Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, a parallel algorithm is presented for data clustering on a multicomputer with star topology. This algorithm is fast and requires a small amount of memory per processing element, which makes it even suitable for SIMD implementation. The proposed parallel algorithm completes in O(K+S2-T2) steps for a clustering problem of N data patterns with M features per pattern and K clusters where S and T are the minimum numbers such that NM≤S! and KM≤T!, on the S-dimensional star graph  

Intelligent solutions, based on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, to solve complicated practical problems in various sectors are becoming more and more widespread nowadays, because of their flexibility, symbolic reasoning, and explanation capabilities. Meanwhile, accurate forecasts on tourism demand and study on the pattern of the tourism demand from various origins is essential for the tourism-related industries to formulate efficient and effective strategies on maintaining and boosting tourism industry in a country. In this paper we develop a hybrid AI model to deal with tourist arrival forecasting problems. The hybrid model adopts Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) and... 

Some periodic and quasi-periodic pulse trains are emitted by different sources in the environment and a number of sensors receive them through a single channel simultaneously. We are often interested in separating these pulse trains for source identification at sensors. This identification process is termed as deinterleaving pulse trains. Deinterleaving pulse trains has wide applications in communications, radar systems, neural systems, biomedical engineering, and so on. This paper studies the deinterleaving problem with the assumption that both sources and sensors are fixed. In this study, the problem of deinterleaving pulse trains is modeled as a blind source separation (BSS) problem. To... 

In this paper, we study the power allocation problem in multi-cell OFDMA networks, where given the tradeoff between user satisfaction and profit of the service provider, maximizing the revenue of the service provider is also taken into account. Consequently, two Stackelberg games are proposed for allocating proper powers to central and cell-edge users. In our algorithm, assuming the fact that users agree to pay more for better QoS level, the service provider imposes optimum prices for unit-power transmitted to users as they request different levels of QoS. In addition, in order to improve system performance at cell-edge locations, users are divided into two groups based on their distance to... 

Image segmentation with clustering approach is widely used in biomedical application. Fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering is able to preserve the information between tissues in image, but not taking spatial information into account, makes segmentation results of the standard FCM sensitive to noise. To overcome the above shortcoming, a modified FCM algorithm for MRI brain image segmentation is presented in this paper. The algorithm is realized by incorporating the spatial neighborhood information into the standard FCM algorithm and modifying the membership weighting of each cluster by smoothing it by Total Variation (TV) denoising. The proposed algorithm is evaluated with accuracy index in... 

k-medoids algorithm is a partitional, centroid-based clustering algorithm which uses pairwise distances of data points and tries to directly decompose the dataset with n points into a set of k disjoint clusters. However, k-medoids itself requires all distances between data points that are not so easy to get in many applications. In this paper, we introduce a new method which requires only a small proportion of the whole set of distances and makes an effort to estimate an upperbound for unknown distances using the inquired ones. This algorithm makes use of the triangle inequality to calculate an upper-bound estimation of the unknown distances. Our method is built upon a recursive approach to... 

Supplier selection is a decision-making process to identify and evaluate suppliers for making contracts. Here, we use interval type-2 fuzzy values to show the decision makers' preferences and also introduce a new formula to compute the distance between two interval type-2 fuzzy sets. The performance of the proposed distance formula in comparison with the normalized Hamming, normalized Hamming based on the Hausdorff metric, normalized Euclidean and the signed distances is evaluated. The results show that the signed distance has the same trend as our method, but the other three methods are not appropriate for interval type-2 fuzzy sets. Using this approach, we propose a hierarchical... 

In this paper, we propose a novel density-based fuzzy clustering algorithm based on Active Learning Method (ALM), which is a methodology of soft computing inspired by some hypotheses claiming that human brain interprets information in pattern-like images rather than numerical quantities. The proposed clustering algorithm, Fuzzy Unsupervised Active Learning Method (FUALM), is performed in two main phases. First, each data point spreads in the feature space just like an ink drop that spreads on a sheet of paper. As a result of this process, densely connected ink patterns are formed that represent clusters. In the second phase, a fuzzifying process is applied in order to summarize the effects... 

Wireless sensor networks consist of a large number of nodes which are distributed sporadically in a geographic area. The energy of all nodes on the network is limited. For this reason, providing a method of communication between nodes and network administrator to manage energy consumption is crucial. For this purpose, one of the proposed methods with high performance, is clustering methods. The big challenge in clustering methods is dividing network into several clusters that each cluster is managed by a cluster head (CH). In this paper, a centralized genetic-based clustering (CGC) protocol using onion approach is proposed. The CGC protocol selects the appropriate nodes as CHs according to... 

Fuzzy C-means clustering (FCM) is proposed as a promising method for the clustering of chromatographic fingerprints of complex samples, such as essential oils. As an example, secondary metabolites of 14 citrus leaves samples are extracted and analyzed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The obtained chromatographic fingerprints are divided to desired number of chromatographic regions. Owing to the fact that chromatographic problems, such as elution time shift and peak overlap can significantly affect the clustering results, therefore, each chromatographic region is analyzed using multivariate curve resolution-alternating least squares (MCR-ALS) to address these problems. Then,... 

