The Application of Bayesian Optimization and Classifier Systems in Nurse Scheduling
Two ideas taken from Bayesian optimization and classifier systems are presented for personnel scheduling based on choosing a suitable scheduling rule from a set for each person’s assignment. Unlike our previous work of using genetic algorithms whose learning is implicit, the learning in both approaches is explicit, i.e. we are able to identify building blocks directly. To achieve this target, the Bayesian optimization algorithm builds a Bayesian network of the joint probability distribution of the rules used to construct solutions, while the adapted classifier system assigns each rule a strength value that is constantly updated according to its usefulness in the current situation. Computational results from 52 real data instances of nurse scheduling demonstrate the success of both approaches. It is also suggested that the learning mechanism in the proposed approaches might be suitable for other scheduling problems.

title: A Self-Adjusting Algorithm for Driver Scheduling
abstract: Public transport driver scheduling is a world wide problem, which is NP-hard. Although some mathematically based methods are being used in the transport industry, there is still much scope for improvements. This paper presents a novel evolutionary approach that simulates the self-adjusting process on a single schedule. Five factors characterized by fuzzy membership functions are first aggregated to evaluate the shift structure. This evaluating function is incorporated into a constructing heuristic to make shift selection. A self-adjusting algorithm is then designed to guide the constructing heuristic to improve a given initial schedule iteratively. In each generation an unfit portion of the working schedule is removed. Broken schedules are repaired by the constructing heuristic until stopping condition is met. Experimental results on real-world driver scheduling problems has demonstrated the success of the proposed approach.

title: Distributed hosting of Web content with erasure coding and unequal weight assignment
abstract: By sharing and hosting personal Web content in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion, we may increase the bandwidth of retrieval and improve the reliability of retrieval. The cost is that the Web content has to be replicated to and stored in the peers, consuming valuable network bandwidth and peer storage space. In this work, we develop two technologies, namely hierarchical content organization with unequal weight assignment and erasure coding, to reduce the amount of content to be distributed, yet still maintain the retrieval speed up and reliability. Significant improvement over the ordinary Web server is demonstrated.

title: Introducing a Rule Importance Measure
abstract: Association rule algorithms often generate an excessive number of rules, many of which are not significant. It is difficult to determine which rules are more useful, interesting and important. We introduce a rough set based Rule Importance Measure to select the most important rules. We use ROSETTA software to generate multiple reducts. Apriori association rule algorithm is then applied to generate rule sets for each data set based on each reduct. Some rules are generated more frequently than the others among the total rule sets. We consider such rules as more important. We define rule importance as the frequency of an association rule generated across all the rule sets. Rule importance is different from either rule interestingness measures or rule quality measures because of their application tasks, the processes where the measures are applied and the contents they measure. The experimental results from an artificial data set, UCI machine learning datasets and an actual geriatric care medical data set show that our method reduces the computational cost for rule generation and provides an effective measure of how important is a rule.

title: An internet routing forensics framework for discovering rules of abnormal BGP events
abstract: Abnormal BGP events such as attacks, misconfigurations, electricity failures, can cause anomalous or pathological routing behavior at either global level or prefix level, and thus must be detected in their early stages. Instead of using ad hoc methods to analyze BGP data, in this paper we introduce an Internet Routing Forensics framework to systematically process BGP routing data, discover rules of abnormal BGP events, and apply these rules to detect the occurrences of these events. In particular, we leverage data mining techniques to train the framework to learn rules of abnormal BGP events, and our results from two case studies show that these rules are effective. In one case study, rules of worm events discovered from the BGP data during the outbreaks of the CodeRed and Nimda worms were able to successfully detect worm impact on BGP when an independent worm, the Slammer, subsequently occurred. Similarly, in another case study, rules of electricity blackout events obtained using BGP data from the 2003 East Coast blackout were able to detect the BGP impact from the Florida blackout caused by Hurricane Frances in 2004.

title: Genescene: biomedical text and data mining
abstract: To access the content of digital texts efficiently, it is necessary to provide more sophisticated access than keyword based searching. Genescene provides biomedical researchers with research findings and background relations automatically extracted from text and experimental data. These provide a more detailed overview of the information available. The extracted relations were evaluated by qualified researchers and are precise. A qualitative ongoing evaluation of the current online interface indicates that this method to search the literature is more useful and efficient than keyword based searching.

title: Rule Evaluations, Attributes, and Rough Sets: Extension and a Case Study
abstract: Manually evaluating important and interesting rules generated from data is generally infeasible due to the large number of rules extracted. Different approaches such as rule interestingness measures and rule quality measures have been proposed and explored previously to extract interesting and high quality association rules and classification rules. Rough sets theory was originally presented as an approach to approximate concepts under uncertainty. In this paper, we explore rough sets based rule evaluation approaches in knowledge discovery. We demonstrate rule evaluation approaches through a real-world geriatric care data set from Dalhousie Medical School. Rough set based rule evaluation approaches can be used in a straightforward way to rank the importance of the rules. One interesting system developed along these lies in HYRIS (HYbrid Rough sets Intelligent System). We introduce HYRIS through a case study on survival analysis using the geriatric care data set.