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    Similarity of feature selection methods: An empirical study across data intensive classification tasks

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    In the past two decades, the dimensionality of datasets involved in machine learning and data mining applications has increased explosively. Therefore, feature selection has become a necessary step to make the analysis more manageable and to extract useful knowledge about a given domain. A large variety of feature selection techniques are available in literature, and their comparative analysis is a very difficult task. So far, few studies have investigated, from a theoretical and/or experimental point of view, the degree of similarity/dissimilarity among the available techniques, namely the extent to which they tend to produce similar results within specific application contexts. This kind of similarity analysis is of crucial importance when two or more methods are combined in an ensemble fashion: indeed the ensemble paradigm is beneficial only if the involved methods are capable of giving different and complementary representations of the considered domain. This paper gives a contribution in this direction by proposing an empirical approach to evaluate the degree of consistency among the outputs of different selection algorithms in the context of high dimensional classification tasks. Leveraging on a proper similarity index, we systematically compared the feature subsets selected by eight popular selection methods, representatives of different selection approaches, and derived a similarity trend for feature subsets of increasing size. Through an extensive experimentation involving sixteen datasets from three challenging domains (Internet advertisements, text categorization and micro-array data classification), we obtained useful insight into the pattern of agreement of the considered methods. In particular, our results revealed how multivariate selection approaches systematically produce feature subsets that overlap to a small extent with those selected by the other methods

    Smart spaces for adaptive information integration in bioinformatics

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    Bioinformatics is reaping the benefits of advances in Semantic Web technology thanks to the growing number of available biomedical web resources and portals. Although positive in general, this abundance poses practical challenges to researchers who must be skilled in techniques for retrieving and integrating sparse and complex contents, and thereof calls for more “intelligent” and user friendly ways of interaction to easily get information. With the aim of making available the intelligent functionality of smart systems, this paper presents SSAIIB (Smart Spaces for Adaptive Information Integration in Bioinformatics), a reference framework for designing bioinformatics smart applications that support discovering, aggregating and delivering contents from web resources according to user’s goals, tasks and concerns. The “Smart Spaces” are software environments whose smartness lies in their ability to adaptively accomplish specific user’s activities such as the exploiting content from biomedical resources, integrating data captured from different sources, supporting data analytics, etc. SSAIIB is structured around two main technologies: service oriented architectures and software agents. In particular, it relies on mechanisms for dynamically assembling suitable services and the use of agents as a natural metaphor for both modelling user’s activities and accessing web resources. A case study is presented that shows the application of SSAIIB to the design and the implementation of a smart space for annotating biomedical texts

    An Evolutionary Method for Combining Different Feature Selection Criteria in Microarray Data Classification

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    The classification of cancers from gene expression profiles is a challenging research area in bioinformatics since the high dimensionality of micro-array data results in irrelevant and redundant information that affects the performance of classification. This paper proposes using an evolutionary algorithm to select relevant gene subsets in order to further use them for the classification task. This is achieved by combining valuable results from different feature ranking methods into feature pools whose dimensionality is reduced by a wrapper approach involving a genetic algorithm and SVM classifier. Specifically, the GA explores the space defined by each feature pool looking for solutions that balance the size of the feature subsets and their classification accuracy. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method provide good results in comparison to different state of art methods for the classification of micro-array data

    A Framework for the Modular Composition of Learning Objects

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    This paper describes a framework to support the modular composition of learning objects for achieving educational goals. The presented approach involves two modeling spaces: the semantic space of educational concepts and the digital space of learning objects. The framework abstracts the parallel features of both spaces for modeling conceptual skeletons, called views, that encapsulate learning objects as well as knowledge on how they can be sequenced. Each view is linked to a concept of the semantic space and is featured by metadata. In order to achieve modularity, portability and extensibility, views are mapped into an XML Schema, based on which they can be systematically implemented and managed by intelligent agents
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