Combining Learning and Optimisation

A special issue of Computers (ISSN 2073-431X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 December 2015) | Viewed by 9223

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
Interests: high dimensional data mining; large scale black-box optimisation; dimensionality reduction; random projections; statistical machine learning; probabilistic modelling

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Machine Learning and Optimisation are workhorses for computational intelligence techniques and data science. In fact, optimisation is key in many machine learning and data mining algorithms; at the same time optimisation methods that incorporate some form of learning strategy have an added level of sophistication, and consequently an increased ability to explore large search spaces efficiently. Finding new ways to combine learning with optimisation has tremendous potential towards providing powerful new methods, capable of solving larger and more complex problems than it was possible to do previously.

This Special Issue aims at publishing original research on new synergies between optimisation and machine learning. Both theoretical analyses and real world applications are encouraged.

Examples of topics include:
- Model building optimisation algorithms, estimation of distribution algorithms
- Learning surrogate functions for optimisation
- Efficient optimisation algorithms for solving complex machine learning tasks
- Dimensionality reduction for large scale learning and optimisation
- Compressive representations and randomisation for large scale problems
- Theoretical results and performance analyses of hybridised methods
- New hybrid algorithms
- Practical systems and real world applications of hybrid optimisation and machine learning methods

Dr Ata Kaban
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Computers is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • machine learning
  • data mining
  • optimisation
  • global optimisation heuristics
  • large scale problems
  • high dimensional problems
  • hybrid algorithms

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

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Article
Learning Dispatching Rules for Scheduling: A Synergistic View Comprising Decision Trees, Tabu Search and Simulation
by Atif Shahzad and Nasser Mebarki
Computers 2016, 5(1), 3; https://doi.org/10.3390/computers5010003 - 17 Feb 2016
Cited by 33 | Viewed by 8867
Abstract
A promising approach for an effective shop scheduling that synergizes the benefits of the combinatorial optimization, supervised learning and discrete-event simulation is presented. Though dispatching rules are in widely used by shop scheduling practitioners, only ordinary performance rules are known; hence, dynamic generation [...] Read more.
A promising approach for an effective shop scheduling that synergizes the benefits of the combinatorial optimization, supervised learning and discrete-event simulation is presented. Though dispatching rules are in widely used by shop scheduling practitioners, only ordinary performance rules are known; hence, dynamic generation of dispatching rules is desired to make them more effective in changing shop conditions. Meta-heuristics are able to perform quite well and carry more knowledge of the problem domain, however at the cost of prohibitive computational effort in real-time. The primary purpose of this research lies in an offline extraction of this domain knowledge using decision trees to generate simple if-then rules that subsequently act as dispatching rules for scheduling in an online manner. We used similarity index to identify parametric and structural similarity in problem instances in order to implicitly support the learning algorithm for effective rule generation and quality index for relative ranking of the dispatching decisions. Maximum lateness is used as the scheduling objective in a job shop scheduling environment. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Combining Learning and Optimisation)
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