GA-based learning for rule identification in fuzzy neural networks

Employing an effective learning process is a critical topic in designing a fuzzy neural network, especially when expert knowledge is not available. This paper presents a genetic algorithm (GA) based learning approach for a specific type of fuzzy neural network. The proposed learning approach consists of three stages. In the first stage the membership functions of both input and output variables are initialized by determining their centers and widths using a self-organizing algorithm. The second stage employs the proposed GA based learning algorithm to identify the fuzzy rules while the final stage tunes the derived structure and parameters using a back-propagation learning algorithm. The capabilities of the proposed GA-based learning approach are evaluated using a well-examined benchmark example and its effectiveness is analyzed by means of a comparative study with other approaches. The usefulness of the proposed GA-based learning approach is also illustrated in a practical case study where it is used to predict the performance of road traffic control actions. Results from the benchmarking exercise and case study effectively demonstrate the ability of the proposed three stages learning approach to identify relevant fuzzy rules from a training data set with a higher prediction accuracy than alternative approaches.     

Predicting Aflatoxin Contamination in Peanuts: A Genetic Algorithm/Neural Network Approach

Aflatoxin contamination in peanut crops is a problem of significant health and financial importance. Predicting aflatoxin levels prior to crop harvest is useful for minimizing the impact of a contaminated crop and is the goal of our research. Backpropagation neural networks have been used to model problems of this type, however development of networks poses the complex problem of setting values for architectural features and backpropagation parameters. Genetic algorithms have been used in other studies to determine parameters for backpropagation neural networks. This paper describes the development of a genetic algorithm/backpropagation neural network hybrid (GA/BPN) in which a genetic algorithm is used to find architectures and backpropagation parameter values simultaneously for a backpropagation neural network that predicts aflatoxin contamination levels in peanuts based on environmental data. Learning rate, momentum, and number of hidden nodes are the parameters that are set by the genetic algorithm. A three-layer feed-forward network with logistic activation functions is used. Inputs to the network are soil temperature, drought duration, crop age, and accumulated heat units. The project showed that the GA/BPN approach automatically finds highly fit parameter sets for backpropagation neural networks for the aflatoxin problem.     

基于神经网络的无线传感器网络数据预测应用研究

无线传感器网络是一种由数量庞大的网络节点形成的复杂无线网络,是无线传感器的典型应用,目前已经广泛应用在多个领域当中。将神经网络引入到无线传感器网络当中,通过神经元描述每一个无线传感器数据,构建神经网络元模型。对传统的神经网络模型进行改进,利用无线传感器的神经网络模型,实现无线传感器网络采集数据的融合与提取。通过各种应用类型的差异,选择影响数据输出结果的主要因素,建立一种能够进行预测的模型。以某个区域是否发生火灾为实验原型,对该区域的火灾发生概率进行预测,采用已有的火灾发生数据为训练样本,通过收敛的网络预测火灾发生的概率。实验结果表明,基于神经网络的无线传感器网络数据预测是一种可行、有效的方法。     

基于贝叶斯网络的林火概率预测系统设计与实现

针对林火预测具有影响因素多、机制复杂、难以结构化等特点,设计并实现了一个基于贝叶斯网络的实用林火概率预测系统。该系统以气象、植被、地理、人类活动等数据作为输入,综合林火历史数据建立贝叶斯网络模型,并应用联合树算法进行概率推理,进而预测出林火发生概率。在某省实际林火历史数据上对系统进行了测试,比较了所设计系统与加拿大火险天气指标系统（FWI）的预测性能,验证了系统的可行性和实用性。     

Feature and decision level sensor fusion of electromagnetic induction and ground penetrating radar sensors for landmine detection with hand-held units

Strategies for fusion of electromagnetic induction (metal detector (MD)) and ground penetrating radar (GPR) sensors for landmine detection are investigated. Feature and decision level algorithms are devised and compared. Features are extracted from the MD signals by correlating with weighted density distribution functions. A multi-frequency band linear prediction method generates features for the GPR. Feature level fusion combines MD and GPR features in a single neural network. Decision level fusion is performed by using the MD features as inputs to one neural network and the GPR features as inputs to the geometric mean and combining the output values. Experimental results are reported on a very large real data set containing 2315 mine encounters of different size, shape, content and metal composition that are measured under different soil conditions at three distinct geographical locations.     

