Sharif Digital Repository

Recent advances in storage and processing have provided the possibility of automatic gathering of information, which in turn leads to fast and continuous flows of data. The data which are produced and stored in this way are called data streams. Data streams are produced in large size, and much dynamism and have some unique properties which make them applicable to model many real data mining applications. The main challenge of streaming data is the occurrence of concept drift. In addition, regarding the costs of labeling of instances, it is often assumed that only a small fraction of instances are labeled. In this paper, we propose an ensemble algorithm to classify instances of non-stationary... 

Hierarchical reinforcement learning facilitates learning in large and complex domains by exploiting subtasks and creating hierarchical structures using these subtasks. Subtasks are usually defined through finding subgoals of the problem. Providing mechanisms for autonomous subgoal discovery and skill acquisition is a challenging issue in reinforcement learning. Among the proposed algorithms, a few of them are successful both in performance and also efficiency in terms of the running time of the algorithm. In this paper, we study four methods for subgoal discovery which are based on graph partitioning. The idea behind the methods proposed in this paper is that if we partition the transition... 

For the last couple of decades, researchers/managers have realized that the traditional success criteria known as golden triangle (time, cost, quality) are not adequate measures to align a project with the long term success trend of a company. The perception of project success may differ from one industry to another or from one stakeholder (client, contractor, etc.) to other. Petrochemical projects are of high complexity and a vast variety of parameters needs to be monitored in order to produce on spec products according to the customer requirements and market dynamic changes. To be successful in such complex projects, it is required to be successful in every phase of the project lifecycle.... 

For the last couple of decades, researchers/managers have realized that the traditional success criteria known as golden triangle (time, cost, quality) are not adequate measures to align a project with the long term success trend of a company. The perception of project success may differ from one industry to another or from one stakeholder (client, contractor, etc.) to other. Petrochemical projects are of high complexity and a vast variety of parameters needs to be monitored in order to produce on spec products according to the customer requirements and market dynamic changes. To be successful in such complex projects, it is required to be successful in every phase of the project lifecycle.... 

For the last couple of decades, researchers/managers have realized that the traditional success criteria known as golden triangle (time, cost, quality) are not adequate measures to align a project with the long term success trend of a company. The perception of project success may differ from one industry to another or from one stakeholder (client, contractor, etc.) to other. Petrochemical projects are of high complexity and a vast variety of parameters needs to be monitored in order to produce on spec products according to the customer requirements and market dynamic changes. To be successful in such complex projects, it is required to be successful in every phase of the project lifecycle.... 

We have entered the era of networked communications where concepts such as big data and social networks are emerging. The explosion and profusion of available data in a broad range of application domains cause data streams to become an inevitable part of the most real-world applications. In the classification of data streams, there are four major challenges: infinite length, concept drift, recurring and evolving concepts. This paper proposes a novel method to address the mentioned challenges with a focus on the last one. Unlike the existing methods for detection of evolving concepts, we cast joint classification and detection of evolving concepts into optimizing an objective function by... 

We have entered the era of networked communications where concepts such as big data and social networks are emerging. The explosion and profusion of available data in a broad range of application domains cause data streams to become an inevitable part of the most real-world applications. In the classification of data streams, there are four major challenges: infinite length, concept drift, recurring and evolving concepts. This paper proposes a novel method to address the mentioned challenges with a focus on the last one. Unlike the existing methods for detection of evolving concepts, we cast joint classification and detection of evolving concepts into optimizing an objective function by... 

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;... 

Learning an appropriate distance measure under supervision of side information has become a topic of significant interest within machine learning community. In this paper, we address the problem of metric learning for constrained clustering by considering three important issues: (1) considering importance degree for constraints, (2) preserving the topological structure of data, and (3) preserving some natural distribution properties in the data. This work provides a unified way to handle different issues in constrained clustering by learning an appropriate distance measure. It has modeled the first issue by injecting the importance degree of constraints directly into an objective function.... 

We consider a demand response program in which a block of apartments receive a discount from their electricity supplier if they ensure that their aggregate load from air conditioning does not exceed a predetermined threshold. The goal of the participants is to obtain the discount, while ensuring that their individual temperature preferences are also satisfied. As such, the apartments need to collectively optimise their use of air conditioning so as to satisfy these constraints and minimise their costs. Given an optimal cooling profile that secures the discount, the problem that the apartments face then is to divide the total discounted cost in a fair way. To achieve this, we take a... 

