We consider off-policy policy evaluation with function approximation (FA) in average-reward MDPs, where the goal is to estimate both the reward rate and the differential value function. For this problem, bootstrapping is necessary and, along with off-policy learning and FA, results in the deadly triad (Sutton & Barto, 2018). To address the deadly triad, we propose two novel algorithms, reproducing the celebrated success of Gradient TD algorithms in the average-reward setting. In terms of estimating the differential value function, the algorithms are the first convergent off-policy linear function approximation algorithms. In terms of estimating the reward rate, the algorithms are the first convergent off-policy linear function approximation algorithms that do not require estimating the density ratio. We demonstrate empirically the advantage of the proposed algorithms, as well as their nonlinear variants, over a competitive density-ratio-based approach, in a simple domain as well as challenging robot simulation tasks.

Working with a non-stationary stream of data requires for the analysis system to evolve its model (the parameters as well as the structure) over time. In particular, concept drifts can occur, which makes it necessary to forget knowledge that has become obsolete. However, the forgetting is subjected to the stability-plasticity dilemma, that is, increasing forgetting improve reactivity of adapting to the new data while reducing the robustness of the system. Based on a set of inference rules, Evolving Fuzzy Systems-EFS-have proven to be effective in solving the data stream learning problem. However tackling the stability-plasticity dilemma is still an open question. This paper proposes a coherent method to integrate forgetting in Evolving Fuzzy System, based on the recently introduced notion of concept drift anticipation. The forgetting is applied with two methods: an exponential forgetting of the premise part and a deferred directional forgetting of the conclusion part of EFS to preserve the coherence between both parts. The originality of the approach consists in applying the forgetting only in the anticipation module and in keeping the EFS (called principal system) learned without any forgetting. Then, when a drift is detected in the stream, a selection mechanism is proposed to replace the obsolete parameters of the principal system with more suitable parameters of the anticipation module. An evaluation of the proposed methods is carried out on benchmark online datasets, with a comparison with state-of-the-art online classifiers (Learn++.NSE, PENsemble, pclass) as well as with the original system using different forgetting strategies.

As interest in autonomous driving increases, efforts are being made to meet requirements for the high-level automation of vehicles. In this context, the functionality inside the vehicle cabin plays a key role in ensuring a safe and pleasant journey for driver and passenger alike. At the same time, recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled a whole range of new applications and assistance systems to solve automated problems in the vehicle cabin. This paper presents a thorough survey on existing work that utilizes AI methods for use-cases inside the driving cabin, focusing, in particular, on application scenarios related to (1) driving safety and (2) driving comfort. Results from the surveyed works show that AI technology has a promising future in tackling in-cabin tasks within the autonomous driving aspect.

We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the adaptivity constraint. We consider two popular limited adaptivity models: batch learning model and rare policy switch model, and propose two efficient online RL algorithms for linear Markov decision processes. In specific, for the batch learning model, our proposed LSVI-UCB-Batch algorithm achieves an $\tilde O(\sqrt{d^3H^3T} + dHT/B)$ regret, where $d$ is the dimension of the feature mapping, $H$ is the episode length, $T$ is the number of interactions and $B$ is the number of batches. Our result suggests that it suffices to use only $\sqrt{T/dH}$ batches to obtain $\tilde O(\sqrt{d^3H^3T})$ regret. For the rare policy switch model, our proposed LSVI-UCB-RareSwitch algorithm enjoys an $\tilde O(\sqrt{d^3H^3T[1+T/(dH)]^{dH/B}})$ regret, which implies that $dH\log T$ policy switches suffice to obtain the $\tilde O(\sqrt{d^3H^3T})$ regret. Our algorithms achieve the same regret as the LSVI-UCB algorithm (Jin et al., 2019), yet with a substantially smaller amount of adaptivity.

Textile manufacturing is a typical traditional industry involving high complexity in interconnected processes with limited capacity on the application of modern technologies. Decision-making in this domain generally takes multiple criteria into consideration, which usually arouses more complexity. To address this issue, the present paper proposes a decision support system that combines the intelligent data-based random forest (RF) models and a human knowledge based analytical hierarchical process (AHP) multi-criteria structure in accordance to the objective and the subjective factors of the textile manufacturing process. More importantly, the textile manufacturing process is described as the Markov decision process (MDP) paradigm, and a deep reinforcement learning scheme, the Deep Q-networks (DQN), is employed to optimize it. The effectiveness of this system has been validated in a case study of optimizing a textile ozonation process, showing that it can better master the challenging decision-making tasks in textile manufacturing processes.

