This book presents recent machine learning paradigms and advances in learning analytics, an emerging research discipline concerned with the collection, advanced processing, and extraction of useful information from both educators’ and learners’ data with the goal of improving education and learning systems. In this context, internationally respected researchers present various aspects of learning analytics and selected application areas, including: • Using learning analytics to measure student engagement, to quantify the learning experience and to facilitate self-regulation; • Using learning analytics to predict student performance; • Using learning analytics to create learning materials and educational courses; and • Using learning analytics as a tool to support learners and educators in synchronous and asynchronous eLearning. The book offers a valuable asset for professors, researchers, scientists, engineers and students of all disciplines. Extensive bibliographies at the end of each chapter guide readers to probe further into their application areas of interest.
Introduces machine learning and its algorithmic paradigms, explaining the principles behind automated learning approaches and the considerations underlying their usage.
The book focuses on machine learning. Divided into three parts, the first part discusses the feature selection problem. The second part then describes the application of machine learning in the classification problem, while the third part presents an overview of real-world applications of swarm-based optimization algorithms. The concept of machine learning (ML) is not new in the field of computing. However, due to the ever-changing nature of requirements in today’s world it has emerged in the form of completely new avatars. Now everyone is talking about ML-based solution strategies for a given problem set. The book includes research articles and expository papers on the theory and algorithms of machine learning and bio-inspiring optimization, as well as papers on numerical experiments and real-world applications.
This book introduces basic machine learning concepts and applications for a broad audience that includes students, faculty, and industry practitioners. We begin by describing how machine learning provides capabilities to computers and embedded systems to learn from data. A typical machine learning algorithm involves training, and generally the performance of a machine learning model improves with more training data. Deep learning is a sub-area of machine learning that involves extensive use of layers of artificial neural networks typically trained on massive amounts of data. Machine and deep learning methods are often used in contemporary data science tasks to address the growing data sets and detect, cluster, and classify data patterns. Although machine learning commercial interest has grown relatively recently, the roots of machine learning go back to decades ago. We note that nearly all organizations, including industry, government, defense, and health, are using machine learning to address a variety of needs and applications. The machine learning paradigms presented can be broadly divided into the following three categories: supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and semi-supervised learning. Supervised learning algorithms focus on learning a mapping function, and they are trained with supervision on labeled data. Supervised learning is further sub-divided into classification and regression algorithms. Unsupervised learning typically does not have access to ground truth, and often the goal is to learn or uncover the hidden pattern in the data. Through semi-supervised learning, one can effectively utilize a large volume of unlabeled data and a limited amount of labeled data to improve machine learning model performances. Deep learning and neural networks are also covered in this book. Deep neural networks have attracted a lot of interest during the last ten years due to the availability of graphics processing units (GPU) computational power, big data, and new software platforms. They have strong capabilities in terms of learning complex mapping functions for different types of data. We organize the book as follows. The book starts by introducing concepts in supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised learning. Several algorithms and their inner workings are presented within these three categories. We then continue with a brief introduction to artificial neural network algorithms and their properties. In addition, we cover an array of applications and provide extensive bibliography. The book ends with a summary of the key machine learning concepts.
This book presents machine learning models and algorithms to address big data classification problems. Existing machine learning techniques like the decision tree (a hierarchical approach), random forest (an ensemble hierarchical approach), and deep learning (a layered approach) are highly suitable for the system that can handle such problems. This book helps readers, especially students and newcomers to the field of big data and machine learning, to gain a quick understanding of the techniques and technologies; therefore, the theory, examples, and programs (Matlab and R) presented in this book have been simplified, hardcoded, repeated, or spaced for improvements. They provide vehicles to test and understand the complicated concepts of various topics in the field. It is expected that the readers adopt these programs to experiment with the examples, and then modify or write their own programs toward advancing their knowledge for solving more complex and challenging problems. The presentation format of this book focuses on simplicity, readability, and dependability so that both undergraduate and graduate students as well as new researchers, developers, and practitioners in this field can easily trust and grasp the concepts, and learn them effectively. It has been written to reduce the mathematical complexity and help the vast majority of readers to understand the topics and get interested in the field. This book consists of four parts, with the total of 14 chapters. The first part mainly focuses on the topics that are needed to help analyze and understand data and big data. The second part covers the topics that can explain the systems required for processing big data. The third part presents the topics required to understand and select machine learning techniques to classify big data. Finally, the fourth part concentrates on the topics that explain the scaling-up machine learning, an important solution for modern big data problems.
