On-line scheduling of two parallel machines with a single server

In this paper, we consider the on-line scheduling of two parallel identical machines sharing a single server with the objective of minimizing the latest completion time of all jobs. Each job has to be setup by the server before being processed on one of the machines. Three special cases: equal length jobs, equal processing times and regular equal setup times are considered and the asymptotic competitive ratios of list scheduling are determined. Also, a lower bound for the equal length job case is given, and two heuristics with tight asymptotic competitive ratios for the other two cases are proposed.     

Bottleneck-based heuristics to minimize total tardiness for the flexible flow line with unrelated parallel machines

This paper considers the flexible flow line problem with unrelated parallel machines at each stage and with a bottleneck stage on the line. The objective of the problem is to minimize the total tardiness. Two bottleneck-based heuristics with three machine selection rules are proposed to solve the problem. The heuristics first develop an indicator to identify a bottleneck stage in the flow line, and then separate the flow line into the upstream stages, the bottleneck stage, and the downstream stages. The upstream stages are the stages ahead of the bottleneck stage and the downstream stages are the stages behind the bottleneck stage. A new approach is developed to find the arrival times of the jobs at the bottleneck stage. Using the new approach, the bottleneck-based heuristics develop two decision rules to iteratively schedule the jobs at the bottleneck stage, the upstream stages, and the downstream stages. In order to evaluate the performance of the bottleneck-based heuristics, seven commonly used dispatching rules and a basic tabu search algorithm are investigated for comparison purposes. Seven experimental factors are used to design 128 production scenarios, and ten test problems are generated for each scenario. Computational results show that the bottleneck-based heuristics significantly outperform all the dispatching rules for the test problems. Although the effective performance of the bottleneck-based heuristics is inferior to the basic tabu search algorithm, the bottleneck-based heuristics are much more efficient than the tabu search algorithm. Also, a test of the effect of the experimental factors on the dispatching rules, the bottleneck-based heuristics, and the basic tabu search algorithm is performed, and some interesting insights are discovered.     

Modeling wine preferences by data mining from physicochemical properties

We propose a data mining approach to predict human wine taste preferences that is based on easily available analytical tests at the certification step. A large dataset (when compared to other studies in this domain) is considered, with white and red vinho verde samples (from Portugal). Three regression techniques were applied, under a computationally efficient procedure that performs simultaneous variable and model selection. The support vector machine achieved promising results, outperforming the multiple regression and neural network methods. Such model is useful to support the oenologist wine tasting evaluations and improve wine production. Furthermore, similar techniques can help in target marketing by modeling consumer tastes from niche markets.     

The behaviour of the multi-layer perceptron and the support vector regression learning methods in the prediction of NO and NO2 concentrations in Szeged, Hungary

The main aim of this paper is to predict NO and NO₂ concentrations 4 days in advance by comparing two artificial intelligence learning methods, namely, multi-layer perceptron and support vector machines, on two kinds of spatial embedding of the temporal time series. Hourly values of NO and NO₂ concentrations, as well as meteorological variables were recorded in a cross-road monitoring station with heavy traffic in Szeged, in order to build a model for predicting NO and NO₂ concentrations several hours in advance. The prediction of NO and NO₂ concentrations was performed partly on the basis of their past values, and partly on the basis of temperature, humidity and wind speed data. Since NO can be predicted more accurately, its values were considered primarily when forecasting NO₂. Time series prediction can be interpreted in a way that is suitable for artificial intelligence learning. Two effective learning methods, namely, multi-layer perceptron and support vector regression are used to provide efficient non-linear models for NO and NO₂ time series predictions. Multi-layer perceptron is widely used to predict these time series, but support vector regression has not yet been applied for predicting NO and NO₂ concentrations. Three commonly used linear algorithms were considered as references: 1-day persistence, average of several day persistence and linear regression. Based on the good results of the average of several day persistence, a prediction scheme was introduced, which forms weighted averages instead of simple ones. The optimization of these weights was performed with linear regression in linear case and with the learning methods mentioned in non-linear case. Concerning the NO predictions, the non-linear learning methods give significantly better predictions than the reference linear methods. In the case of NO₂, the improvement of the prediction is considerable, however, it is less notable than for NO.     