An intelligent system for forest fire risk prediction and fire fighting management in Galicia

Over the last two decades in southern Europe, more than 10 million hectares of forest have been damaged by fire. Due to the costs and complications of fire-fighting a number of technical developments in the field have been appeared in recent years. This paper describes a system developed for the region of Galicia in NW Spain, one of the regions of Europe most affected by fires. This system fulfills three main aims: it acts as a preventive tool by predicting forest fire risks, it backs up the forest fire monitoring and extinction phase, and it assists in planning the recuperation of the burned areas. The forest fire prediction model is based on a neural network whose output is classified into four symbolic risk categories, obtaining an accuracy of 0.789. The other two main tasks are carried out by a knowledge-based system developed following the CommonKADS methodology. Currently we are working on the trail of the system in a controlled real environment. This will provide results on real behaviour that can be used to fine-tune the system to the point where it is considered suitable for installation in a real application environment.     

Intelligent and vision-based fire detection systems: A survey

Fire is one of the main disasters in the world. A fire detection system should detect fires in various environments (e.g., buildings, forests, and rural areas) in the shortest time in order to reduce financial losses and humanistic disasters. Fire sensors are, in fact, complementary to conventional point sensors (e.g., smoke and heat detectors), which provide people the early warnings of fire occurrences. Cameras combined with image processing techniques detect fire occurrences more quickly than point sensors. Moreover, they provide the size, growth, and direction of fires more easily than their conventional detectors. This paper, initially, presents a glance view on the main features of various environments including buildings, forests, and mines that should be considered in the design of fire detection systems. Afterwards, it describes some of the intelligent and vision-based fire detection systems that have been presented by researchers in the last decade. These systems are categorized, in this paper, into two groups: intelligent detection systems for forest fires and intelligent fire detection systems for all of the environments. They use various intelligent techniques (e.g., convolutional neural networks, color models, and fuzzy logic) to detect fire occurrences with a high accuracy in various environments. Performances of the fire detection systems are compared to each other in terms of detection rate, precision, true-positive rate, false-positive rate, etc. under different evaluation scenarios.     

A genetic algorithm to refine input data selection for air temperature prediction using artificial neural networks

The accurate prediction of air temperature is important in many areas of decision-making including agricultural management, transportation and energy management. Previous research has focused on the development of artificial neural network (ANN) models to predict air temperature from one to twelve hours in advance. The inputs to these models included a constant duration of prior data with a fixed resolution for all environmental variables for all prediction horizons. The overall goal of this research was to develop more accurate ANN models that could predict air temperature for each prediction horizon. The specific objective was to determine if the ANN model accuracy could be improved by applying a genetic algorithm (GA) for each prediction horizon to determine the preferred duration and resolution of input prior data for each environmental variable. The ANN models created based on this GA based approach provided smaller errors than the models created based on the existing constant duration and fixed data resolution approach for all twelve prediction horizons. Except for a few cases, the GA generally included a longer duration for prior air temperature data and shorter durations for other environmental variables. The mean absolute errors (MAEs) for the evaluation input patterns of the one-, four-, eight-, and twelve-hour prediction models that were based on this GA approach were 0.564 °C, 1.264 °C, 1.766 °C and 2.018 °C, respectively. These MAEs were improvements of 3.98%, 4.59%, 2.55% and 1.70% compared to the models that were created based on the existing approach for the same corresponding prediction horizons. Thus, the GA based approach to determine the duration and resolution of prior input data resulted in more accurate ANN models than the existing ones for air temperature prediction. Future work could examine the effects of various GA and fitness evaluation parameters that were part of the approach used in this study.     

Efficient forest fire occurrence prediction for developing countries using two weather parameters

Forest fire occurrence prediction plays a major role in resource allocation, mitigation and recovery efforts. This paper compares two artificial intelligence based methods, artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector machines (SVM), utilizing a reduced set of weather parameters. Using a reduced set of parameters results in an efficient and reduced cost prediction system especially for developing countries. In this paper the aim is to predict forest fire occurrence by reducing the number of monitored features, and eliminating the need for weather prediction mechanisms. The reason is to reduce errors due to inaccuracies in weather prediction. The challenge is to choose a limited number of easily measurable features in the aim of reducing the cost of the system and its maintenance. At the same time, the chosen features must have a high correlation with the risk of fire occurrence. A literature review of forest fire prediction methods divided into systems/indices, and artificial intelligence is provided. The two fire danger prediction algorithms utilize relative humidity and cumulative precipitation to output a risk estimate. The assessment of these algorithms, using data from Lebanon, demonstrated their ability to accurately predict the risk of fire occurrence on a scale of four levels.     

