dimensionality reduction is a necessary task in data mining when working with high dimensional data. A type of dimensionality reduction is feature selection. Feature selection based on feature ranking has received much attention by researchers. The major reasons are its scalability, ease of use, and fast computation. Feature ranking methods can be divided into different categories and may use different measures for ranking features. Recently, ensemble methods have entered in the field of ranking and achieved more accuracy among others. Accordingly, in this paper a Heterogeneous ensemble based algorithm for feature ranking is proposed. The base ranking methods in this ensemble structure are... 

Data streams have some unique properties which make them applicable in precise modeling of many real data mining applications. The most challenging property of data streams is the occurrence of "concept drift". Recurring concepts is a type of concept drift which can be seen in most of real world problems. Detecting recurring concepts makes it possible to exploit previous knowledge obtained in the learning process. This leads to quick adaptation of the learner whenever a concept reappears. In this paper, we propose a learning algorithm called Pool and Accuracy based Stream Classification with some variations, which takes the advantage of maintaining a pool of classifiers to track recurring... 

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is one of the basic and important problems in molecular biology. MSA can be used for different purposes including finding the conserved motifs and structurally important regions in protein sequences and determine evolutionary distance between sequences. Aligning several sequences cannot be done in polynomial time and therefore heuristic methods such as genetic algorithms can be used to find approximate solutions of MSA problems. Several algorithms based on genetic algorithms have been developed for this problem in recent years. Most of these algorithms use very complicated, problem specific and time consuming mutation operators. In this paper, we propose a... 

In this paper, we propose an optimization framework to retrieve an optimal group of experts to perform a given multi-aspect task/project. Each task needs a diverse set of skills and the group of assigned experts should be able to collectively cover all required aspects of the task. We consider three types of multiaspect team formation problems and propose a unified framework to solve these problems accurately and efficiently. Our proposed framework is based on Facility Location Analysis (FLA) which is a well known branch of the Operation Research (OR). Our experiments on a real dataset show significant improvement in comparison with the state-of-the art approaches for the team formation... 

Incremental learning has been used extensively for data stream classification. Most attention on the data stream classification paid on non-evolutionary methods. In this paper, we introduce new incremental learning algorithms based on harmony search. We first propose a new classification algorithm for the classification of batch data called harmony-based classifier and then give its incremental version for classification of data streams called incremental harmony-based classif ier. Finally, we improve it to reduce its computational overhead in absence of drifts and increase its robustness in presence of noise. This improved version is called improved incremental harmony-based classifier. The... 

Handling recurring concepts has become of interest as a challenging problem in the field of data stream classification in recent years. One main feature of data streams is that they appear in nonstationary environments. This means that the concept which the data are drawn from, changes over the time. If after a long enough time, the concept reverts to one of the previous concepts, it is said that recurring concepts has occurred. One solution to this challenge is to maintain a pool of classifiers, each representing a concept in the stream. This paper follows this approach and holds an ensemble of classifiers for each concept. As for each received batch of data, a new classifier is created;... 

In this paper, we introduce a new hybrid learning algorithm, called DTGP, to construct cost-sensitive classifiers. This algorithm uses a decision tree as its basic classifier and the constructed decision tree will be pruned by a genetic programming algorithm using a fitness function that is sensitive to misclassification costs. The proposed learning algorithm has been examined through six cost-sensitive problems. The experimental results show that the proposed learning algorithm outperforms in comparison to some other known learning algorithms like C4.5 or naïve Bayesian  

Increasing access to very large and non-stationary datasets in many real problems has made the classical data mining algorithms impractical and made it necessary to design new online classification algorithms. Online learning of data streams has some important features, such as sequential access to the data, limitation on time and space complexity and the occurrence of concept drift. The infinite nature of data streams makes it hard to label all observed instances. It seems that using the semi-supervised approaches have much more compatibility with the problem. So in this paper we present a new semi-supervised ensemble learning algorithm for data streams. This algorithm uses the majority... 

One of the main challenges of data streams is the occurrence of concept drift. Concept drift is the change of target (or feature) distribution, and can occur in different types: sudden, gradual, incremental or recurring. Because of the forgetting mechanism existing in the data stream learning process, recurring concepts has received much attention recently, and became a challenging problem. This paper tries to exploit the existence of recurring concepts in the learning process and improve the classification of data streams. It uses a pool of concepts to detect the reoccurrence of a concept using two methods: a Bayesian, and a heuristic method. Two approaches are used in the classification... 

Classification of data streams has become an important area of data mining, as the number of applications facing these challenges increases. In this paper, we propose a new ensemble learning method for data stream classification in presence of concept drift. Our method is capable of detecting changes and adapting to new concepts which appears in the stream