arXiv subjects

Iztok Fister

Publications and source records attributed to Iztok Fister.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Framework for identifying the equivalence between Nature-Inspired Metaheuristics

The domain of metaheuristic optimization has become vibrant due to a flood of new algorithms using a new nature-inspired metaphor but lacking clear methodological novelty. The Criticism behind the development of these algorithms has reached such an extent that the critics started to assert that all novel algorithms are only copies of already developed ones. In this study, we try to show that the situation is not so black and white. Therefore, we define a strong equivalence theorem for estimating the similarity between two nature-inspired metaheuristics, according to which two algorithms are equivalent if, and only if, the cosine similarity of their phenotypic and genotypic feature vectors, characterizing their behavior by searching for the optimal solutions, is above some threshold. On the theorem basis, a framework is developed for identifying the equivalence between nature-inspired metaheuristics. Extensive experimental work using the framework has shown that searching for conditions to achieve the high similarity of the more well-known nature-inspired metaheuristics is hard, or even not possible to achieve, in the limited computational environments.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2024

NiaAutoARM: Automated generation and evaluation of Association Rule Mining pipelines

The Numerical Association Rule Mining paradigm that includes concurrent dealing with numerical and categorical attributes is beneficial for discovering associations from datasets consisting of both features. The process is not considered as easy since it incorporates several processing steps running sequentially that form an entire pipeline, e.g., preprocessing, algorithm selection, hyper-parameter optimization, and the definition of metrics evaluating the quality of the association rule. In this paper, we proposed a novel Automated Machine Learning method, NiaAutoARM, for constructing the full association rule mining pipelines based on stochastic population-based meta-heuristics automatically. Along with the theoretical representation of the proposed method, we also present a comprehensive experimental evaluation of the proposed method.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2024

Digital twins in sport: Concepts, Taxonomies, Challenges and Practical Potentials

Digital twins belong to ten of the strategic technology trends according to the Gartner list from 2019, and have encountered a big expansion, especially with the introduction of Industry 4.0. Sport, on the other hand, has become a constant companion of the modern human suffering a lack of a healthy way of life. The application of digital twins in sport has brought dramatic changes not only in the domain of sport training, but also in managing athletes during competitions, searching for strategical solutions before and tactical solutions during the games by coaches. In this paper, the domain of digital twins in sport is reviewed based on papers which have emerged in this area. At first, the concept of a digital twin is discussed in general. Then, taxonomies of digital twins are appointed. According to these taxonomies, the collection of relevant papers is analyzed, and some real examples of digital twins are exposed. The review finishes with a discussion about how the digital twins affect changes in the modern sport disciplines, and what challenges and opportunities await the digital twins in the future.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Profiling the carbon footprint of performance bugs

Much debate nowadays is devoted to the impacts of modern information and communication technology on global carbon emissions. Green information and communication technology is a paradigm creating a sustainable and environmentally friendly computing field that tries to minimize the adverse effects on the environment. Green information and communication technology are under constant development nowadays. Thus, in this paper, we undertake the problem of performance bugs that, until recently, have never been studied so profoundly. We assume that inappropriate software implementations can have a crucial influence on global carbon emissions. Here, we classify those performance bugs and develop inappropriate implementations of four programs written in C++. To mitigate these simulated performance bugs, measuring software and hardware methods that can estimate the increased carbon footprint properly were proposed.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Towards replicated algorithms

The main deficiency of the algorithms running on digital computers nowadays is their inability to change themselves during the execution. In line with this, the paper introduces the so-called replicated algorithms, inspired by the concept of developing a human brain. Similar to the human brain, where the process of thinking is strongly parallel, replicated algorithms, incorporated into a population, are also capable of replicating themselves and solving problems in parallel. They operate as a model for mapping the known input to a known output. In our preliminary study, these algorithms are built as sequences of arithmetic operators, applied for calculating arithmetic expressions, while their behavior showed that they can operate in the condition of open-ended evolution.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2023

A comprehensive review of visualization methods for association rule mining: Taxonomy, Challenges, Open problems and Future ideas

Association rule mining is intended for searching for the relationships between attributes in transaction databases. The whole process of rule discovery is very complex, and involves pre-processing techniques, a rule mining step, and post-processing, in which visualization is carried out. Visualization of discovered association rules is an essential step within the whole association rule mining pipeline, to enhance the understanding of users on the results of rule mining. Several association rule mining and visualization methods have been developed during the past decades. This review paper aims to create a literature review, identify the main techniques published in peer-reviewed literature, examine each method's main features, and present the main applications in the field. Defining the future steps of this research area is another goal of this review paper.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2022