基于遗传算法和BP神经网络的房价预测分析

针对BP神经网络存在易陷入局部极小值、收敛速度慢等问题,提出用遗传算法优化BP神经网络并用于房价预测。采用BP神经网络建立房价预测模型。利用遗传算法对BP神经网络的初始权值和阈值进行优化。选取1998年2011年贵阳市的房价及其主要影响因素作为实验数据,分别对传统的BP神经网络和经过遗传算法优化后的BP神经网络进行训练和仿真实验,结果表明,与传统的BP神经网络预测模型相比,经过遗传算法优化后的BP神经网络预测模型能加快网络的收敛速度,提高房价的预测精度。     

Forecasting building energy consumption: Adaptive long-short term memory neural networks driven by genetic algorithm

The real-world building can be regarded as a comprehensive energy engineering system; its actual energy consumption depends on complex affecting factors, including various weather data and time signature. Accurate energy consumption forecasting and effective energy system management play an essential part in improving building energy efficiency. The multi-source weather profile and energy consumption data could enable integrating data-driven models and evolutionary algorithms to achieve higher forecasting accuracy and robustness. The proposed building energy consumption forecasting system consists of three layers: data acquisition and storage layer, data pre-processing layer and data analytics layer. The core part of the data analytics layer is a hybrid genetic algorithm (GA) and long-short term memory (LSTM) neural network model for accurate and robust energy prediction. LSTM neural network is adopted to capture the interrelationship between energy consumption data and time. GA is adopted to select the optimal architecture for LSTM neural networks to improve its forecasting accuracy and robustness. The hyper-parameters for determining LSTM architecture include the number of LSTM layers, number of neurons in each LSTM layer, dropping rate of each LSTM layer and network learning rate. Meanwhile, the effects of historical weather profile and time horizon of past information are also investigated. Two real-life educational buildings are adopted to test the performance of the proposed building energy consumption forecasting system. Experiments reveal that the proposed adaptive LSTM neural network performs better than the existing feedforward neural network and LSTM-based prediction models in accuracy and robustness. It also outperforms those LSTM networks whose hyper-parameters are determined by grid search, Bayesian optimisation and PSO. Such accurate energy consumption prediction can play an essential role in various areas, including daily building energy management, decision making of facility managers, building information model designs, net-zero energy operation, climate change mitigation and circular economy.     

Exhaustive and heuristic search approaches for learning a software defect prediction model

In this paper, we propose a software defect prediction model learning problem (SDPMLP) where a classification model selects appropriate relevant inputs, from a set of all available inputs, and learns the classification function. We show that the SDPMLP is a combinatorial optimization problem with factorial complexity, and propose two hybrid exhaustive search and probabilistic neural network (PNN), and simulated annealing (SA) and PNN procedures to solve it. For small size SDPMLP, exhaustive search PNN works well and provides an (all) optimal solution(s). However, for large size SDPMLP, the use of exhaustive search PNN approach is not pragmatic and only the SA–PNN allows us to solve the SDPMLP in a practical time limit. We compare the performance of our hybrid approaches with traditional classification algorithms and find that our hybrid approaches perform better than traditional classification algorithms.     

Enhancement of parcel valuation with adaptive artificial neural network modeling

This study targets a research on the application of artificial neural network (ANN) and multiple regression analysis (MRA) approaches in Geomatics Engineering science to land valuation process. The prediction capability was investigated and evaluated using three ANN models constructed with different activation functions (sigmoid, tangent hyperbolic and adaptive activation function) and MRA was used as a reference approach. These four methodologies were applied to land valuation in order to model the unit market value with various inputs based on essential criteria. All approaches were investigated with their estimation level in training and testing data. It was observed that adaptive ANN performed noticeably higher predicting the values with the highest accuracy and giving the smallest RMSE value in validation process, although other methodologies approximated to the raw data at a promising level for further valuation-based applications.     

Surface roughness prediction in turning using artificial neural network

In this work, a back propagation neural network model has been developed for the prediction of surface roughness in turning operation. A large number of experiments were performed on mild steel work-pieces using high speed steel as the cutting tool. Process parametric conditions including speed, feed, depth of cut, and the measured parameters such as feed and the cutting forces are used as inputs to the neural network model. Roughness of the machined surface corresponding to these conditions is the output of the neural network. The convergence of the mean square error both in training and testing came out very well. The performance of the trained neural network has been tested with experimental data, and found to be in good agreement.     

