In this study, a novel promotive particle swarm optimizer with double hierarchical structures is proposed. It is inspired by successful mechanisms present in social and biological systems to make particles compete fairly. In the proposed method, the swarm is first divided into multiple independent subpopulations organized in a hierarchical promotion structure, which protects subpopulation at each hierarchy to search for the optima in parallel. A unidirectional communication strategy and a promotion operator are further implemented to allow excellent particles to be promoted from low-hierarchy subpopulations to high-hierarchy subpopulations. Furthermore, for the internal competition within each subpopulation of the hierarchical promotion structure, a hierarchical multiscale optimum controlled by a tiered architecture of particles is constructed for particles, in which each particle can synthesize a set of optima of its different scales. The hierarchical promotion structure can protect particles that just fly to promising regions and have low fitness from competing with the entire swarm. Also, the double hierarchical structures increase the diversity of searching. Numerical experiments and statistical analysis of results reported on 30 benchmark problems show that the proposed method improves the accuracy and convergence speed especially in solving complex problems when compared with several variations of particle swarm optimization.
The objective of this study is to develop and examine the performance of an image classification system using fuzzy c-means (FCM) on a large set of images represented by MPEG-7 low-level descriptors. This experimental data set consists of five different categories of images. In a series of experiments we considered 5 different categories of the MPEG-7 descriptors related to colors and textures of images. Prior to any clustering the original space was reduced using the standard principal component analysis (PCA). A series of carefully organized experiments has led to a number of interesting findings as to the suitability of fuzzy sets in the framework in image organization and description, insights into the structure of various categories and their interrelationship
Associative and bidirectional associative memories are examples of associative structures studied intensively in the literature. The underlying idea is to realize associative mapping so that the recall processes (one-directional and bidirectional ones) are realized with minimal recall errors. Associative and fuzzy associative memories have been studied in numerous areas yielding efficient applications for image recall and enhancements and fuzzy controllers, which can be regarded as one-directional associative memories. In this study, we revisit and augment the concept of associative memories by offering some new design insights where the corresponding mappings are realized on the basis of a related collection of landmarks (prototypes) over which an associative mapping becomes spanned. In light of the bidirectional character of mappings, we have developed an augmentation of the existing fuzzy clustering (fuzzy c-means, FCM) in the form of a so-called collaborative fuzzy clustering. Here, an interaction in the formation of prototypes is optimized so that the bidirectional recall errors can be minimized. Furthermore, we generalized the mapping into its granular version in which numeric prototypes that are formed through the clustering process are made granular so that the quality of the recall can be quantified. We propose several scenarios in which the allocation of information granularity is aimed at the optimization of the characteristics of recalled results (information granules) that are quantified in terms of coverage and specificity. We also introduce various architectural augmentations of the associative structures.
Fuzzy models are regarded as linguistic modeling structures with well-defined functional blocks of input and output interfaces along with a processing module. The paper examines the functions of these modules and specifies the relevant optimization tasks emerging in fuzzy system identification. Considering several distinct levels of conceptual memorization realized within the fuzzy models (subsequently resulting in establishing short-, medium-, and long-term memories), the corresponding learning policies are developed. The study includes also detailed simulation studies.
The study is concerned with the development of models of software cost estimation using the technology of fuzzy sets. We propose an augmentation of the well-known class of COCOMO cost estimation models by admitting a granular form of the estimates of the variables used there. Granular models of cost estimation are also introduced. The performance of the granular models is illustrated by a series of numerical experiments.
We develop a new approach to the design of neural networks, which utilizes a collaborative framework of knowledge-driven experience. In contrast to the "standard" way of developing neural networks, which explicitly exploits experimental data, this approach incorporates a mechanism of knowledge-driven experience. The essence of the proposed scheme of learning is to take advantage of the parameters (connections) of neural networks built in the past for the same phenomenon (which might also exhibit some variability over time or space) for which are interested to construct the network on a basis of currently available data. We establish a conceptual and algorithmic framework to reconcile these two essential sources of information (data and knowledge) in the process of the development of the network. To make a presentation more focused and come up with a detailed quantification of the resulting architecture, we concentrate on the experience-based design of radial basis function neural networks (RBFNNs). We introduce several performance indexes to quantify an effect of utilization of the knowledge residing within the connections of the networks and establish an optimal level of their use. Experimental results are presented for low-dimensional synthetic data and selected datasets available at the Machine Learning Repository.
