Evolutionary Computation In Data Mining

This book integrates two areas of computer science, namely data mining and evolutionary algorithms. Both these areas have become increasingly popular in the last few years, and their integration is currently an active research area. In general, data mining consists of extracting knowledge from data. The motivation for applying evolutionary algorithms to data mining is that evolutionary algorithms are robust search methods which perform a global search in the space of candidate solutions. This book emphasizes the importance of discovering comprehensible, interesting knowledge, which is potentially useful for intelligent decision making. The text explains both basic concepts and advanced topics

Data mining is a very active research area with many successful real-world app- cations. It consists of a set of concepts and methods used to extract interesting or useful knowledge (or patterns) from real-world datasets, providing valuable support for decision making in industry, business, government, and science. Although there are already many types of data mining algorithms available in the literature, it is still dif cult for users to choose the best possible data mining algorithm for their particular data mining problem. In addition, data mining al- rithms have been manually designed; therefore they incorporate human biases and preferences. This book proposes a new approach to the design of data mining algorithms. - stead of relying on the slow and ad hoc process of manual algorithm design, this book proposes systematically automating the design of data mining algorithms with an evolutionary computation approach. More precisely, we propose a genetic p- gramming system (a type of evolutionary computation method that evolves c- puter programs) to automate the design of rule induction algorithms, a type of cl- si cation method that discovers a set of classi cation rules from data. We focus on genetic programming in this book because it is the paradigmatic type of machine learning method for automating the generation of programs and because it has the advantage of performing a global search in the space of candidate solutions (data mining algorithms in our case), but in principle other types of search methods for this task could be investigated in the future.

Data mining (DM) consists of extracting interesting knowledge from re- world, large & complex data sets; and is the core step of a broader process, called the knowledge discovery from databases (KDD) process. In addition to the DM step, which actually extracts knowledge from data, the KDD process includes several preprocessing (or data preparation) and post-processing (or knowledge refinement) steps. The goal of data preprocessing methods is to transform the data to facilitate the application of a (or several) given DM algorithm(s), whereas the goal of knowledge refinement methods is to validate and refine discovered knowledge. Ideally, discovered knowledge should be not only accurate, but also comprehensible and interesting to the user. The total process is highly computation intensive. The idea of automatically discovering knowledge from databases is a very attractive and challenging task, both for academia and for industry. Hence, there has been a growing interest in data mining in several AI-related areas, including evolutionary algorithms (EAs). The main motivation for applying EAs to KDD tasks is that they are robust and adaptive search methods, which perform a global search in the space of candidate solutions (for instance, rules or another form of knowledge representation).

This book provides a collection of fourty articles containing new material on both theoretical aspects of Evolutionary Computing (EC), and demonstrating the usefulness/success of it for various kinds of large-scale real world problems. Around 23 articles deal with various theoretical aspects of EC and 17 articles demonstrate the success of EC methodologies. These articles are written by leading experts of the field from different countries all over the world.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Bioinformatics, EvoBIO 2007, held in Valencia, Spain, April 2007. Coverage brings together experts in computer science with experts in bioinformatics and the biological sciences. It presents contributions on fundamental and theoretical issues along with papers dealing with different applications areas.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Bioinformatics, EvoBIO 2010, held in Istanbul, Turkey, in April 2010 co-located with the Evo* 2010 events. This 15 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. EvoBIO is the premiere European event for those interested in the interface between evolutionary computation, machine learning, data mining, bioinformatics, and computational biology. Topics addressed by the papers include biomarker discovery, cell simulation and modeling, ecological modeling, fluxomics, gene networks, biotechnology, metabolomics, microarray analysis, phylogenetics, protein interactions, proteomics, sequence analysis and alignment, and systems biology.

This book presents a unified framework, based on specialized evolutionary algorithms, for the global induction of various types of classification and regression trees from data. The resulting univariate or oblique trees are significantly smaller than those produced by standard top-down methods, an aspect that is critical for the interpretation of mined patterns by domain analysts. The approach presented here is extremely flexible and can easily be adapted to specific data mining applications, e.g. cost-sensitive model trees for financial data or multi-test trees for gene expression data. The global induction can be efficiently applied to large-scale data without the need for extraordinary resources. With a simple GPU-based acceleration, datasets composed of millions of instances can be mined in minutes. In the event that the size of the datasets makes the fastest memory computing impossible, the Spark-based implementation on computer clusters, which offers impressive fault tolerance and scalability potential, can be applied.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Bioinformatics, EvoBIO 2007, held in Valencia, Spain, April 2007. Coverage brings together experts in computer science with experts in bioinformatics and the biological sciences. It presents contributions on fundamental and theoretical issues along with papers dealing with different applications areas.