Semi-supervised learning is a learning paradigm concerned with the study of how computers and natural systems such as humans learn in the presence of both labeled and unlabeled data. Traditionally, learning has been studied either in the unsupervised paradigm (e.g., clustering, outlier detection) where all the data are unlabeled, or in the supervised paradigm (e.g., classification, regression) where all the data are labeled. The goal of semi-supervised learning is to understand how combining labeled and unlabeled data may change the learning behavior, and design algorithms that take advantage of such a combination. Semi-supervised learning is of great interest in machine learning and data mining because it can use readily available unlabeled data to improve supervised learning tasks when the labeled data are scarce or expensive. Semi-supervised learning also shows potential as a quantitative tool to understand human category learning, where most of the input is self-evidently unlabeled.

We present the CIFF proof procedure for abductive logic programming with constraints, and we prove its correctness. CIFF is an extension of the IFF proof procedure for abductive logic programming, relaxing the original restrictions over variable quantification (allowedness conditions) and incorporating a constraint solver to deal with numerical constraints as in constraint logic programming. Finally, we describe the CIFF System, comparing it with state of the art abductive systems and answer set solvers and showing how to use it to program some applications.

We present a novel approach for learning nonlinear dynamic models, which leads to a new set of tools capable of solving problems that are otherwise difficult. We provide theory showing this new approach is consistent for models with long range structure, and apply the approach to motion capture and high-dimensional video data, yielding results superior to standard alternatives.

Data analysis and data mining are concerned with unsupervised pattern finding and structure determination in data sets. The data sets themselves are explicitly linked as a form of representation to an observational or otherwise empirical domain of interest. "Structure" has long been understood as symmetry which can take many forms with respect to any transformation, including point, translational, rotational, and many others. Beginning with the role of number theory in expressing data, we show how we can naturally proceed to hierarchical structures. We show how this both encapsulates traditional paradigms in data analysis, and also opens up new perspectives towards issues that are on the order of the day, including data mining of massive, high dimensional, heterogeneous data sets. Linkages with other fields are also discussed including computational logic and symbolic dynamics. The structures in data surveyed here are based on hierarchy, represented as p-adic numbers or an ultrametric topology.

In this paper, we present an application of neural networks in the renewable energy domain. We have developed a methodology for the daily prediction of global solar radiation on a horizontal surface. We use an ad-hoc time series preprocessing and a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) in order to predict solar radiation at daily horizon. First results are promising with nRMSE < 21% and RMSE < 998 Wh/m2. Our optimized MLP presents prediction similar to or even better than conventional methods such as ARIMA techniques, Bayesian inference, Markov chains and k-Nearest-Neighbors approximators. Moreover we found that our data preprocessing approach can reduce significantly forecasting errors.

Thanks to recent advances, AI Planning has become the underlying technique for several applications. Figuring prominently among these is automated Web Service Composition (WSC) at the "capability" level, where services are described in terms of preconditions and effects over ontological concepts. A key issue in addressing WSC as planning is that ontologies are not only formal vocabularies; they also axiomatize the possible relationships between concepts. Such axioms correspond to what has been termed "integrity constraints" in the actions and change literature, and applying a web service is essentially a belief update operation. The reasoning required for belief update is known to be harder than reasoning in the ontology itself. The support for belief update is severely limited in current planning tools. Our first contribution consists in identifying an interesting special case of WSC which is both significant and more tractable. The special case, which we term "forward effects", is characterized by the fact that every ramification of a web service application involves at least one new constant generated as output by the web service. We show that, in this setting, the reasoning required for belief update simplifies to standard reasoning in the ontology itself. This relates to, and extends, current notions of "message-based" WSC, where the need for belief update is removed by a strong (often implicit or informal) assumption of "locality" of the individual messages. We clarify the computational properties of the forward effects case, and point out a strong relation to standard notions of planning under uncertainty, suggesting that effective tools for the latter can be successfully adapted to address the former. Furthermore, we identify a significant sub-case, named "strictly forward effects", where an actual compilation into planning under uncertainty exists. This enables us to exploit off-the-shelf planning tools to solve message-based WSC in a general form that involves powerful ontologies, and requires reasoning about partial matches between concepts. We provide empirical evidence that this approach may be quite effective, using Conformant-FF as the underlying planner.

Many regression problems involve not one but several response variables (y's). Often the responses are suspected to share a common underlying structure, in which case it may be advantageous to share information across them; this is known as multitask learning. As a special case, we can use multiple responses to better identify shared predictive features -- a project we might call multitask feature selection. This thesis is organized as follows. Section 1 introduces feature selection for regression, focusing on ell_0 regularization methods and their interpretation within a Minimum Description Length (MDL) framework. Section 2 proposes a novel extension of MDL feature selection to the multitask setting. The approach, called the "Multiple Inclusion Criterion" (MIC), is designed to borrow information across regression tasks by more easily selecting features that are associated with multiple responses. We show in experiments on synthetic and real biological data sets that MIC can reduce prediction error in settings where features are at least partially shared across responses. Section 3 surveys hypothesis testing by regression with a single response, focusing on the parallel between the standard Bonferroni correction and an MDL approach. Mirroring the ideas in Section 2, Section 4 proposes a novel MIC approach to hypothesis testing with multiple responses and shows that on synthetic data with significant sharing of features across responses, MIC sometimes outperforms standard FDR-controlling methods in terms of finding true positives for a given level of false positives. Section 5 concludes.

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have exploded in terms of scale and scope over the last few years. The unprecedented growth of these networks present challenges in terms of system design and maintenance. One way to cope with this is by partitioning such large networks and assigning these partitions to different machines. However, social networks possess unique properties that make the partitioning problem non-trivial. The main contribution of this paper is to understand different properties of social networks and how these properties can guide the choice of a partitioning algorithm. Using large scale measurements representing real OSNs, we first characterize different properties of social networks, and then we evaluate qualitatively different partitioning methods that cover the design space. We expose different trade-offs involved and understand them in light of properties of social networks. We show that a judicious choice of a partitioning scheme can help improve performance.

Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a mathematical theory based on the formalization of the notions of concept and concept hierarchies. It has been successfully applied to several Computer Science fields such as data mining, software engineering, and knowledge engineering, and in many domains like medicine, psychology, linguistics and ecology. For instance, it has been exploited for the design, mapping and refinement of ontologies. In this paper, we show how FCA can benefit from a given domain ontology by analyzing the impact of a taxonomy (on objects and/or attributes) on the resulting concept lattice. We will mainly concentrate on the usage of a taxonomy to extract generalized patterns (i.e., knowledge generated from data when elements of a given domain ontology are used) in the form of concepts and rules, and improve navigation through these patterns. To that end, we analyze three generalization cases (,, and α) and show their impact on the size of the generalized pattern set. Different scenarios of simultaneous generalizations on both objects and attributes are also discussed.

The paper proposes an analysis on some existent ontologies, in order to point out ways to resolve semantic heterogeneity in information systems. Authors are highlighting the tasks in a Knowledge Acquisiton System and identifying aspects related to the addition of new information to an intelligent system. A solution is proposed, as a combination of ontology reasoning services and natural languages generation. A multi-agent system will be conceived with an extractor agent, a reasoner agent and a competence management agent.