Evolutionary fuzzification of RIPPER for regression: Case study of stock prediction

Random forest swarm optimization-based for heart diseases diagnosis

Heart disease has been one of the leading causes of death worldwide in recent years. Among diagnostic methods for heart disease, angiography is one of the most common methods, but it is costly and has side effects. Given the difficulty of heart disease prediction, data mining can play an important role in predicting heart disease accurately. In this paper, by combining the multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) and Random Forest, a new approach is proposed to predict heart disease. The main goal is to produce diverse and accurate decision trees and determine the (near) optimal number of them simultaneously. In this method, an evolutionary multi-objective approach is used instead of employing a commonly used approach, i.e., bootstrap, feature selection in the Random Forest, and random number selection of training sets. By doing so, different training sets with different samples and features for training each tree are generated. Also, the obtained solutions in Pareto-optimal fronts determine the required number of training sets to build the random forest. By doing so, the random forest's performance can be enhanced, and consequently, the prediction accuracy will be improved. The proposed method's effectiveness is investigated by comparing its performance over six heart datasets with individual and ensemble classifiers. The results suggest that the proposed method with the (near) optimal number of classifiers outperforms the random forest algorithm with different classifiers.

Stock prediction and mutual fund portfolio management using curve fitting techniques

Investment in the share market helps generate more profit than the other financial instruments but has the threat of market risk that might lead to a high loss. This risk factor refrains many potential investors from investing in the share market directly. Instead, they invest in different mutual funds that are being managed by experienced portfolio managers. To avoid the risk factors and increase the gain, they put the accumulated capital in multiple stocks. They need to perform many calculations and predictions to overcome the uncertainties and unpredictability and need to ensure higher gains to the investors of that mutual fund. In this research work initially, a data mining based approach employs a curve fitting/regression technique to forecast the individual stock price. Based on the above analysis, we propose a framework to diversify the investment of the capital fund. This method employs buy and hold strategy using both statistical features and basic domain knowledge of the share market. The proposed framework distributes the capital first, by distributing sector-wise, and then for each sector, investing company-wise, as a diversified approach among different stocks for higher return but maintaining lower risks. Experimental results show that the proposed framework performs well and generates a good yield compared to some benchmark and ranked mutual funds in the Indian stock market.

A Labeling Method for Financial Time Series Prediction Based on Trends

Time series prediction has been widely applied to the finance industry in applications such as stock market price and commodity price forecasting. Machine learning methods have been widely used in financial time series prediction in recent years. How to label financial time series data to determine the prediction accuracy of machine learning models and subsequently determine final investment returns is a hot topic. Existing labeling methods of financial time series mainly label data by comparing the current data with those of a short time period in the future. However, financial time series data are typically non-linear with obvious short-term randomness. Therefore, these labeling methods have not captured the continuous trend features of financial time series data, leading to a difference between their labeling results and real market trends. In this paper, a new labeling method called "continuous trend labeling" is proposed to address the above problem. In the feature preprocessing stage, this paper proposed a new method that can avoid the problem of look-ahead bias in traditional data standardization or normalization processes. Then, a detailed logical explanation was given, the definition of continuous trend labeling was proposed and also an automatic labeling algorithm was given to extract the continuous trend features of financial time series data. Experiments on the Shanghai Composite Index and Shenzhen Component Index and some stocks of China showed that our labeling method is a much better state-of-the-art labeling method in terms of classification accuracy and some other classification evaluation metrics. The results of the paper also proved that deep learning models such as LSTM and GRU are more suitable for dealing with the prediction of financial time series data.

Daily Water Level Prediction of Zrebar Lake (Iran): A Comparison between M5P, Random Forest, Random Tree and Reduced Error Pruning Trees Algorithms

Zrebar Lake is one of the largest freshwater lakes in Iran and it plays an important role in the ecosystem of the environment, while its desiccation has a negative impact on the surrounded ecosystem. Despite this, this lake provides an interesting recreation setting in terms of ecotourism. The prediction and forecasting of the water level of the lake through simple but practical methods can provide a reliable tool for future lake water resource management. In the present study, we predict the daily water level of Zrebar Lake in Iran through well-known decision tree-based algorithms, including the M5 pruned (M5P), random forest (RF), random tree (RT) and reduced error pruning tree (REPT). We used five different water input combinations to find the most effective one. For our modeling, we chose 70% of the dataset for training (from 2011 to 2015) and 30% for model evaluation (from 2015 to 2017). We evaluated the models’ performances using different quantitative (root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), coefficient of determination (R2), percent bias (PBIAS) and ratio of the root mean square error to the standard deviation of measured data (RSR)) and visual frameworks (Taylor diagram and box plot). Our results showed that water level with a one-day lag time had the highest effect on the result and, by increasing the lag time, its effect on the result was decreased. This result indicated that all the developed models had a good prediction capability, but the M5P model outperformed the others, followed by RF and RT equally and then REPT. Our results showed that these algorithms can predict water level accurately only with a one-day lag time in water level as an input and they are cost-effective tools for future predictions.

Classification of Guillain–Barré Syndrome Subtypes Using Sampling Techniques with Binary Approach

Guillain–Barré Syndrome (GBS) is an unusual disorder where the body’s immune system affects the peripheral nervous system. GBS has four main subtypes, whose treatments vary among them. Severe cases of GBS can be fatal. This work aimed to investigate whether balancing an original GBS dataset improves the predictive models created in a previous study. purpleBalancing a dataset is to pursue symmetry in the number of instances of each of the classes.The dataset includes 129 records of Mexican patients diagnosed with some subtype of GBS. We created 10 binary datasets from the original dataset. Then, we balanced these datasets using four different methods to undersample the majority class and one method to oversample the minority class. Finally, we used three classifiers with different approaches to creating predictive models. The results show that balancing the original dataset improves the previous predictive models. The goal of the predictive models is to identify the GBS subtypes applying Machine Learning algorithms. It is expected that specialists may use the model to have a complementary diagnostic using a reduced set of relevant features. Early identification of the subtype will allow starting with the appropriate treatment for patient recovery. This is a contribution to exploring the performance of balancing techniques with real data.