Minimizing makespan in permutation flow shop scheduling problems using a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm

This paper proposes a hybrid metaheuristic for the minimization of makespan in permutation flow shop scheduling problems. The solution approach is robust, fast, and simply structured, and comprises three components: an initial population generation method based on a greedy randomized constructive heuristic, a genetic algorithm (GA) for solution evolution, and a variable neighbourhood search (VNS) to improve the population. The hybridization of a GA with VNS, combining the advantages of these two individual components, is the key innovative aspect of the approach. Computational experiments on benchmark data sets demonstrate that the proposed hybrid metaheuristic reaches high-quality solutions in short computational times. Furthermore, it requires very few user-defined parameters, rendering it applicable to real-life flow shop scheduling problems.     

Probabilistic GRASP-Tabu Search algorithms for the UBQP problem

This paper presents two algorithms combining GRASP and Tabu Search for solving the Unconstrained Binary Quadratic Programming (UBQP) problem. We first propose a simple GRASP-Tabu Search algorithm working with a single solution and then reinforce it by introducing a population management strategy. Both algorithms are based on a dedicated randomized greedy construction heuristic and a tabu search procedure. We show extensive computational results on two sets of 31 large random UBQP instances and one set of 54 structured instances derived from the MaxCut problem. Comparisons with state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed algorithms in terms of both solution quality and computational efficiency. It is noteworthy that the reinforced GRASP-Tabu Search algorithm is able to improve the previous best known results for 19 MaxCut instances.     

基于改进遗传算法的稀疏重构算法

稀疏重构算法中凸松弛法在恢复效率方面、贪婪追踪法在恢复精度方面存在不足,基于遗传算法迭代优化的思想,结合模拟退火以及多种群算法的优势,提出了基于模拟退火遗传算法和基于多种群遗传算法的启发式稀疏重构算法。所提算法均从传统遗传算法易陷入局部最优解的缺陷出发,分别通过保持个体间的差异性和提高种群多样性来搜索待求稀疏信号的全局最优解,并通过理论分析证明了所提算法参数选取及搜索策略的有效性。此外,以阵列信号处理中空间信源的波达方向（DOA）估计问题为例,验证所提算法的有效性。仿真结果表明,相较于正交匹配追踪OMP算法和基于l1范数奇异值分解的l1-SVD算法,所提算法提高了DOA估计的精度,且降低了运算复杂度,使其快速收敛至全局最优解。     

VLSI implementation of greedy-based distributed routing schemes for ad hoc networks

We describe a VLSI implementation based on a FPGA of a new greedy algorithm for approximating minimum set covering in ad hoc wireless network applications. The implementation makes the algorithm suitable for embedded and real-time architectures. The algorithm, while not randomized, is based on a probability distribution that leads the greedy choice. The algorithm has been specifically tailored to run on platforms with minimal computational hardware.     

Plate tectonic reconstructions with continuously closing plates

We present a new algorithm for modeling a self-consistent set of global plate polygons. Each plate polygon is composed of a finite list of plate margins, all with different Euler poles. We introduce a "continuously closed plate" (CCP), such that, as each margin moves independently, the plate polygon remains closed geometrically as a function of time. This method solves emerging needs in computational geodynamics to combine kinematic with dynamic models. Because they have polygons that are too widely spaced in time and have inconsistent motions between margins and plates, traditional global plate tectonic reconstructions have become inadequate for geodynamics. The CCP algorithm has been incorporated into the GPlates open-source paleogeographic system. The algorithm is a set of procedures and data structures that operate on collections of reconstructed geometric data to form closed plate polygons; the main data structures used for each plate polygon are based on a nested hierarchy of topological elements. Reconstructions with CCPs can be created, edited, visualized, and exported with GPlates. The native storage of the dynamic reconstructions is the GPlates Markup Language, GPML, which uses an XML-based file format called GML. We demonstrate the utility of the CCP method by creating a global reconstruction with continuously closing plates from 140 Ma to the present using data from existing, traditional reconstructions.     

