Malek Alzaqebah

Bio: Malek Alzaqebah is an academic researcher from University of Dammam. The author has contributed to research in topics: Computer science & Population. The author has an hindex of 9, co-authored 20 publications receiving 260 citations. Previous affiliations of Malek Alzaqebah include Jadara University & National University of Malaysia.

Hybridizing relieff, mRMR filters and GA wrapper approaches for gene selection

Abstract: Gene expression data comprises a huge number of genes but have only few samples that can be used to address supervised classification problems. This paper is aimed at identifying a small set of genes, to efficiently distinguish various types of biological sample; hence we have proposed a three-stage of gene selection algorithm for genomic data. The proposed approach combines ReliefF, mRMR (Minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance) and GA (Genetic Algorithm) coded as (R-m-GA). In the first stage, the candidate gene set is identified by applying the ReliefF. While, the second minimizes the redundancy with the help of mRMR method, which facilitates the selection of effectual gene subset from the candidate set. In the third stage, GA with classifier (used as a fitness function by the GA) is applied to choose the most discriminating genes. The proposed method is validated on the tumor datasets such as: CNS, DLBCL and Prostate cancer, using IB1 classifier. The comparative analysis of the R-m-GA against GA and ReliefF-GA has revealed that the proposed method is capable of finding the smallest gene subset that offers the highest classification accuracy.

An adaptive artificial bee colony and late-acceptance hill-climbing algorithm for examination timetabling

Abstract: The artificial bee colony (ABC) is a population-based metaheuristic that mimics the foraging behaviour of honeybees in order to produce high-quality solutions for optimisation problems. The ABC algorithm combines both exploration and exploitation processes. In the exploration process, the worker bees are responsible for selecting a random solution and applying it to a random neighbourhood structure, while the onlooker bees are responsible for choosing a food source based on a selection strategy. In this paper, a disruptive selection strategy is applied within the ABC algorithm in order to improve the diversity of the population and prevent premature convergence in the evolutionary process. A self-adaptive strategy for selecting neighbourhood structures is added to further enhance the local intensification capability (adaptively choosing the neighbourhood structure helps the algorithm to escape local optima). Finally, a modified ABC algorithm is hybridised with a local search algorithm, i.e. the late-acceptance hill-climbing algorithm, to quickly descend to a good-quality solution. The experiments show that the ABC algorithm with the disruptive selection strategy outperforms the original ABC algorithm. The hybridised ABC algorithm also outperforms the lone ABC algorithm when tested on examination timetabling problems.

Modified artificial bee colony for the vehicle routing problems with time windows

Abstract: The natural behaviour of the honeybee has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years and several algorithms have been developed that mimic swarm behaviour to solve optimisation problems. This paper introduces an artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). A Modified ABC algorithm is proposed to improve the solution quality of the original ABC. The high exploration ability of the ABC slows-down its convergence speed, which may due to the mechanism used by scout bees in replacing abandoned (unimproved) solutions with new ones. In the Modified ABC a list of abandoned solutions is used by the scout bees to memorise the abandoned solutions, then the scout bees select a solution from the list based on roulette wheel selection and replace by a new solution with random routs selected from the best solution. The performance of the Modified ABC is evaluated on Solomon benchmark datasets and compared with the original ABC. The computational results demonstrate that the Modified ABC outperforms the original ABC also produce good solutions when compared with the best-known results in the literature. Computational investigations show that the proposed algorithm is a good and promising approach for the VRPTW.

Neighborhood search methods with Moth Optimization algorithm as a wrapper method for feature selection problems

Abstract: Feature selection methods are used to select a subset of features from data, therefore only the useful information can be mined from the samples to get better accuracy and improves the computational efficiency of the learning model. Moth-flam Optimization (MFO) algorithm is a population-based approach, that simulates the behavior of real moth in nature, one drawback of the MFO algorithm is that the solutions move toward the best solution, and it easily can be stuck in local optima as we investigated in this paper, therefore, we proposed a MFO Algorithm combined with a neighborhood search method for feature selection problems, in order to avoid the MFO algorithm getting trapped in a local optima, and helps in avoiding the premature convergence, the neighborhood search method is applied after a predefined number of unimproved iterations (the number of tries fail to improve the current solution). As a result, the proposed algorithm shows good performance when compared with the original MFO algorithm and with state-of-the-art approaches.

A comprehensive survey: artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm and applications

Abstract: Swarm intelligence (SI) is briefly defined as the collective behaviour of decentralized and self-organized swarms. The well known examples for these swarms are bird flocks, fish schools and the colony of social insects such as termites, ants and bees. In 1990s, especially two approaches based on ant colony and on fish schooling/bird flocking introduced have highly attracted the interest of researchers. Although the self-organization features are required by SI are strongly and clearly seen in honey bee colonies, unfortunately the researchers have recently started to be interested in the behaviour of these swarm systems to describe new intelligent approaches, especially from the beginning of 2000s. During a decade, several algorithms have been developed depending on different intelligent behaviours of honey bee swarms. Among those, artificial bee colony (ABC) is the one which has been most widely studied on and applied to solve the real world problems, so far. Day by day the number of researchers being interested in ABC algorithm increases rapidly. This work presents a comprehensive survey of the advances with ABC and its applications. It is hoped that this survey would be very beneficial for the researchers studying on SI, particularly ABC algorithm.

Supervised, Unsupervised, and Semi-Supervised Feature Selection: A Review on Gene Selection

Abstract: Recently, feature selection and dimensionality reduction have become fundamental tools for many data mining tasks, especially for processing high-dimensional data such as gene expression microarray data. Gene expression microarray data comprises up to hundreds of thousands of features with relatively small sample size. Because learning algorithms usually do not work well with this kind of data, a challenge to reduce the data dimensionality arises. A huge number of gene selection are applied to select a subset of relevant features for model construction and to seek for better cancer classification performance. This paper presents the basic taxonomy of feature selection, and also reviews the state-of-the-art gene selection methods by grouping the literatures into three categories: supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised. The comparison of experimental results on top 5 representative gene expression datasets indicates that the classification accuracy of unsupervised and semi-supervised feature selection is competitive with supervised feature selection.