Volume 6 (2016): Edizione 2 (April 2016)

This paper presents an application of Cuckoo search algorithm to determine optimal location and sizing of Static VAR Compensator. Cuckoo search algorithm is a modern heuristic technique basing Cuckoo species’ parasitic strategy. The Lévy flight has been employed to generate random Cuckoo eggs. Moreover, the objective function is a multiobjective problem, which minimizes loss power, voltage deviation and investment cost of Static VAR Compensator while satisfying other operating constraints in power system. Cuckoo search algorithm is evaluated on three case studies and compared with the Teaching-learning-based optimization, Particle Swarm optimization and Improved Harmony search algorithm. The results show that Cuckoo search algorithm is better than other optimization techniques and its performance is also better.

Consumer brands often offer discounts to attract new shoppers to buy their products. The most valuable customers are those who return after this initial incentive purchase. With enough purchase history, it is possible to predict which shoppers, when presented an offer, will buy a new item. While dealing with Big Data and with data streams in particular, it is a common practice to summarize or aggregate customers’ transaction history to the periods of few months. As an outcome, we compress the given huge volume of data, and transfer the data stream to the standard rectangular format. Consequently, we can explore a variety of practically or theoretically motivated tasks. For example, we can rank the given field of customers in accordance to their loyalty or intension to repurchase in the near future. This objective has very important practical application. It leads to preferential treatment of the right customers. We tested our model (with competitive results) online during Kaggle-based Acquire Valued Shoppers Challenge in 2014.

Technological advancements within the educational sector and online learning promoted portable data-based adaptive techniques to influence the developments within transformative learning and enhancing the learning experience. However, many common adaptive educational systems tend to focus on adopting learning content that revolves around pre-black box learner modelling and teaching models that depend on the ideas of a few experts. Such views might be characterized by various sources of uncertainty about the learner response evaluation with adaptive educational system, linked to learner reception of instruction. High linguistic uncertainty levels in e-learning settings result in different user interpretations and responses to the same techniques, words, or terms according to their plans, cognition, pre-knowledge, and motivation levels. Hence, adaptive teaching models must be targeted to individual learners’ needs. Thus, developing a teaching model based on the knowledge of how learners interact with the learning environment in readable and interpretable white box models is critical in the guidance of the adaptation approach for learners’ needs as well as understanding the way learning is achieved.

This paper presents a novel interval type-2 fuzzy logic-based system which is capable of identifying learners’ preferred learning strategies and knowledge delivery needs that revolves around characteristics of learners and the existing knowledge level in generating an adaptive learning environment. We have conducted a large scale evaluation of the proposed system via real-word experiments on 1458 students within a massively crowded e-learning platform. Such evaluations have shown the proposed interval type-2 fuzzy logic system’s capability of handling the encountered uncertainties which enabled to achieve superior performance with regard to better completion and success rates as well as enhanced learning compared to the non-adaptive systems, adaptive system versions led by the teacher, and type-1-based fuzzy based counterparts.

Differential evolution (DE) presents a class of evolutionary and meta-heuristic techniques that have been applied successfully to solve many real-world problems. However, the performance of DE is significantly influenced by its control parameters such as scaling factor and crossover probability. This paper proposes a new adaptive DE algorithm by greedy adjustment of the control parameters during the running of DE. The basic idea is to perform greedy search for better parameter assignments in successive learning periods in the whole evolutionary process. Within each learning period, the current parameter assignment and its neighboring assignments are tested (used) in a number of times to acquire a reliable assessment of their suitability in the stochastic environment with DE operations. Subsequently the current assignment is updated with the best candidate identified from the neighborhood and the search then moves on to the next learning period. This greedy parameter adjustment method has been incorporated into basic DE, leading to a new DE algorithm termed as Greedy Adaptive Differential Evolution (GADE). GADE has been tested on 25 benchmark functions in comparison with five other DE variants. The results of evaluation demonstrate that GADE is strongly competitive: it obtained the best rank among the counterparts in terms of the summation of relative errors across the benchmark functions with a high dimensionality.

Constructive learning algorithms are an efficient way to train feedforward neural networks. Some of their features, such as the automatic definition of the neural network (NN) architecture and its fast training, promote their high adaptive capacity, as well as allow for skipping the usual pre-training phase, known as model selection. However, such advantages usually come with the price of lower accuracy rates, when compared to those obtained with conventional NN learning approaches. This is, perhaps, the reason for conventional NN training algorithms being preferred over constructive NN (CoNN) algorithms. Aiming at enhancing CoNN accuracy performance and, as a result, making them a competitive choice for machine learning based applications, this paper proposes the use of functionally expanded input data. The investigation described in this paper considered six two-class CoNN algorithms, ten data domains and seven polynomial expansions. Results from experiments, followed by a comparative analysis, show that performance rates can be improved when CoNN algorithms learn from functionally expanded input data.