Sequential behavior is essential to intelligence in general and a fundamental part of human activities, ranging from reasoning to language, and from everyday skills to complex problem solving. Sequence learning is an important component of learning in many tasks and application fields: planning, reasoning, robotics natural language processing, speech recognition, adaptive control, time series prediction, financial engineering, DNA sequencing, and so on. This book presents coherently integrated chapters by leading authorities and assesses the state of the art in sequence learning by introducing essential models and algorithms and by examining a variety of applications. The book offers topical sections on sequence clustering and learning with Markov models, sequence prediction and recognition with neural networks, sequence discovery with symbolic methods, sequential decision making, biologically inspired sequence learning models.
This book presents studies involving algorithms in the machine learning paradigms. It discusses a variety of learning problems with diverse applications, including prediction, concept learning, explanation-based learning, case-based (exemplar-based) learning, statistical rule-based learning, feature extraction-based learning, optimization-based learning, quantum-inspired learning, multi-criteria-based learning and hybrid intelligence-based learning.
Lifelong Machine Learning, Second Edition is an introduction to an advanced machine learning paradigm that continuously learns by accumulating past knowledge that it then uses in future learning and problem solving. In contrast, the current dominant machine learning paradigm learns in isolation: given a training dataset, it runs a machine learning algorithm on the dataset to produce a model that is then used in its intended application. It makes no attempt to retain the learned knowledge and use it in subsequent learning. Unlike this isolated system, humans learn effectively with only a few examples precisely because our learning is very knowledge-driven: the knowledge learned in the past helps us learn new things with little data or effort. Lifelong learning aims to emulate this capability, because without it, an AI system cannot be considered truly intelligent. Research in lifelong learning has developed significantly in the relatively short time since the first edition of this book was published. The purpose of this second edition is to expand the definition of lifelong learning, update the content of several chapters, and add a new chapter about continual learning in deep neural networks—which has been actively researched over the past two or three years. A few chapters have also been reorganized to make each of them more coherent for the reader. Moreover, the authors want to propose a unified framework for the research area. Currently, there are several research topics in machine learning that are closely related to lifelong learning—most notably, multi-task learning, transfer learning, and meta-learning—because they also employ the idea of knowledge sharing and transfer. This book brings all these topics under one roof and discusses their similarities and differences. Its goal is to introduce this emerging machine learning paradigm and present a comprehensive survey and review of the important research results and latest ideas in the area. This book is thus suitable for students, researchers, and practitioners who are interested in machine learning, data mining, natural language processing, or pattern recognition. Lecturers can readily use the book for courses in any of these related fields.
Machine learning techniques provide cost-effective alternatives to traditional methods for extracting underlying relationships between information and data and for predicting future events by processing existing information to train models. Efficient Learning Machines explores the major topics of machine learning, including knowledge discovery, classifications, genetic algorithms, neural networking, kernel methods, and biologically-inspired techniques. Mariette Awad and Rahul Khanna’s synthetic approach weaves together the theoretical exposition, design principles, and practical applications of efficient machine learning. Their experiential emphasis, expressed in their close analysis of sample algorithms throughout the book, aims to equip engineers, students of engineering, and system designers to design and create new and more efficient machine learning systems. Readers of Efficient Learning Machines will learn how to recognize and analyze the problems that machine learning technology can solve for them, how to implement and deploy standard solutions to sample problems, and how to design new systems and solutions. Advances in computing performance, storage, memory, unstructured information retrieval, and cloud computing have coevolved with a new generation of machine learning paradigms and big data analytics, which the authors present in the conceptual context of their traditional precursors. Awad and Khanna explore current developments in the deep learning techniques of deep neural networks, hierarchical temporal memory, and cortical algorithms. Nature suggests sophisticated learning techniques that deploy simple rules to generate highly intelligent and organized behaviors with adaptive, evolutionary, and distributed properties. The authors examine the most popular biologically-inspired algorithms, together with a sample application to distributed datacenter management. They also discuss machine learning techniques for addressing problems of multi-objective optimization in which solutions in real-world systems are constrained and evaluated based on how well they perform with respect to multiple objectives in aggregate. Two chapters on support vector machines and their extensions focus on recent improvements to the classification and regression techniques at the core of machine learning.
This book presents a wealth of deep-learning algorithms and demonstrates their design process. It also highlights the need for a prudent alignment with the essential characteristics of the nature of learning encountered in the practical problems being tackled. Intended for readers interested in acquiring practical knowledge of analysis, design, and deployment of deep learning solutions to real-world problems, it covers a wide range of the paradigm’s algorithms and their applications in diverse areas including imaging, seismic tomography, smart grids, surveillance and security, and health care, among others. Featuring systematic and comprehensive discussions on the development processes, their evaluation, and relevance, the book offers insights into fundamental design strategies for algorithms of deep learning.