Time series numerical association rule mining variants in smart agriculture

Numerical association rule mining offers a very efficient way of mining association rules, where algorithms can operate directly with categorical and numerical attributes. These methods are suitable for mining different transaction databases, where data are entered sequentially. However, little attention has been paid to the time series numerical association rule mining, which offers a new technique for extracting association rules from time series data. This paper presents a new algorithmic method for time series numerical association rule mining and its application in smart agriculture. We offer a concept of a hardware environment for monitoring plant parameters and a novel data mining method with practical experiments. The practical experiments showed the method's potential and opened the door for further extension.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2021

On deploying the Artificial Sport Trainer into practice

Computational Intelligence methods for automatic generation of sport training plans in individual sport disciplines have achieved a mature phase. In order to confirm their added value, they have been deployed into practice. As a result, several methods have been developed for generating well formulated training plans on computers automatically that, typically, depend on the collection of past sport activities. However, monitoring the realization of the performed training sessions still represents a bottleneck in automating the process of sport training as a whole. The objective of this paper is to present a new low-cost and efficient embedded device for monitoring the realization of sport training sessions that is dedicated to monitor cycling training sessions. We designed and developed a new bike computer, i.e. the AST-Monitor, that can be mounted easily on almost every bicycle. The aforementioned bike computer is based on the Raspberry Pi device that supports different external sensors for capturing the data during the realization of sport training sessions. An adjusted GUI tailored to the needs of athletes is developed, along with the hardware. The proof of concept study, using the AST-Monitor in practice, revealed the potential of the proposed solution for monitoring of realized sport training sessions automatically. The new device also opens the door for the future utilization of Artificial Intelligence in a wide variety of sports.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

Information cartography in association rule mining

Association Rule Mining is a machine learning method for discovering the interesting relations between the attributes in a huge transaction database. Typically, algorithms for Association Rule Mining generate a huge number of association rules, from which it is hard to extract structured knowledge and present this automatically in a form that would be suitable for the user. Recently, an information cartography has been proposed for creating structured summaries of information and visualizing with methodology called "metro maps". This was applied to several problem domains, where pattern mining was necessary. The aim of this study is to develop a method for automatic creation of metro maps of information obtained by Association Rule Mining and, thus, spread its applicability to the other machine learning methods. Although the proposed method consists of multiple steps, its core presents metro map construction that is defined in the study as an optimization problem, which is solved using an evolutionary algorithm. Finally, this was applied to four well-known UCI Machine Learning datasets and one sport dataset. Visualizing the resulted metro maps not only justifies that this is a suitable tool for presenting structured knowledge hidden in data, but also that they can tell stories to users.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2020

A brief overview of swarm intelligence-based algorithms for numerical association rule mining

Numerical Association Rule Mining is a popular variant of Association Rule Mining, where numerical attributes are handled without discretization. This means that the algorithms for dealing with this problem can operate directly, not only with categorical, but also with numerical attributes. Until recently, a big portion of these algorithms were based on a stochastic nature-inspired population-based paradigm. As a result, evolutionary and swarm intelligence-based algorithms showed big efficiency for dealing with the problem. In line with this, the main mission of this chapter is to make a historical overview of swarm intelligence-based algorithms for Numerical Association Rule Mining, as well as to present the main features of these algorithms for the observed problem. A taxonomy of the algorithms was proposed on the basis of the applied features found in this overview. Challenges, waiting in the future, finish this paper.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2020

uARMSolver: A framework for Association Rule Mining

The paper presents a novel software framework for Association Rule Mining named uARMSolver. The framework is written fully in C++ and runs on all platforms. It allows users to preprocess their data in a transaction database, to make discretization of data, to search for association rules and to guide a presentation/visualization of the best rules found using external tools. As opposed to the existing software packages or frameworks, this also supports numerical and real-valued types of attributes besides the categorical ones. Mining the association rules is defined as an optimization and solved using the nature-inspired algorithms that can be incorporated easily. Because the algorithms normally discover a huge amount of association rules, the framework enables a modular inclusion of so-called visual guiders for extracting the knowledge hidden in data, and visualize these using external tools.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2020

