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

Theory of fuzzy integrals and its applications

https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/13152/4/Fulltext.pdf

Critical analysis of Big Data challenges and analytical methods

Toward the development of a big data analytics capability

Big Data has emerged in the past few years as a new paradigm providing abundant data and opportunities to improve and/or enable research and decision-support applications with unprecedented value for digital earth applications including business, sciences and engineering. At the same time, Big Data presents challenges for digital earth to store, transport, process, mine and serve the data. Cloud computing provides fundamental support to address the challenges with shared computing resources including computing, storage, networking and analytical software; the application of these resources has fostered impressive Big Data advancements. This paper surveys the two frontiers – Big Data and cloud computing – and reviews the advantages and consequences of utilizing cloud computing to tackling Big Data in the digital earth and relevant science domains. From the aspects of a general introduction, sources, challenges, technology status and research opportunities, the following observations are offered: (i...

https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17538947.2016.1239771

Big Data and cloud computing: innovation opportunities and challenges

There is a trend that, virtually everyone, ranging from big Web companies to traditional enterprisers to physical science researchers to social scientists, is either already experiencing or anticipating unprecedented growth in the amount of data available in their world, as well as new opportunities and great untapped value. This paper reviews big data challenges from a data management respective. In particular, we discuss big data diversity, big data reduction, big data integration and cleaning, big data indexing and query, and finally big data analysis and mining. Our survey gives a brief overview about big-data-oriented research and problems.

Big data challenge: a data management perspective

Learning fuzzy rules from fuzzy samples based on rough set technique

The fuzzy rough set (FRS) model has been introduced to handle databases with real values. However, FRS was sensitive to misclassification and perturbation (here misclassification means error or missing values in classification, and perturbation means small changes of numerical data). The variable precision rough sets (VPRSs) model was introduced to handle databases with misclassification. However, it could not effectively handle the real-valued datasets. Now, it is valuable from theoretical and practical aspects to combine FRS and VPRS so that a powerful tool, which not only can handle numerical data but also is less sensitive to misclassification and perturbation, can be developed. In this paper, we set up a model named fuzzy VPRSs (FVPRSs) by combining FRS and VPRS with the goal of making FRS a special case. First, we study the knowledge representation ways of FRS and VPRS, and then, propose the set approximation operators of FVPRS. Second, we employ the discernibility matrix approach to investigate the structure of attribute reductions in FVPRS and develop an algorithm to find all reductions. Third, in order to overcome the NP-complete problem of finding all reductions, we develop some fast heuristic algorithms to obtain one near-optimal attribute reduction. Finally, we compare FVPRS with RS, FRS, and several flexible RS-based approaches with respect to misclassification and perturbation. The experimental comparisons show the feasibility and effectiveness of FVPRS.

The Model of Fuzzy Variable Precision Rough Sets

Attribute reduction is one of the most meaningful research topics in the existing fuzzy rough sets, and the approach of discernibility matrix is the mathematical foundation of computing reducts. When computing reducts with discernibility matrix, we find that only the minimal elements in a discernibility matrix are sufficient and necessary. This fact motivates our idea in this paper to develop a novel algorithm to find reducts that are based on the minimal elements in the discernibility matrix. Relative discernibility relations of conditional attributes are defined and minimal elements in the fuzzy discernibility matrix are characterized by the relative discernibility relations. Then, the algorithms to compute minimal elements and reducts are developed in the framework of fuzzy rough sets. Experimental comparison shows that the proposed algorithms are effective.

A Novel Algorithm for Finding Reducts With Fuzzy Rough Sets

The fuzzy-rough set (FRS) methodology, as a useful tool to handle discernibility and fuzziness, has been widely studied. Some researchers studied on the rough approximation of fuzzy sets, while some others focused on studying one application of FRS: attribute reduction (i.e., feature selection). However, constructing classifier by using FRS, as another application of FRS, has been less studied. In this paper, we build a rule-based classifier by using one generalized FRS model after proposing a new concept named as ?consistence degree? which is used as the critical value to keep the discernibility information invariant in the processing of rule induction. First, we generalized the existing FRS to a robust model with respect to misclassification and perturbation by incorporating one controlled threshold into knowledge representation of FRS. Second, we propose a concept named as ?consistence degree? and by the strict mathematical reasoning, we show that this concept is reasonable as a critical value to reduce redundant attribute values in database. By employing this concept, we then design a discernibility vector to develop the algorithms of rule induction. The induced rule set can function as a classifier. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed rule-based classifier is feasible and effective on noisy data.

Suyun Zhao

Papers

Big data challenge: a data management perspective

Learning fuzzy rules from fuzzy samples based on rough set technique

The Model of Fuzzy Variable Precision Rough Sets

A Novel Algorithm for Finding Reducts With Fuzzy Rough Sets

Building a Rule-Based Classifier—A Fuzzy-Rough Set Approach