Application placement in computer clustering in software as a service (SaaS) networks

One major service provided by cloud computing is Software as a Service (SaaS). As competition in the SaaS market intensifies, it becomes imperative for a SaaS provider to design and configure its computing system properly. This paper studies the application placement problem encountered in computer clustering in SaaS networks. This problem involves deciding which software applications to install on each computer cluster of the provider and how to assign customers to the clusters in order to minimize total cost. Given the complexity of the problem, we propose two algorithms to solve it. The first one is a probabilistic greedy algorithm which includes randomization and perturbation features to avoid getting trapped in a local optimum. The second algorithm is based on a reformulation of the problem where each cluster is to be assigned an application configuration from a properly generated subset of configurations. We conducted an extensive computational study using large data sets with up to 300 customers and 50 applications. The results show that both algorithms outperform a standard branch-and-bound procedure for problem instances with large sizes. The probabilistic greedy algorithm is shown to be the most efficient in solving the problem.     

基于敏感属性值语义桶分组的t-closeness隐私模型

t-closeness模型是数据发布领域中用于抵御相似性攻击和偏斜攻击的一种有效方法,但其采用的EMD(earth mover's distance)距离没有考虑等价类与数据表间敏感属性分布的稳定性,不能全面地衡量分布间距离,在分布间稳定差异过大时会大大提高隐私泄露的风险.针对这种局限,提出了一种SABuk t-closeness模型,它在传统t-closeness模型的基础上,为更加准确地度量分布间距离,以EMD距离与KL散度(kullback-leibler divergence)结合构建距离度量标准.同时,根据敏感属性的层次树结构,对数据表进行语义相似性桶分组划分,然后采用贪心思想生成满足要求的最小等价类,并且运用k-近邻的思想来选取QI(quasi-identifiers)值相似的元组生成等价类.实验结果表明,SABuk t-closeness模型在牺牲少量时间的前提下减少了信息损失,能在有效地保护敏感信息不泄露的同时保持较高的数据效用.     

基于改进迭代贪婪算法的预制构件调度研究

迭代贪婪算法是一种具有较强局部搜索能力的元启发式算法,但由于传统迭代贪婪算法搜索范围过大,搜索效率有限,为了进一步提升传统迭代贪婪算法的搜索能力,考虑到阈值接受算法具有能缩小搜索范围的特点,提出了一种改进的迭代贪婪算法解决流水车间预制生产的订单接受与调度问题。该改进算法是在破坏原调度序列后加入一种基于构造启发式规则的重建策略,并结合阈值接受算法的自适应接受准则用以跳出局部最优。经大量仿真实验结果显示,与传统迭代贪婪算法、禁忌搜索算法以及遗传算法对比,改进的迭代贪婪算法具有更好的求解质量和鲁棒性。     

Efficient greedy feature selection for unsupervised learning

Reducing the dimensionality of the data has been a challenging task in data mining and machine learning applications. In these applications, the existence of irrelevant and redundant features negatively affects the efficiency and effectiveness of different learning algorithms. Feature selection is one of the dimension reduction techniques, which has been used to allow a better understanding of data and improve the performance of other learning tasks. Although the selection of relevant features has been extensively studied in supervised learning, feature selection in the absence of class labels is still a challenging task. This paper proposes a novel method for unsupervised feature selection, which efficiently selects features in a greedy manner. The paper first defines an effective criterion for unsupervised feature selection that measures the reconstruction error of the data matrix based on the selected subset of features. The paper then presents a novel algorithm for greedily minimizing the reconstruction error based on the features selected so far. The greedy algorithm is based on an efficient recursive formula for calculating the reconstruction error. Experiments on real data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods for unsupervised feature selection.     

MTruths：Web信息多真值发现方法

Web已成为一个浩瀚的信息海洋,其信息分散在不同的数据源中.不同数据源常常为同一对象实体提供冲突的属性值.如何从这些冲突属性值中找到真值被称为真值发现问题.根据属性值数量可将对象属性分为单值属性和多值属性,现有的多数真值发现算法对单值属性的真值发现比较有效.针对多值属性的真值发现问题,提出了一个多真值发现方法MTruths,该方法将多真值发现问题转化为一个最优化问题,其目标是：各对象的真值与各数据源提供的观察值之间的相似性加权和达到最大.对象真值求解过程中,提出2种方法求真值列表的最优解：基于枚举的方法和贪心算法.与已有方法不同的是MTruths可以直接得到对象的多个真值.最后,通过图书和电影2个真实数据集上的实验表明,MTruths的2种实现方法的准确性以及贪心算法的效率优于现有真值发现方法.     

