We consider the problem of adaptation to the margin and to complexity in binary classification. We suggest an exponential weighting aggregation scheme. We use this aggregation procedure to construct classifiers which adapt automatically to margin and complexity. Two main examples are worked out in which adaptivity is achieved in frameworks proposed by Steinwart and Scovel [Learning Theory. Lecture Notes in Comput. Sci. 3559 (2005) 279--294. Springer, Berlin; Ann. Statist. 35 (2007) 575--607] and Tsybakov [Ann. Statist. 32 (2004) 135--166]. Adaptive schemes, like ERM or penalized ERM, usually involve a minimization step. This is not the case for our procedure.

It is widely recognized today that the management of imprecision and vagueness will yield more intelligent and realistic knowledge-based applications. Description Logics (DLs) are a family of knowledge representation languages that have gained considerable attention the last decade, mainly due to their decidability and the existence of empirically high performance of reasoning algorithms. In this paper, we extend the well known fuzzy ALC DL to the fuzzy SHIN DL, which extends the fuzzy ALC DL with transitive role axioms (S), inverse roles (I), role hierarchies (H) and number restrictions (N). We illustrate why transitive role axioms are difficult to handle in the presence of fuzzy interpretations and how to handle them properly. Then we extend these results by adding role hierarchies and finally number restrictions. The main contributions of the paper are the decidability proof of the fuzzy DL languages fuzzy-SI and fuzzy-SHIN, as well as decision procedures for the knowledge base satisfiability problem of the fuzzy-SI and fuzzy-SHIN.

In recent years, kernel density estimation has been exploited by computer scientists to model machine learning problems. The kernel density estimation based approaches are of interest due to the low time complexity of either O(n) or O(n*log(n)) for constructing a classifier, where n is the number of sampling instances. Concerning design of kernel density estimators, one essential issue is how fast the pointwise mean square error (MSE) and/or the integrated mean square error (IMSE) diminish as the number of sampling instances increases. In this article, it is shown that with the proposed kernel function it is feasible to make the pointwise MSE of the density estimator converge at O(n^-2/3) regardless of the dimension of the vector space, provided that the probability density function at the point of interest meets certain conditions.

The adoption of probabilistic models for the best individuals found so far is a powerful approach for evolutionary computation. Increasingly more complex models have been used by estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs), which often result better effectiveness on finding the global optima for hard optimization problems. Supervised and unsupervised learning of Bayesian networks are very effective options, since those models are able to capture interactions of high order among the variables of a problem. Diversity preservation, through niching techniques, has also shown to be very important to allow the identification of the problem structure as much as for keeping several global optima. Recently, clustering was evaluated as an effective niching technique for EDAs, but the performance of simpler low-order EDAs was not shown to be much improved by clustering, except for some simple multimodal problems. This work proposes and evaluates a combination operator guided by a measure from information theory which allows a clustered low-order EDA to effectively solve a comprehensive range of benchmark optimization problems.

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a functional imaging method that is being developed for bedside use in critical care medicine. Aiming at improving the chest anatomical resolution of EIT images we developed a fuzzy model based on EIT high temporal resolution and the functional information contained in the pulmonary perfusion and ventilation signals. EIT data from an experimental animal model were collected during normal ventilation and apnea while an injection of hypertonic saline was used as a reference . The fuzzy model was elaborated in three parts: a modeling of the heart, a pulmonary map from ventilation images and, a pulmonary map from perfusion images. Image segmentation was performed using a threshold method and a ventilation/perfusion map was generated. EIT images treated by the fuzzy model were compared with the hypertonic saline injection method and CT-scan images, presenting good results in both qualitative (the image obtained by the model was very similar to that of the CT-scan) and quantitative (the ROC curve provided an area equal to 0.93) point of view. Undoubtedly, these results represent an important step in the EIT images area, since they open the possibility of developing EIT-based bedside clinical methods, which are not available nowadays. These achievements could serve as the base to develop EIT diagnosis system for some life-threatening diseases commonly found in critical care medicine.