Minimization of the number of cluster heads in a wireless sensor network is a very important problem to reduce channel contention and to improve the efficiency of the algorithm when executed at the level of cluster-heads. In this paper, we propose an efficient method based on genetic algorithms (GAs) to solve a sensor network optimization problem. Long communication distances between sensors and a sink in a sensor network can greatly drain the energy of sensors and reduce the lifetime of a network. By clustering a sensor network into a number of independent clusters using a GA, we can greatly minimize the total communication distance, thus prolonging the network lifetime. Simulation results... 

Reconstructing haplotype in MEC (Minimum Error Correction) model is an important clustering problem which focuses on inferring two haplotypes from SNP fragments (Single Nucleotide Polymorphism) containing gaps and errors. Mutated form of human genome is responsible for genetic diseases which mostly occur in SNP sites. In this paper, a fuzzy clustering approach is performed for haplotype reconstruction or haplotype assembly from a given sample Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP). In the best previous approach based on reconstruction rate (Wang 2007[2]), all SNP-fragments are considered with equal values. In our proposed method the value of the fragments are based on the degree of membership... 

The dynamic nature of mobile nodes in mobile adhoc networks (MANETs), causes their association and disassociation to and from clusters perturb the stability of network and problem becomes worse if nodes are clusterheads (CH). Therefore cluster maintenance schemes are needed to handle new admissions and releases of node in the clusters. In this paper, we introduce a novel cluster maintenance algorithm which selects a new clusterhead from a trusty area that is defined previously based on some maintenance optimization rules. The election process is done before the current clusterhead leaves the cluster. So the routes which include this clusterhead as a middle node are less probable to break and... 

Class-based n-gram language models are those most frequently-used in continuous speech recognition systems, especially for languages for which no richly annotated corpora are available. Various word clustering algorithms have been proposed to build such class-based models. In this work, we discuss the superiority of soft approaches to class construction, whereby each word can be assigned to more than one class. We also propose a new method for possibilistic word clustering. The possibilistic C-mean algorithm is used as our clustering method. Various parameters of this algorithm are investigated; e.g., centroid initialization, distance measure, and words' feature vector. In the experiments... 

Association mapping of genetic diseases has attracted extensive research interest during the recent years. However, most of the methodologies introduced so far suffer from spurious inference of the associated sites due to population inhomogeneities. In this paper, we introduce a statistical framework to compensate for this shortcoming by equipping the current methodologies with a state-of-the-art clustering algorithm being widely used in population genetics applications. The proposed framework jointly infers the disease-associated factors and the hidden population structures. In this regard, a Markov Chain-Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedure has been employed to assess the posterior probability... 

The objective in multi-label learning problems is simultaneous prediction of many labels for each input instance. During the past years, there were many proposed embedding based approaches to solve this problem by considering label dependencies and decreasing learning and prediction cost. However, compressing the data leads to lose part of information included in label space. The idea in this work is to divide the whole label space to some independent small groups which leads to independent learning and prediction for each small group in the main space, rather than transforming to the compressed space. We use subspace clustering approaches to extract these small partitions such that the... 

In modern power systems, technical virtual power plants (TVPPs) play an important role enabling presence of distributed energy resources (DERs) in electricity markets. In this paper, strategy of using the available energy resources for a TVPP is put under investigation. A new optimization framework is presented for problem of TVPP energy scheduling by taking operational constraints of distribution network into account. In the proposed model, photovoltaic (PV) units and micro turbines along with the electric vehicles (EVs) are scheduled in such a way that the profit of TVPP owner would be maximized. The uncertainty in output generation of PV units is modeled by adopting fuzzy c-means (FCM)... 

In this paper, we propose a novel density-based fuzzy clustering algorithm based on Active Learning Method (ALM), which is a methodology of soft computing inspired by some hypotheses claiming that human brain interprets information in pattern-like images rather than numerical quantities. The proposed clustering algorithm, Fuzzy Unsupervised Active Learning Method (FUALM), is performed in two main phases. First, each data point spreads in the feature space just like an ink drop that spreads on a sheet of paper. As a result of this process, densely connected ink patterns are formed that represent clusters. In the second phase, a fuzzifying process is applied in order to summarize the effects... 

Cellular learning automata (CLA) is a distributed computational model which was introduced in the last decade. This model combines the computational power of the cellular automata with the learning power of the learning automata. Cellular learning automata is composed from a lattice of cells working together to accomplish their computational task; in which each cell is equipped with some learning automata. Wide range of applications utilizes CLA such as image processing, wireless networks, evolutionary computation and cellular networks. However, the only input to this model is a reinforcement signal and so it cannot receive another input such as the state of the environment. In this paper,... 

In this paper, we introduce a document clustering method based on Sparse Topical Coding, called Cluster-based Sparse Topical Coding. Topic modeling is capable of improving textual document clustering by describing documents via bag-of-words models and projecting them into a topic space. The latent semantic descriptions derived by the topic model can be utilized as features in a clustering process. In our proposed method, document clustering and topic modeling are integrated in a unified framework in order to achieve the highest performance. This framework includes Sparse Topical Coding, which is responsible for topic mining, and K-means that discovers the latent clusters in documents...