Applying a novel decision rule to the sphere-structured support vector machines algorithm

The traditional sphere-structured support vector machines algorithm is one of the learning methods. It can partition the training samples space by means of constructing the spheres with the minimum volume covering all training samples of each pattern class in high-dimensional feature space. However, the decision rule of the traditional sphere-structured support vector machines cannot assign ambiguous sample points such as some encircled by more than two spheres to valid class labels. Therefore, the traditional sphere-structured support vector machines is insufficient for obtaining the better classification performance. In this article, we propose a novel decision rule applied to the traditional sphere-structured support vector machines. This new decision rule significantly improves the performance of labeling ambiguous points. Experimental results of seven real datasets show the traditional sphere-structured support vector machines based on this new decision rule can not only acquire the better classification accuracies than the traditional sphere-structured support vector machines but also achieve the comparable performance to the classical support vector machines. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Short-term fault prediction based on support vector machines with parameter optimization by evolution strategy

Support vector machines (SVMs) are the effective machine-learning methods based on the structural risk minimization (SRM) principle, which is an approach to minimize the upper bound risk functional related to the generalization performance. The parameter selection is an important factor that impacts the performance of SVMs. Evolution Strategy with Covariance Matrix Adaptation (CMA-ES) is an evolutionary optimization strategy, which is used to optimize the parameters of SVMs in this paper. Compared with the traditional SVMs, the optimal SVMs using CMA-ES have more accuracy in predicting the Lorenz signal. The industry case illustrates that the proposed method is very successfully in forecasting the short-term fault of large machinery.     

An intelligent fault diagnosis method based on wavelet packer analysis and hybrid support vector machines

In this paper, a new intelligent method for the fault diagnosis of the rotating machinery is proposed based on wavelet packet analysis (WPA) and hybrid support machine (hybrid SVM). In fault diagnosis for mechanical systems, information about stability and mutability can be further acquired through WPA from original signal. The faulty vibration signals obtained from a rotating machinery are decomposed by WPA via Dmeyer wavelet. A new multi-class fault diagnosis algorithm based on 1-v-r SVM approach is proposed and applied to rotating machinery. The extracted features are applied to hybrid SVM for estimating fault type. Compared to conventional back-propagation network (BPN), the superiority of the hybrid SVM method is shown in the success of fault diagnosis. The test results of hybrid SVM demonstrate that the applying of energy criterion to vibration signals after WPA is a very powerful and reliable method and hence estimating fault type on rotating machinery accurately and quickly.     

Least squares twin support vector machines for pattern classification

In this paper we formulate a least squares version of the recently proposed twin support vector machine (TSVM) for binary classification. This formulation leads to extremely simple and fast algorithm for generating binary classifiers based on two non-parallel hyperplanes. Here we attempt to solve two modified primal problems of TSVM, instead of two dual problems usually solved. We show that the solution of the two modified primal problems reduces to solving just two systems of linear equations as opposed to solving two quadratic programming problems along with two systems of linear equations in TSVM. Classification using nonlinear kernel also leads to systems of linear equations. Our experiments on publicly available datasets indicate that the proposed least squares TSVM has comparable classification accuracy to that of TSVM but with considerably lesser computational time. Since linear least squares TSVM can easily handle large datasets, we further went on to investigate its efficiency for text categorization applications. Computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method over linear proximal SVM on all the text corpuses considered.     

A study on the use of statistical tests for experimentation with neural networks: Analysis of parametric test conditions and non-parametric tests

In this paper, we focus on the experimental analysis on the performance in artificial neural networks with the use of statistical tests on the classification task. Particularly, we have studied whether the sample of results from multiple trials obtained by conventional artificial neural networks and support vector machines checks the necessary conditions for being analyzed through parametrical tests. The study is conducted by considering three possibilities on classification experiments: random variation in the selection of test data, the selection of training data and internal randomness in the learning algorithm.The results obtained state that the fulfillment of these conditions are problem-dependent and indefinite, which justifies the need of using non-parametric statistics in the experimental analysis.