The present research comes up with a novel DNA-loaded poly-L-lysine (PLL)/hyaluronan (HA) nanocarrier (DNA-loaded PLL/HA NCs) for gene delivery applications, as a promising candidate for gene delivery into diverse cells. A straightforward approach was employed to prepare such a nanosystem through masking DNA-loaded PLL molecules by HA. Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, dynamic light scattering (DLS), field emission-scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) were used to analyse the interaction of the molecules as well as the physicochemical properties of the NCs. The NCs showed a negative charge of –24 ± 3 mV, with an average size of 138 ±... 

Incremental learning is a learning algorithm that can get new information from new training sets without forgetting the acquired knowledge from the previously used training sets. In this paper, an incremental learning algorithm based on ensemble learning is proposed. Then, an application of the proposed algorithm for spam filtering is discussed. The proposed algorithm called incremental RotBoost, assumes the environment is stationary. It trains new weak classifiers for newly arriving data, which are added to the ensemble of classifiers. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, several computer experiments are conducted. The results of computer experiments show the ability of... 

Concept drift, change in the underlying distribution that data points come from, is an inevitable phenomenon in data streams. Due to increase in the number of data streams' applications such as network intrusion detection, weather forecasting, and detection of unconventional behavior in financial transactions; numerous researches have recently been conducted in the area of concept drift detection. An ideal method for concept drift detection should be able to rapidly and correctly identify changes in the underlying distribution of data points and adapt its model as quickly as possible while the memory and processing time is limited. In this paper, we propose a novel explicit method based on... 

With the increasing volume of data, the best approach for learning from this data is to exploit an online learning algorithm. Online ensemble methods take advantage of an ensemble of classifiers to predict labels of data. Prediction with expert advice is a well-studied problem in the online ensemble learning literature. The weighted majority and the randomized weighted majority (RWM) algorithms are two well-known solutions to this problem, aiming to converge to the best expert. Since among some expert, the best one does not necessarily have the minimum error in all regions of data space, defining specific regions and converging to the best expert in each of these regions will lead to a... 

Multi-agent systems can be seen as an apparatus for testing the performance of real distributed systems. One problem encountered in multi-agent systems with the learning capability is credit assignment. This paper presents two methods for solving this problem. The first method assigns credit to the agents according to the history of the interaction while the second method assigns credit to the agents according to the knowledge of agents, and thus the shares of the agents are extracted from the feedback of the environment. The computer experiments show that critic learning has a positive impact in credit assignment problem  

Autoregressive models are among the most successful neural network methods for estimating a distribution from a set of samples. However, these models, such as other neural methods, need large data sets to provide good estimations. We believe that knowing structural information about the data can improve their performance on small data sets. Masked autoencoder for distribution estimation (MADE) is a well-structured density estimator, which alters a simple autoencoder by setting a set of masks on its connections to satisfy the autoregressive condition. Nevertheless, this model does not benefit from extra information that we might know about the structure of the data. This information can... 

Autoregressive models are among the most successful neural network methods for estimating a distribution from a set of samples. However, these models, such as other neural methods, need large data sets to provide good estimations. We believe that knowing structural information about the data can improve their performance on small data sets. Masked autoencoder for distribution estimation (MADE) is a well-structured density estimator, which alters a simple autoencoder by setting a set of masks on its connections to satisfy the autoregressive condition. Nevertheless, this model does not benefit from extra information that we might know about the structure of the data. This information can... 

Automatic image annotation is a mechanism to assign a list of appropriate tags that describe the visual content of a given image. Most methods only focus on the content of the images and ignore the relationship between the tags in vocabulary. In this work, we propose a new deep learning-based automatic image annotation architecture, which considers label dependencies in a graph convolution neural network structure and extracts tag descriptors to re-weight the output class scores based on their relationships. The proposed architecture has three main parts: feature extraction, graph convolutional network, and annotation. In graph convolutional network, we apply one layer convolution on... 

People use social networks to share millions of stories every day, but these stories rarely become viral. Can we estimate the probability that a story becomes a viral cascade If so, can we find a set of users that are more likely to trigger viral cascades These estimation and maximization problems are very challenging since both rare-event nature of viral cascades and efficiency requirement should be considered. Unfortunately, this problem still remains largely unexplored to date. In this paper, given temporal dynamics of a network, we first develop an efficient viral cascade probability estimation method, VICE, that leverages an special importance sampling approximation to achieve high...