Many systems can be described in terms of networks of discrete elements and their various relationships to one another. A semantic network, or multi-relational network, is a directed labeled graph consisting of a heterogeneous set of entities connected by a heterogeneous set of relationships. Semantic networks serve as a promising general-purpose modeling substrate for complex systems. Various standardized formats and tools are now available to support practical, large-scale semantic network models. First, the Resource Description Framework (RDF) offers a standardized semantic network data model that can be further formalized by ontology modeling languages such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Second, the recent introduction of highly performant triple-stores (i.e. semantic network databases) allows semantic network models on the order of $10^9$ edges to be efficiently stored and manipulated. RDF and its related technologies are currently used extensively in the domains of computer science, digital library science, and the biological sciences. This article will provide an introduction to RDF/RDFS/OWL and an examination of its suitability to model discrete element complex systems.

Previous work in social network analysis (SNA) has modeled the existence of links from one entity to another, but not the attributes such as language content or topics on those links. We present the Author-Recipient-Topic (ART) model for social network analysis, which learns topic distributions based on the direction-sensitive messages sent between entities. The model builds on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and the Author-Topic (AT) model, adding the key attribute that distribution over topics is conditioned distinctly on both the sender and recipient---steering the discovery of topics according to the relationships between people. We give results on both the Enron email corpus and a researcher's email archive, providing evidence not only that clearly relevant topics are discovered, but that the ART model better predicts people's roles and gives lower perplexity on previously unseen messages. We also present the Role-Author-Recipient-Topic (RART) model, an extension to ART that explicitly represents people's roles.

A pattern database (PDB) is a heuristic function implemented as a lookup table that stores the lengths of optimal solutions for subproblem instances. Standard PDBs have a distinct entry in the table for each subproblem instance. In this paper we investigate compressing PDBs by merging several entries into one, thereby allowing the use of PDBs that exceed available memory in their uncompressed form. We introduce a number of methods for determining which entries to merge and discuss their relative merits. These vary from domain-independent approaches that allow any set of entries in the PDB to be merged, to more intelligent methods that take into account the structure of the problem. The choice of the best compression method is based on domain-dependent attributes. We present experimental results on a number of combinatorial problems, including the four-peg Towers of Hanoi problem, the sliding-tile puzzles, and the Top-Spin puzzle. For the Towers of Hanoi, we show that the search time can be reduced by up to three orders of magnitude by using compressed PDBs compared to uncompressed PDBs of the same size. More modest improvements were observed for the other domains.

Data mining allows the exploration of sequences of phenomena, whereas one usually tends to focus on isolated phenomena or on the relation between two phenomena. It offers invaluable tools for theoretical analyses and exploration of the structure of sentences, texts, dialogues, and speech. We report here the results of an attempt at using it for inspecting sequences of verbs from French accounts of road accidents. This analysis comes from an original approach of unsupervised training allowing the discovery of the structure of sequential data. The entries of the analyzer were only made of the verbs appearing in the sentences. It provided a classification of the links between two successive verbs into four distinct clusters, allowing thus text segmentation. We give here an interpretation of these clusters by applying a statistical analysis to independent semantic annotations.

Wikipedia provides a semantic network for computing semantic relatedness in a more structured fashion than a search engine and with more coverage than WordNet. We present experiments on using Wikipedia for computing semantic relatedness and compare it to WordNet on various benchmarking datasets. Existing relatedness measures perform better using Wikipedia than a baseline given by Google counts, and we show that Wikipedia outperforms WordNet on some datasets. We also address the question whether and how Wikipedia can be integrated into NLP applications as a knowledge base. Including Wikipedia improves the performance of a machine learning based coreference resolution system, indicating that it represents a valuable resource for NLP applications. Finally, we show that our method can be easily used for languages other than English by computing semantic relatedness for a German dataset.