The paper relies on the clinical data of a previously published study. We identify two very questionable assumptions of said work, namely confusing evidence of absence and absence of evidence, and neglecting the ordinal nature of attributes' domains. We then show that using an adequate ordinal methodology such as the dominance-based rough sets approach (DRSA) can significantly improve the predictive accuracy of the expert system, resulting in almost complete accuracy for a dataset of 100 instances. Beyond the performance of DRSA in solving the diagnosis problem at hand, these results suggest the inadequacy and triviality of the underlying dataset. We provide links to open data from the UCI machine learning repository to allow for an easy verification/refutation of the claims made in this paper. Keywords: Decision Support Systems, Expert Systems, Dominance Based Rough Set Approach, Diagnosis, Seminal Quality.

Over the last decade, the long-running endeavour to automate high-level processes in machine learning (ML) has risen to mainstream prominence, stimulated by advances in optimisation techniques and their impact on selecting ML models/algorithms. Central to this drive is the appeal of engineering a computational system that both discovers and deploys high-performance solutions to arbitrary ML problems with minimal human interaction. Beyond this, an even loftier goal is the pursuit of autonomy, which describes the capability of the system to independently adjust an ML solution over a lifetime of changing contexts. However, these ambitions are unlikely to be achieved in a robust manner without the broader synthesis of various mechanisms and theoretical frameworks, which, at the present time, remain scattered across numerous research threads. Accordingly, this review seeks to motivate a more expansive perspective on what constitutes an automated/autonomous ML system, alongside consideration of how best to consolidate those elements. In doing so, we survey developments in the following research areas: hyperparameter optimisation, multi-component models, neural architecture search, automated feature engineering, meta-learning, multi-level ensembling, dynamic adaptation, multi-objective evaluation, resource constraints, flexible user involvement, and the principles of generalisation. We also develop a conceptual framework throughout the review, augmented by each topic, to illustrate one possible way of fusing high-level mechanisms into an autonomous ML system. Ultimately, we conclude that the notion of architectural integration deserves more discussion, without which the field of automated ML risks stifling both its technical advantages and general uptake.

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) is a complex systems modeling technique which, due to its unique advantages, has lately risen in popularity. They are based on graphs that represent the causal relationships among the parameters of the system to be modeled, and they stand out for their interpretability and flexibility. With the late popularity of FCMs, a plethora of research efforts have taken place to develop and optimize the model. One of the most important elements of FCMs is the learning algorithm they use, and their effectiveness is largely determined by it. The learning algorithms learn the node weights of an FCM, with the goal of converging towards the desired behavior. The present study reviews the genetic algorithms used for training FCMs, as well as gives a general overview of the FCM learning algorithms, putting evolutionary computing into the wider context.

The main aim in ensemble learning is using multiple individual classifiers outputs rather than one classifier output to aggregate them for more accurate classification. Generating an ensemble classifier generally is composed of three steps: selecting the base classifier, applying a sampling strategy to generate different individual classifiers and aggregation the classifiers outputs. This paper focuses on the classifiers outputs aggregation step and presents a new interval-based aggregation modeling using bagging resampling approach and Interval Agreement Approach (IAA) in ensemble learning. IAA is an interesting and practical aggregation approach in decision making which was introduced to combine decision makers opinions when they present their opinions by intervals. In this paper, in addition to implementing a new aggregation approach in ensemble learning, we designed some experiments to encourage researchers to use interval modeling in ensemble learning because it preserves more uncertainty and this leads to more accurate classification. For this purpose, we compared the results of implementing the proposed method to the majority vote as the most common and successful aggregation function in the literature on 10 medical data sets to show the better performance of the interval modeling and the proposed interval-based aggregation function in binary classification when it comes to ensemble learning. The results confirm the good performance of our proposed approach.

Social media popularity and importance is on the increase, due to people using it for various types of social interaction across multiple channels. This social interaction by online users includes submission of feedback, opinions and recommendations about various individuals, entities, topics, and events. This systematic review focuses on the evolving research area of Social Opinion Mining, tasked with the identification of multiple opinion dimensions, such as subjectivity, sentiment polarity, emotion, affect, sarcasm and irony, from user-generated content represented across multiple social media platforms and in various media formats, like text, image, video and audio. Therefore, through Social Opinion Mining, natural language can be understood in terms of the different opinion dimensions, as expressed by humans. This contributes towards the evolution of Artificial Intelligence, which in turn helps the advancement of several real-world use cases, such as customer service and decision making. A thorough systematic review was carried out on Social Opinion Mining research which totals 485 studies and spans a period of twelve years between 2007 and 2018. The in-depth analysis focuses on the social media platforms, techniques, social datasets, language, modality, tools and technologies, natural language processing tasks and other aspects derived from the published studies. Such multi-source information fusion plays a fundamental role in mining of people's social opinions from social media platforms. These can be utilised in many application areas, ranging from marketing, advertising and sales for product/service management, and in multiple domains and industries, such as politics, technology, finance, healthcare, sports and government. Future research directions are presented, whereas further research and development has the potential of leaving a wider academic and societal impact.