粗糙集属性约简方法在股票预测中的应用研究

针对神经网络在股票预测中遇到的困难,在预测模型中引入粗糙集理论,提出一种基于粗糙集与神经网络相结合的预测方法,并根据基本遗传算法的弱点对其进行了改进。首先,介绍了基于遗传算法的属性约简方法,对各遗传因子进行改进。然后,采用基于改进遗传算法的属性约简方法对模型的样本数据进行约简,删除冗余数据,得到样本输入的最小约简。最后,利用约简后的样本对预测模型进行训练与检验。实验结果表明,该方法具有较高的预测精度,能有效地解决网络结构复杂、学习速度缓慢等问题。     

An incremental adaptive neural network model for online noisy data regression and its application to compartment fire studies

This paper presents a probabilistic-entropy-based neural network (PENN) model for tackling online data regression problems. The network learns online with an incremental growth network structure and performs regression in a noisy environment. The training samples presented to the model are clustered into hyperellipsoidal Gaussian kernels in the joint space of the input and output domains by using the principles of Bayesian classification and minimization of entropy. The joint probability distribution is established by applying the Parzen density estimator to the kernels. The prediction is carried out by evaluating the expected conditional mean of the output space with the given input vector. The PENN model is demonstrated to be able to remove symmetrically distributed noise embedded in the training samples. The performance of the model was evaluated by three benchmarking problems with noisy data (i.e., Ozone, Friedman#1, and Santa Fe Series E). The results show that the PENN model is able to outperform, statistically, other artificial neural network models. The PENN model is also applied to solve a fire safety engineering problem. It has been adopted to predict the height of the thermal interface which is one of the indicators of fire safety level of the fire compartment. The data samples are collected from a real experiment and are noisy in nature. The results show the superior performance of the PENN model working in a noisy environment, and the results are found to be acceptable according to industrial requirements.     

A novel spiking neural network of receptive field encoding with groups of neurons decision

Human information processing depends mainly on billions of neurons which constitute a complex neural network, and the information is transmitted in the form of neural spikes. In this paper, we propose a spiking neural network (SNN), named MD-SNN, with three key features: (1) using receptive field to encode spike trains from images; (2) randomly selecting partial spikes as inputs for each neuron to approach the absolute refractory period of the neuron; (3) using groups of neurons to make decisions. We test MD-SNN on the MNIST data set of handwritten digits, and results demonstrate that: (1) Different sizes of receptive fields influence classification results significantly. (2) Considering the neuronal refractory period in the SNN model, increasing the number of neurons in the learning layer could greatly reduce the training time, effectively reduce the probability of over-fitting, and improve the accuracy by 8.77%. (3) Compared with other SNN methods, MD-SNN achieves a better classification; compared with the convolution neural network, MD-SNN maintains flip and rotation invariance (the accuracy can remain at 90.44% on the test set), and it is more suitable for small sample learning (the accuracy can reach 80.15% for 1000 training samples, which is 7.8 times that of CNN).     

基于稀疏自编码深度神经网络的林火图像分类

针对林火与相似目标很难区分的问题,提出一种基于稀疏自编码深度神经网络的林火图像分类新方法。采用无监督的特征学习算法稀疏自编码从无标签图像小块中学习特征参数,完成深度神经网络的训练;利用学习到的特征从原始大小分类图像中提取特征并卷积和均值池化特征;对卷积和池化后的特征采用softmax回归来训练最终softmax分类器。实验结果表明,跟传统的BP神经网络相比,新方法能够更有效区分林火与红旗、红叶等类似物体。     

Model dissection from earthquake time series: A comparative analysis using modern non-linear forecasting and artificial neural network approaches

This study utilizes two non-linear approaches to characterize model behavior of earthquake dynamics in the crucial tectonic regions of Northeast India (NEI). In particular, we have applied a (i) non-linear forecasting technique to assess the dimensionality of the earthquake-generating mechanism using the monthly frequency earthquake time series (magnitude ?4) obtained from NOAA and USGS catalogues for the period 1960–2003 and (ii) artificial neural network (ANN) methods—based on the back-propagation algorithm (BPA) to construct the neural network model of the same data set for comparing the two. We have constructed a multilayered feed forward ANN model with an optimum input set configuration specially designed to take advantage of more completely on the intrinsic relationships among the input and retrieved variables and arrive at the feasible model for earthquake prediction. The comparative analyses show that the results obtained by the two methods are stable and in good agreement and signify that the optimal embedding dimension obtained from the non-linear forecasting analysis compares well with the optimal number of inputs used for the neural networks.The constructed model suggests that the earthquake dynamics in the NEI region can be characterized by a high-dimensional chaotic plane. Evidence of high-dimensional chaos appears to be associated with “stochastic seasonal” bias in these regions and would provide some useful constraints for testing the model and criteria to assess earthquake hazards on a more rigorous and quantitative basis.