The number of elderly people is constantly increasing in the developed countries. Elderly tend to lead an isolated life away from their offspring; however, they may fear being unable to obtain help if they are injured or ill. During the last decades, this fear has generated research attempts to find assistive technologies for making living of elderly people at homes easier and independent, as is the aim of this research work. Research study proposes a generalized approach to an intelligent and ubiquitous care system to recognize a few of the most common and important health problems of the elderly, which can be detected by analyzing their movement. In the event that the system was to recognize a health problem, it would automatically notify a physician with an included explanation of the automatic diagnosis. It is two-step approach; in the first step it classifies person's activities into five activities: fall, unconscious fall, walking, standing/sitting, lying down/lying. In the second step, it classifies walking patterns into five different health states; one healthy and four unhealthy: hemiplegia (usually the result of stroke), Parkinson’s disease, leg pain and back pain. Moreover, since elderly having these health problems are less stable and more prone to falls, recognizing them leads not only to detection but indirectly also to prevention of falls of elderly people. In the initial approach movement of the user is captured with the motion capture system, which consists of the tags attached to the body, whose coordinates are acquired by the sensors situated in the apartment. In the current approach wearable inertial sensors are used, allowing monitoring inside or outside of the buildings. Output time-series of coordinates are modeled with the proposed data mining approach to recognize the specific health problem.

We present a computational method to generate explanations to answers of complex queries over biomedical ontologies and databases, using the high-level representation and efficient automated reasoners of Answer Set Programming. We show the applicability of our approach with some queries related to drug discovery over PHARMGKB, DRUGBANK, BIOGRID, CTD and SIDER.

Bagging is a simple yet effective design which combines multiple single learners to form an ensemble for prediction. Despite its popular usage in many real-world applications, existing research is mainly concerned with studying unstable learners as the key to ensure the performance gain of a bagging predictor, with many key factors remaining unclear. For example, it is not clear when a bagging predictor can outperform a single learner and what is the expected performance gain when different learning algorithms were used to form a bagging predictor. In this paper, we carry out comprehensive empirical studies to evaluate bagging predictors by using 12 different learning algorithms and 48 benchmark data-sets. Our analysis uses robustness and stability decompositions to characterize different learning algorithms, through which we rank all learning algorithms and comparatively study their bagging predictors to draw conclusions. Our studies assert that both stability and robustness are key requirements to ensure the high performance for building a bagging predictor. In addition, our studies demonstrated that bagging is statistically superior to most single base learners, except for KNN and Naïve Bayes (NB). Multi-layer perception (MLP), Naïve Bayes Trees (NBTree), and PART are the learning algorithms with the best bagging performance.

Korf, Reid, and Edelkamp launched a line of research aimed at predicting how many nodes IDA* will expand with a given depth bound. This paper advances this line of research in three ways. First, we identify a source of prediction error that has hitherto been overlooked. We call it the "discretization effect." Second, we disprove the intuitively appealing idea that a "more informed" prediction system cannot make worse predictions than a ``less informed'' one. More informed systems are more susceptible to the discretization effect, and in our experiments the more informed system makes poorer predictions. Our third contribution is a method, called "Epsilon-truncation," which makes a prediction system less informed, in a carefully chosen way, so as to improve its predictions by reducing the discretization effect. In our experiments Epsilon-truncation improved predictions substantially.

This paper describes an approach to solving insertion tasks by a robot that uses exploratory behaviors and proprioceptive feedback. The approach was inspired by the developmental progression of insertion abilities in both chimpanzees and humans (Hayashi et al. 2006). Before mastering insertions, the infants of the two species undergo a stage where they only press objects against other objects without releasing them. Our goal was to emulate this developmental stage on a robot to see if it may lead to simpler representations for insertion tasks. Experiments were performed using a shapesorter puzzle with three different blocks and holes.

We focus on a class of models used for representing the dynamics between a discrete set of probabilistic events in a continuous-time setting. The proposed framework offers tractable learning and inference procedures and provides compact state representations for processes which exhibit variable delays between events. The approach is applied to a heart sound labeling task that exhibits long-range dependencies on previous events, and in which explicit modeling of the rhythm timings is justifiable by cardiological principles.

In multiple-Instance Learning (MIL), training class labels are attached to sets of bags composed of unlabeled instances, and the goal is to deal with classification of bags. Most previous MIL algorithms, which tackle classification problems, consider each instance as a represented feature. Although the algorithms work well in some prediction problems, considering diverse features to represent an instance may provide more significant information for learning task. Moreover, since each instance may be mapped into diverse feature spaces, encountering a large number of irrelevant or redundant features is inevitable. In this paper, we propose a method to select relevant instances and concurrently consider multiple features for each instance, which is termed as MIL-MFS. MIL-MFS is based on multiple kernel learning (MKL), and it iteratively selects the fusing multiple features for classifier training. Experimental results show that the MIL-MFS combined with multiple kernel learning can significantly improve the classification performance.

Real-time heuristic search algorithms that precompute search space-specific databases have demonstrated exceptional performance in video-game pathfinding. We discuss the first steps towards extending these algorithms to other search spaces that also benefit from the real-time property. We present our initial progress in characterizing the performance of current algorithms based on the features of a search space, and discuss future directions of this research.

The study of phase transition phenomenon of NP complete problems plays an important role in understanding the nature of hard problems. In this paper, we follow this line of research by considering the problem of counting solutions of Constraint Satisfaction Problems (#CSP). We consider the random model, i.e. RB model. We prove that phase transition of #CSP does exist as the number of variables approaches infinity and the critical values where phase transitions occur are precisely located. Preliminary experimental results also show that the critical point coincides with the theoretical derivation. Moreover, we propose an approximate algorithm to estimate the expectation value of the solutions number of a given CSP instance of RB model.

We extend the precedence constraints contexts heuristic (hpcc) to a temporal and numeric setting, and propose rules to account precedence constraints among comparison variables and logical variables. Experimental results on benchmark domains show that our extension has the potential to lead to better plan quality than that with the heuristic proposed by Eyerich and others.