Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

The Whale Optimization Algorithm

An overview of the self-organizing map algorithm, on which the papers in this issue are based, is presented in this article.

The Self-Organizing Map

Knowledge Management

This paper proposes an algorithm for optimization inspired by the imperialistic competition. Like other evolutionary ones, the proposed algorithm starts with an initial population. Population individuals called country are in two types: colonies and imperialists that all together form some empires. Imperialistic competition among these empires forms the basis of the proposed evolutionary algorithm. During this competition, weak empires collapse and powerful ones take possession of their colonies. Imperialistic competition hopefully converges to a state in which there exist only one empire and its colonies are in the same position and have the same cost as the imperialist. Applying the proposed algorithm to some of benchmark cost functions, shows its ability in dealing with different types of optimization problems.

Imperialist competitive algorithm: An algorithm for optimization inspired by imperialistic competition

A novel numerical optimization algorithm inspired from weed colonization

The conventional digital hardware computational blocks with different structures are designed to compute the precise results of the assigned calculations. The main contribution of our proposed Bio-inspired Imprecise Computational blocks (BICs) is that they are designed to provide an applicable estimation of the result instead of its precise value at a lower cost. These novel structures are more efficient in terms of area, speed, and power consumption with respect to their precise rivals. Complete descriptions of sample BIC adder and multiplier structures as well as their error behaviors and synthesis results are introduced in this paper. It is then shown that these BIC structures can be exploited to efficiently implement a three-layer face recognition neural network and the hardware defuzzification block of a fuzzy processor.

Bio-Inspired Imprecise Computational Blocks for Efficient VLSI Implementation of Soft-Computing Applications

Mutual information-based feature selection for intrusion detection systems

This paper investigates the application of immunity genetic algorithm (IGA) for the problem of optimal placement of phasor measurement units (PMUs) in an electric power network. The problem is to determine the placement sites of the minimal set of PMUs which makes the system observable. Incorporating immune operator in the canonical genetic algorithm (GA), on the condition of preserving GA's advantages, utilizes some characteristics and knowledge of the problems for restraining the degenerative phenomena during evolution, so as to improve the algorithm efficiency. This type of prior knowledge about some parts of optimal solution exists in the PMU placement problem. So, the IGA is adopted in this paper to solve the problem. Also, a new effect which is preventing from familial reproduction is studied which shows an increase in converging speed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified via IEEE standard systems and a realistic large-scale power system.

Caro Lucas

Papers

Imperialist competitive algorithm: An algorithm for optimization inspired by imperialistic competition

A novel numerical optimization algorithm inspired from weed colonization

Bio-Inspired Imprecise Computational Blocks for Efficient VLSI Implementation of Soft-Computing Applications

Mutual information-based feature selection for intrusion detection systems

Optimal Placement of Phasor Measurement Units Using Immunity Genetic Algorithm