Volume 7 (2017): Edizione 1 (January 2017)

This article presents short-term predictions using neural networks tuned by energy associated to series based-predictor filter for complete and incomplete datasets. A benchmark of high roughness time series from Mackay Glass (MG), Logistic (LOG), Henon (HEN) and some univariate series chosen from NN3 Forecasting Competition are used. An average smoothing technique is assumed to complete the data missing in the dataset. The Hurst parameter estimated through wavelets is used to estimate the roughness of the real and forecasted series. The validation and horizon of the time series is presented by the 15 values ahead. The performance of the proposed filter shows that even a short dataset is incomplete, besides a linear smoothing technique employed; the prediction is almost fair by means of SMAPE index. Although the major result shows that the predictor system based on energy associated to series has an optimal performance from several chaotic time series, in particular, this method among other provides a good estimation when the short-term series are taken from one point observations.

Estimating the connectivity of a network from events observed at each node has many applications. One prominent example is found in neuroscience, where spike trains (sequences of action potentials) are observed at each neuron, but the way in which these neurons are connected is unknown. This paper introduces a novel method for estimating connections between nodes using a similarity measure between sequences of event times. Specifically, a normalized positive definite kernel defined on spike trains was used. The proposed method was evaluated using synthetic and real data, by comparing with methods using transfer entropy and the Victor-Purpura distance. Synthetic data was generated using CERM (Coupled Escape-Rate Model), a model that generates various spike trains. Real data recorded from the visual cortex of an anaesthetized cat was analyzed as well. The results showed that the proposed method provides an effective way of estimating the connectivity of a network when the time sequences of events are the only available information.

A novel data knowledge representation with the combination of structure learning ability of preprocessed collaborative fuzzy clustering and fuzzy expert knowledge of Takagi- Sugeno-Kang type model is presented in this paper. The proposed method divides a huge dataset into two or more subsets of dataset. The subsets of dataset interact with each other through a collaborative mechanism in order to find some similar properties within each-other. The proposed method is useful in dealing with big data issues since it divides a huge dataset into subsets of dataset and finds common features among the subsets. The salient feature of the proposed method is that it uses a small subset of dataset and some common features instead of using the entire dataset and all the features. Before interactions among subsets of the dataset, the proposed method applies a mapping technique for granules of data and centroid of clusters. The proposed method uses information of only half or less/more than the half of the data patterns for the training process, and it provides an accurate and robust model, whereas the other existing methods use the entire information of the data patterns. Simulation results show the proposed method performs better than existing methods on some benchmark problems.

The adaptive educational systems within e-learning platforms are built in response to the fact that the learning process is different for each and every learner. In order to provide adaptive e-learning services and study materials that are tailor-made for adaptive learning, this type of educational approach seeks to combine the ability to comprehend and detect a person’s specific needs in the context of learning with the expertise required to use appropriate learning pedagogy and enhance the learning process. Thus, it is critical to create accurate student profiles and models based upon analysis of their affective states, knowledge level, and their individual personality traits and skills. The acquired data can then be efficiently used and exploited to develop an adaptive learning environment. Once acquired, these learner models can be used in two ways. The first is to inform the pedagogy proposed by the experts and designers of the adaptive educational system. The second is to give the system dynamic self-learning capabilities from the behaviors exhibited by the teachers and students to create the appropriate pedagogy and automatically adjust the e-learning environments to suit the pedagogies. In this respect, artificial intelligence techniques may be useful for several reasons, including their ability to develop and imitate human reasoning and decision-making processes (learning-teaching model) and minimize the sources of uncertainty to achieve an effective learning-teaching context. These learning capabilities ensure both learner and system improvement over the lifelong learning mechanism. In this paper, we present a survey of raised and related topics to the field of artificial intelligence techniques employed for adaptive educational systems within e-learning, their advantages and disadvantages, and a discussion of the importance of using those techniques to achieve more intelligent and adaptive e-learning environments.

Learning vector quantization (LVQ) is one of the most powerful approaches for prototype based classification of vector data, intuitively introduced by Kohonen. The prototype adaptation scheme relies on its attraction and repulsion during the learning providing an easy geometric interpretability of the learning as well as of the classification decision scheme. Although deep learning architectures and support vector classifiers frequently achieve comparable or even better results, LVQ models are smart alternatives with low complexity and computational costs making them attractive for many industrial applications like intelligent sensor systems or advanced driver assistance systems.

Nowadays, the mathematical theory developed for LVQ delivers sufficient justification of the algorithm making it an appealing alternative to other approaches like support vector machines and deep learning techniques.

This review article reports current developments and extensions of LVQ starting from the generalized LVQ (GLVQ), which is known as the most powerful cost function based realization of the original LVQ. The cost function minimized in GLVQ is an soft-approximation of the standard classification error allowing gradient descent learning techniques. The GLVQ variants considered in this contribution, cover many aspects like bordersensitive learning, application of non-Euclidean metrics like kernel distances or divergences, relevance learning as well as optimization of advanced statistical classification quality measures beyond the accuracy including sensitivity and specificity or area under the ROC-curve.

According to these topics, the paper highlights the basic motivation for these variants and extensions together with the mathematical prerequisites and treatments for integration into the standard GLVQ scheme and compares them to other machine learning approaches. For detailed description and mathematical theory behind all, the reader is referred to the respective original articles.

Thus, the intention of the paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the stateof- the-art serving as a starting point to search for an appropriate LVQ variant in case of a given specific classification problem as well as a reference to recently developed variants and improvements of the basic GLVQ scheme.