Association rules over time

Decisions made nowadays by Artificial Intelligence powered systems are usually hard for users to understand. One of the more important issues faced by developers is exposed as how to create more explainable Machine Learning models. In line with this, more explainable techniques need to be developed, where visual explanation also plays a more important role. This technique could also be applied successfully for explaining the results of Association Rule Mining.This Chapter focuses on two issues: (1) How to discover the relevant association rules, and (2) How to express relations between more attributes visually. For the solution of the first issue, the proposed method uses Differential Evolution, while Sankey diagrams are adopted to solve the second one. This method was applied to a transaction database containing data generated by an amateur cyclist in past seasons, using a mobile device worn during the realization of training sessions that is divided into four time periods. The results of visualization showed that a trend in improving performance of an athlete can be indicated by changing the attributes appearing in the selected association rules in different time periods.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2020

Discovering associations in COVID-19 related research papers

A COVID-19 pandemic has already proven itself to be a global challenge. It proves how vulnerable humanity can be. It has also mobilized researchers from different sciences and different countries in the search for a way to fight this potentially fatal disease. In line with this, our study analyses the abstracts of papers related to COVID-19 and coronavirus-related-research using association rule text mining in order to find the most interestingness words, on the one hand, and relationships between them on the other. Then, a method, called information cartography, was applied for extracting structured knowledge from a huge amount of association rules. On the basis of these methods, the purpose of our study was to show how researchers have responded in similar epidemic/pandemic situations throughout history.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Population-based metaheuristics for Association Rule Text Mining

Nowadays, the majority of data on the Internet is held in an unstructured format, like websites and e-mails. The importance of analyzing these data has been growing day by day. Similar to data mining on structured data, text mining methods for handling unstructured data have also received increasing attention from the research community. The paper deals with the problem of Association Rule Text Mining. To solve the problem, the PSO-ARTM method was proposed, that consists of three steps: Text preprocessing, Association Rule Text Mining using population-based metaheuristics, and text postprocessing. The method was applied to a transaction database obtained from professional triathlon athletes' blogs and news posted on their websites. The obtained results reveal that the proposed method is suitable for Association Rule Text Mining and, therefore, offers a promising way for further development.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2017

Modeling preference time in middle distance triathlons

Modeling preference time in triathlons means predicting the intermediate times of particular sports disciplines by a given overall finish time in a specific triathlon course for the athlete with the known personal best result. This is a hard task for athletes and sport trainers due to a lot of different factors that need to be taken into account, e.g., athlete's abilities, health, mental preparations and even their current sports form. So far, this process was calculated manually without any specific software tools or using the artificial intelligence. This paper presents the new solution for modeling preference time in middle distance triathlons based on particle swarm optimization algorithm and archive of existing sports results. Initial results are presented, which suggest the usefulness of proposed approach, while remarks for future improvements and use are also emphasized.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2017

Making up for the deficit in a marathon run

To predict the final result of an athlete in a marathon run thoroughly is the eternal desire of each trainer. Usually, the achieved result is weaker than the predicted one due to the objective (e.g., environmental conditions) as well as subjective factors (e.g., athlete's malaise). Therefore, making up for the deficit between predicted and achieved results is the main ingredient of the analysis performed by trainers after the competition. In the analysis, they search for parts of a marathon course where the athlete lost time. This paper proposes an automatic making up for the deficit by using a Differential Evolution algorithm. In this case study, the results that were obtained by a wearable sports-watch by an athlete in a real marathon are analyzed. The first experiments with Differential Evolution show the possibility of using this method in the future.

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arXiv2013

A comprehensive review of firefly algorithms

The firefly algorithm has become an increasingly important tool of Swarm Intelligence that has been applied in almost all areas of optimization, as well as engineering practice. Many problems from various areas have been successfully solved using the firefly algorithm and its variants. In order to use the algorithm to solve diverse problems, the original firefly algorithm needs to be modified or hybridized. This paper carries out a comprehensive review of this living and evolving discipline of Swarm Intelligence, in order to show that the firefly algorithm could be applied to every problem arising in practice. On the other hand, it encourages new researchers and algorithm developers to use this simple and yet very efficient algorithm for problem solving. It often guarantees that the obtained results will meet the expectations.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2013

A Brief Review of Nature-Inspired Algorithms for Optimization

Swarm intelligence and bio-inspired algorithms form a hot topic in the developments of new algorithms inspired by nature. These nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms can be based on swarm intelligence, biological systems, physical and chemical systems. Therefore, these algorithms can be called swarm-intelligence-based, bio-inspired, physics-based and chemistry-based, depending on the sources of inspiration. Though not all of them are efficient, a few algorithms have proved to be very efficient and thus have become popular tools for solving real-world problems. Some algorithms are insufficiently studied. The purpose of this review is to present a relatively comprehensive list of all the algorithms in the literature, so as to inspire further research.

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