Mining financial text documents and understanding the sentiments of individual investors, institutions and markets is an important and challenging problem in the literature. Current approaches to mine sentiments from financial texts largely rely on domain specific dictionaries. However, dictionary based methods often fail to accurately predict the polarity of financial texts. This paper aims to improve the state-of-the-art and introduces a novel sentiment analysis approach that employs the concept of financial and non-financial performance indicators. It presents an association rule mining based hierarchical sentiment classifier model to predict the polarity of financial texts as positive, neutral or negative. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated on a benchmark financial dataset. The model is also compared against other state-of-the-art dictionary and machine learning based approaches and the results are found to be quite promising. The novel use of performance indicators for financial sentiment analysis offers interesting and useful insights.

A while ago, while browsing through the latest AI news, I stumbled upon a company that claimed to use "machine learning and advanced artificial intelligence" to collect and analyze hundreds of data touch points to improve user experience in mobile apps. On the same day, I read about another company that predicted customer behavior using "a combination of machine learning and AI" and "AI-powered predictive analytics." Some people refer to AI and machine learning as synonyms and use them interchangeably, while other use them as separate, parallel technologies. In many cases, the people speaking and writing about the technology don't know the difference between AI and ML. In others, they intentionally ignore those differences to create hype and excitement for marketing and sales purposes.

Currently, knowledge discovery in databases is an essential step to identify valid, novel and useful patterns for decision making. There are many real-world scenarios, such as bankruptcy prediction, option pricing or medical diagnosis, where the classification models to be learned need to fulfil restrictions of monotonicity (i.e. the target class label should not decrease when input attributes values increase). For instance, it is rational to assume that a higher debt ratio of a company should never result in a lower level of bankruptcy risk. Consequently, there is a growing interest from the data mining research community concerning monotonic predictive models. This paper aims to present an overview about the literature in the field, analyzing existing techniques and proposing a taxonomy of the algorithms based on the type of model generated. For each method, we review the quality metrics considered in the evaluation and the different data sets and monotonic problems used in the analysis. In this way, this paper serves as an overview of the research about monotonic classification in specialized literature and can be used as a functional guide of the field.

Reinforcement learning (RL) techniques, while often powerful, can suffer from slow learning speeds, particularly in high dimensional spaces. Decomposition of tasks into a hierarchical structure holds the potential to significantly speed up learning, generalization, and transfer learning. However, the current task decomposition techniques often rely on high-level knowledge provided by an expert (e.g. using dynamic Bayesian networks) to extract a hierarchical task structure; which is not necessarily available in autonomous systems. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on Sequential Association Rule Mining that can extract Hierarchical Structure of Tasks in Reinforcement Learning (SARM-HSTRL) in an autonomous manner for both Markov decision processes (MDPs) and factored MDPs. The proposed method leverages association rule mining to discover the causal and temporal relationships among states in different trajectories, and extracts a task hierarchy that captures these relationships among sub-goals as termination conditions of different sub-tasks. We prove that the extracted hierarchical policy offers a hierarchically optimal policy in MDPs and factored MDPs. It should be noted that SARM-HSTRL extracts this hierarchical optimal policy without having dynamic Bayesian networks in scenarios with a single task trajectory and also with multiple tasks' trajectories. Furthermore, it has been theoretically and empirically shown that the extracted hierarchical task structure is consistent with trajectories and provides the most efficient, reliable, and compact structure under appropriate assumptions. The numerical results compare the performance of the proposed SARM-HSTRL method with conventional HRL algorithms in terms of the accuracy in detecting the sub-goals, the validity of the extracted hierarchies, and the speed of learning in several testbeds.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in extending traditional stream processing engines with logical, rule-based, reasoning capabilities. This poses significant theoretical and practical challenges since rules can derive new information and propagate it both towards past and future time points; as a result, streamed query answers can depend on data that has not yet been received, as well as on data that arrived far in the past. Stream reasoning algorithms, however, must be able to stream out query answers as soon as possible, and can only keep a limited number of previous input facts in memory. In this paper, we propose novel reasoning problems to deal with these challenges, and study their computational properties on Datalog extended with a temporal sort and the successor function (a core rule-based language for stream reasoning applications).

Artificial Intelligence is dominating both headlines and the agendas of business leaders. Our 2018 Views from the C-Suite survey of global executives finds widespread agreement that there are tremendous opportunities in digitization and new technologies such as AI. Fully 71 percent of executives expect AI to have "transformative effects for economic growth and competitiveness" over the next 12 months. However, executives may need to temper their expectations for the short-term implications of AI. Much of executives' enthusiasm is justified.

What's more, even AIs based on mechanisms inspired by human biology, such as neural networks, have only a distant relationship with biological neurons in the brain. NN are examples more of the importance of reinforcement and self-organisation of controller networks than any similarity with biology. The first, naive, approach to AI is to think that it is necessary to create a synthetic human, or a synthetic brain to produce cognition: in fact, cognition does not need to be anthropomorphic at all. Second attempt at a definition: "The ability of a machine to achieve performance equal to or better than certain human cognitive processes." This definition is based on the final outcome, without presupposing imitation of biological mechanisms.

AI is a large topic, and there is no single agreed definition of what it involves. But there seems to be more agreement than disagreement. Broadly speaking, AI is an umbrella term for the field in computer science dedicated to making machines simulate different aspects of human intelligence, including learning, decision-making and pattern recognition. Some of the most striking applications, in fields like speech recognition and computer vision, are things people take for granted when assessing human intelligence but have been beyond the limits of computers until relatively recently. The term "artificial intelligence" was coined in 1956 by mathematics professor John McCarthy, who wrote, The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning and any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.

Abstract--Design rule check is a critical step in the physical design of integrated circuits to ensure manufacturability. However, it can be done only after a time-consuming detailed routing procedure, which adds drastically to the time of design iterations. With advanced technology nodes, the outcomes of global routing and detailed routing become less correlated, which adds to the difficulty of predicting design rule violations from earlier stages. In this paper, a framework based on neural network ensembles is proposed to predict design rule violation hotspots using information from placement and global routing. A soft voting structure and a PCA-based subset selection scheme are developed on top of a baseline neural network from a recent work. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture achieves significant improvement in model performance compared to the baseline case. For half of test cases, the performance is even better than random forest, a commonly-used ensemble learning model. Today's IC fabrication technologies require satisfying many complex design rules to ensure manufacturability.

In this paper, we confront the problem of deep learning's big labeled data requirements, offer a rule based strategy for extreme augmentation of small data sets and apply that strategy with the image to image translation model by Isola et al. (2016) to automate cel style cartoon coloring with very limited training data. While our experimental results using geometric rules and transformations demonstrate the performance of our methods on an image translation task with industry applications in art, design and animation, we also propose the use of rules on partial data sets as a generalizable small data strategy, potentially applicable across data types and domains.