A GRASP based solution approach to solve cardinality constrained portfolio optimization problems

In the current work, a solution methodology which combines a meta-heuristic algorithm with an exact solution approach is presented to solve cardinality constrained portfolio optimization (CCPO) problem. The proposed method is comprised of two levels, namely, stock selection and proportion determination. In stock selection level, a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) is developed. Once the stocks are selected the problem reduces to a quadratic programming problem. As GRASP ensures cardinality constraints by selecting predetermined number of stocks and quadratic programming model ensures the remaining problem constraints, no further constraint handling procedures are required. On the other hand, as the problem is decomposed into two sub-problems, total computational burden on the algorithm is considerably reduced. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by using benchmark data sets available in the OR Library. Computational results reveal that the proposed algorithm is competitive with the state of the art algorithms in the related literature.     

Overlapping correlation clustering

We introduce a new approach for finding overlapping clusters given pairwise similarities of objects. In particular, we relax the problem of correlation clustering by allowing an object to be assigned to more than one cluster. At the core of our approach is an optimization problem in which each data point is mapped to a small set of labels, representing membership in different clusters. The objective is to find a mapping so that the given similarities between objects agree as much as possible with similarities taken over their label sets. The number of labels can vary across objects. To define a similarity between label sets, we consider two measures: (i) a 0–1 function indicating whether the two label sets have non-zero intersection and (ii) the Jaccard coefficient between the two label sets. The algorithm we propose is an iterative local-search method. The definitions of label set similarity give rise to two non-trivial optimization problems, which, for the measures of set-intersection and Jaccard, we solve using a greedy strategy and non-negative least squares, respectively. We also develop a distributed version of our algorithm based on the BSP model and implement it using a Pregel framework. Our algorithm uses as input pairwise similarities of objects and can thus be applied when clustering structured objects for which feature vectors are not available. As a proof of concept, we apply our algorithms on three different and complex application domains: trajectories, amino-acid sequences, and textual documents.     

系数增强最小二乘回归子空间聚类法

针对最小二乘回归子空间聚类法在求解表示系数时忽略了样本相似度的不足,提出改进方法。基于样本相互重构的表示系数矩阵和样本相似度矩阵有很大的关联定义系数增强项,求解可以保持样本相似度的表示系数矩阵,提出系数增强最小二乘回归子空间聚类法。在8个标准数据集上的实验表明该方法可以提高最小二乘回归子空间聚类法的聚类性能。     

在重构相空间选取样本的时间序列分形预测

提出一种基于相空间重构原理进行样本选取的改进分形预测算法。该算法将时间序列在相空间重构中得到的嵌入维数和时间延迟作为分形预测中数据样本的选择依据,结合分形理论的拼贴定理和插值迭代算法,实现时间序列的分形预测,建立时间序列的分形预测模型。利用此改进算法对低压电力线噪声序列进行预测的结果表明,与现有分形算法相比,改进算法提高了数据样本间的相似度,优化了数据样本的选取,明显提高了预测的精度,适合于对自相似性和周期性不明确的时间序列的预测。     

A new hybrid algorithm for the balanced transportation problem

We propose a heuristic-exact hybrid algorithm that consists of a heuristic phase, based on two novel heuristics, followed by an exact phase, based on an adapted Ford–Fulkerson algorithm, to solve the Balanced Transportation Problem (BTP). First, we propose three alternative primal models for the BTP. We also define the concepts of negative sets, negative dual rectangles, and the optimal tableau for the BTP. Next, we explore the relationships between these concepts. We also propose two greedy heuristics, based on a linear programming relaxation of the BTP model, to find some negative sets and negative dual rectangles. These two heuristics turn out to be very efficient and obtain optimal or near-optimal BTP tableaus rapidly, as confirmed by the computational experiments. Then, an adapted Ford–Fulkerson algorithm is presented and used to find an optimal solution. The two important advantages of our adapted Ford–Fulkerson algorithm over the standard Ford–Fulkerson algorithm are more flexibility and efficiency. Extensive computational results show that the growth in run-time of our hybrid algorithm, on average, is approximately a linear function of the BTP size. It has significant advantage over the transportation simplex method and on the largest problem instances it is almost five times faster. A key feature of the proposed algorithm is that it is free of degeneracy and cycling altogether.     

