Granular ball guided selector for attribute reduction

A cost-sensitive decision model for efficient pooled testing in mass surveillance of infectious diseases like COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed significant challenges on global health, emphasizing the persistent threat of large-scale infectious diseases in the future. This study addresses the need to enhance pooled testing efficiency for large populations. The common approach in pooled testing involves consolidating multiple test samples into a single tube to efficiently detect positivity at a lower cost. However, what is the optimal number of samples to be grouped together in order to minimize costs? i.e. allocating ten individuals per group may not be the most cost-effective strategy. In response, this paper introduces the hierarchical quotient space, an extension of fuzzy equivalence relations, as a method to optimize group allocations. In this study, we propose a cost-sensitive multi-granularity intelligent decision model to further minimize testing costs. This model considers both testing and collection costs, aiming to achieve the lowest total cost through optimal grouping at a single layer. Building upon this foundation, two multi-granularity models are proposed, exploring hierarchical group optimization. The experimental simulations were conducted using MATLAB R2022a on a desktop with Intel i5-10500 CPU and 8G RAM, considering scenarios with a fixed number of individuals and fixed positive probability. The main findings from our simulations demonstrate that the proposed models significantly enhance the efficiency and reduce the overall costs associated with pooled testing. For example, testing costs were reduced by nearly half when the optimal grouping strategy was applied, compared to the traditional method of grouping ten individuals. Additionally, the multi-granularity approach further optimized the hierarchical groupings, leading to substantial cost savings and improved testing efficiency.

An Ensemble Framework to Forest Optimization Based Reduct Searching

Essentially, the solution to an attribute reduction problem can be viewed as a reduct searching process. Currently, among various searching strategies, meta-heuristic searching has received extensive attention. As a new emerging meta-heuristic approach, the forest optimization algorithm (FOA) is introduced to the problem solving of attribute reduction in this study. To further improve the classification performance of selected attributes in reduct, an ensemble framework is also developed: firstly, multiple reducts are obtained by FOA and data perturbation, and the structure of those multiple reducts is symmetrical, which indicates that no order exists among those reducts; secondly, multiple reducts are used to execute voting classification over testing samples. Finally, comprehensive experiments on over 20 UCI datasets clearly validated the effectiveness of our framework: it is not only beneficial to output reducts with superior classification accuracies and classification stabilities but also suitable for data pre-processing with noise. This improvement work we have performed makes the FOA obtain better benefits in the data processing of life, health, medical and other fields.

Using Locality-Sensitive Hashing for SVM Classification of Large Data Sets

We propose a novel method using Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) for solving the optimization problem that arises in the training stage of support vector machines for large data sets, possibly in high dimensions. LSH was introduced as an efficient way to look for neighbors in high dimensional spaces. Random projections-based LSH functions create bins so that when great probability points belonging to the same bin are close, the points that are far will not be in the same bin. Based on these bins, it is not necessary to consider the whole original set but representatives in each one of them, thus reducing the effective size of the data set. A key of our proposal is that we work with the feature space and use only the projections to search for closeness in this space. Moreover, instead of choosing the projection directions at random, we sample a small subset and solve the associated SVM problem. Projections in this direction allows for a more precise sample in many cases and an approximation of the solution of the large problem is found in a fraction of the running time with small degradation of the classification error. We present two algorithms, theoretical support, and numerical experiments showing their performances on real life problems taken from the LIBSVM data base.