大规模突发事件应急设施选址模型及算法

大规模突发事件下应急物资的需求量巨大以及对资源持续需求的特点,考虑设施选址的公平性、效率性及成本等因素,基于多级覆盖和覆盖衰减思想,提出一类应急设施多目标多重覆盖衰减选址模型。基于MATLAB7.0设计贪婪算法、上升算法、遗传算法程序对模型进行求解,以25组不同规模的算例验证了模型的性能和算法的有效性。数值模拟结果表明,该模型较之传统覆盖选址模型可以为需求点提供更高的覆盖满意度;当目标权系数取不同值时对选址结果产生较大影响;对三个算法性能进行比较,遗传算法最优,上升算法次之,贪婪算法最差,上升算法适于求解中小规模的选址问题,而遗传算法更适合于大规模选址问题的求解。     

The Virtue of Patience in Low-Complexity Scheduling of Packetized Media With Feedback

We consider streaming pre-encoded and packetized media over best-effort networks in the presence of acknowledgment feedbacks. We first review a rate-distortion (RD) optimization framework that can be employed in such scenarios. As part of the framework, a scheduling algorithm selects the data to send over the network at any given time, so as to minimize the end-to-end distortion, given an estimate of channel resources and a history of previous transmissions and received acknowledgements. In practice, a greedy scheduling strategy is often considered to limit the solution search space, and reduce the computational complexity associated to the RD optimization framework. Our work observes that popular greedy schedulers are strongly penalized by early retransmissions. Therefore, we propose a scheduling algorithm that avoids premature retransmissions, while preserving the low computational complexity aspect of the greedy paradigm. Such a scheduling strategy maintains close to optimal RD performance when adapting to network bandwidth fluctuations. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed patient greedy scheduler provides a reduction of up to 50% in transmission rate relative to conventional greedy approaches, and that it brings up to 2 dB of quality improvement in scheduling classical MPEG-based packet video streams     

Efficient greedy learning of gaussian mixture models

This article concerns the greedy learning of gaussian mixtures. In the greedy approach, mixture components are inserted into the mixture one after the other. We propose a heuristic for searching for the optimal component to insert. In a randomized manner, a set of candidate new components is generated. For each of these candidates, we find the locally optimal new component and insert it into the existing mixture. The resulting algorithm resolves the sensitivity to initialization of state-of-the-art methods, like expectation maximization, and has running time linear in the number of data points and quadratic in the (final) number of mixture components. Due to its greedy nature, the algorithm can be particularly useful when the optimal number of mixture components is unknown. Experimental results comparing the proposed algorithm to other methods on density estimation and texture segmentation are provided.     

Self-organization of pulse-coupled oscillators with application toclustering

We introduce an efficient synchronization model that organizes a population of integrate-and-fire oscillators into stable and structured groups. Each oscillator fires synchronously with all the others within its group, but the groups themselves fire with a constant phase difference. The structure of the synchronized groups depends on the choice of the coupling function. We show that by defining the interaction between oscillators according to the relative distance between them, our model can be used as a general clustering algorithm. Unlike existing models, our model incorporates techniques from relational and prototype-based clustering methods and results in a clustering algorithm that is simple, efficient, robust, unbiased by the size of the clusters, and that can find an arbitrary number of clusters. In addition to helping the model self-organize into stable groups, the synergy between clustering and synchronization reduces the computational complexity significantly. The resulting clustering algorithm has several advantages over conventional clustering techniques. In particular, it can generate a nested sequence of partitions and it can determine the optimum number of clusters in an efficient manner. Moreover, since our approach does not involve optimizing an objective function, it is not sensitive to initialization and it can incorporate nonmetric similarity measures. We illustrate the performance of our algorithms with several synthetic and real data sets     

A high speed 1000 fps CMOS image sensor with low noise global shutter pixels

A low read noise 8T global shutter pixel for high speed CMOS image sensor is proposed in this paper.The pixel has a pixel level sample-and-hold circuit and an in-pixel amplifier whose gain is larger than one.Using pixel level sample-and-hold circuit,the KTC noise on FD node can be effectively cancelled by correlated double sampling operation.The in-pixel amplifier with a gain larger than one is employed for reducing the pixel level sample-and-hold capacitors thermal noise and their geometric size.A high speed 1000 fps 256×256 CMOS image sensor based on the pixel is implemented in 0.18μm CMOS process.The chip active area is 5 mm×7 mm with a pixel size of 14μm×14μm.The developed sensor achieves a read noise level as low as 14.8e-while attaining a high fill factor of 40%.The full well capacity can contain 30840e-and the resulting signal dynamic range is 66 dB.