Variable Weights Decision-Making and Its Fuzzy Inference Implementation
This paper investigates multiple attribute decision-making (MADM) problems with preference information on alternatives. Principle of variable weights evaluation is introduced first. Then, a new algorithm, fuzzy inference variable weights method, is proposed. The principle of fuzzy logic control (FLC) and available techniques of variable weights evaluation are merged together, to formulate the new method to determine the adjusted weights of attributes for MADM problems with preferences. An example is provided to illustrate the utility and effectiveness of the proposed method.

title: Manufacturing Grid: Needs, Concept, and Architecture
abstract: As a new approach, grid technology is rapidly used in scientific computing, large-scale data management, and collaborative work. But in the field of manufacturing, the application of grid is just at the beginning. The paper proposes the concept of manufacturing. The needs, definition and architecture of manufacturing gird are discussed, which explains why needs manufacturing grid, what is manufacturing grid and how to construct a manufacturing grid system.

title: An Effective PSO-Based Memetic Algorithm for Flow Shop Scheduling
abstract: This paper proposes an effective particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based memetic algorithm (MA) for the permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSSP) with the objective to minimize the maximum completion time, which is a typical non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP) hard combinatorial optimization problem. In the proposed PSO-based MA (PSOMA), both PSO-based searching operators and some special local searching operators are designed to balance the exploration and exploitation abilities. In particular, the PSOMA applies the evolutionary searching mechanism of PSO, which is characterized by individual improvement, population cooperation, and competition to effectively perform exploration. On the other hand, the PSOMA utilizes several adaptive local searches to perform exploitation. First, to make PSO suitable for solving PFSSP, a ranked-order value rule based on random key representation is presented to convert the continuous position values of particles to job permutations. Second, to generate an initial swarm with certain quality and diversity, the famous Nawaz-Enscore-Ham (NEH) heuristic is incorporated into the initialization of population. Third, to balance the exploration and exploitation abilities, after the standard PSO-based searching operation, a new local search technique named NEH_1 insertion is probabilistically applied to some good particles selected by using a roulette wheel mechanism with a specified probability. Fourth, to enrich the searching behaviors and to avoid premature convergence, a simulated annealing (SA)-based local search with multiple different neighborhoods is designed and incorporated into the PSOMA. Meanwhile, an effective adaptive meta-Lamarckian learning strategy is employed to decide which neighborhood to be used in SA-based local search. Finally, to further enhance the exploitation ability, a pairwise-based local search is applied after the SA-based search. Simulation results based on benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the PSOMA. Additionally, the effects of some parameters on optimization performances are also discussed

title: Constrained Nonlinear State Estimation - A Differential Evolution Based Moving Horizon Approach
abstract: A solution is proposed to estimate the states in the nonlinear discrete time system. Moving Horizon Estimation (MHE) is used to obtain the approximated states by minimizing a criterion that is the Euclidean form of the difference between the estimated outputs and the measured ones over a finite time horizon. The differential evolution (DE) algorithm is incorporated into the implementation of MHE in order to solve the optimization problem which is presented as a nonlinear programming problem due to the constraints. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated in simulated systems that have appeared in the moving horizon estimation literature.

title: DE and NLP Based QPLS Algorithm
abstract: As a novel evolutionary computing technique, Differential Evolution (DE) has been considered to be an effective optimization method for complex optimization problems, and achieved many successful applications in engineering. In this paper, a new algorithm of Quadratic Partial Least Squares (QPLS) based on Nonlinear Programming (NLP) is presented. And DE is used to solve the NLP so as to calculate the optimal input weights and the parameters of inner relationship. The simulation results based on the soft measurement of diesel oil solidifying point on a real crude distillation unit demonstrate that the superiority of the proposed algorithm to linear PLS and QPLS which is based on Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) in terms of fitting accuracy and computational costs.

title: A New Performance Evaluation Model and AHP-Based Analysis Method in Service-Oriented Workflow
abstract: In service-oriented architecture, services and workflows are closely related so that the research on service-oriented workflow attracts the attention of academia. Because of the loosely-coupled, autonomic and dynamic nature of service, the operation and performance evaluation of workflow meet some challenges, such as how to judge the quality of service (QoS) and what is the relation between QoS and workflow performance. In this paper we are going to address these challenges. First the definition of service is proposed, and the characteristics and operation mechanism of service-oriented workflow are presented. Then a service-oriented workflow performance evaluation model is described which combines the performance of the business system and IT system. The key performance indicators (KPI) are also depicted with their formal representation. Finally the improved Analytic Hierarchy Process is brought forward to analyze the correlation between different KPIs and select services.

title: A Novel Fuzzy Neural Network with Fast Training and Accurate Generalization
abstract: For the reason of all parameters in a conventional fuzzy neural network (FNN) needed to be adjusted iteratively, learning can be very slow and may suffer from local minima. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel FNN in this paper, which shows a fast speed and accurate generalization. First we state the universal approximation theorem for an FNN with random membership function parameters (FNN-RM). Since all the membership function parameters are arbitrarily chosen, the proposed FNN-RM algorithm needs to adjust only the output weights of FNNs. Experimental results on function approximation and classification problems show that the new algorithm not only provides thousands of times of speed-up over traditional learning algorithms, but also produces better generalization performance in comparison to other FNNs.

title: Advances in Web Mining and Web Usage Analysis: 6th International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery on the Web, WEBKDD 2004Seattle, WA, USA, August 22-25, ... Papers (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

title: Mining Opinion Features in Customer Reviews
abstract: It is a common practice that merchants selling products on the Web ask their customers to review the products and associated services. As e-commerce is becoming more and more popular, the number of customer reviews that a product receives grows rapidly. For a popular product, the number of reviews can be in hundreds. This makes it difficult for a potential customer to read them in order to make a decision on whether to buy the product. In this project, we aim to summarize all the customer reviews of a product. This summarization task is different from traditional text summarization because we are only interested in the specific features of the product that customers have opinions on and also whether the opinions are positive or negative. We do not summarize the reviews by selecting or rewriting a subset of the original sentences from the reviews to capture their main points as in the classic text summarization. In this paper, we only focus on mining opinion/product features that the reviewers have commented on. A number of techniques are presented to mine such features. Our experimental results show that these techniques are highly effective.

title: Dealing with different distributions in learning from
abstract: In the problem of learning with positive and unlabeled examples, existing research all assumes that positive examples P and the hidden positive examples in the unlabeled set U are generated from the same distribution. This assumption may be violated in practice. In such cases, existing methods perform poorly. This paper proposes a novel technique A-EM to deal with the problem. Experimental results with product page classification demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

title: Twi-Map Support Vector Machine for Multi-classification Problems
abstract: In this paper, a novel method called Twi-Map Support Vector Machines (TMSVM) for multi-classification problems is presented. Our ideas are as follows: Firstly, the training data set is mapped into a high-dimensional feature space. Secondly, we calculate the distances between the training data points and hyperplanes. Thirdly, we view the new vector consisting of the distances as new training data point. Finally, we map the new training data points into another high-dimensional feature space with the same kernel function and construct the optimal hyperplanes. In order to examine the training accuracy and the generalization performance of the proposed algorithm, One-against-One algorithm, Fuzzy Least Square Support Vector Machine (FLS-SVM) and the proposed algorithm are applied to five UCI data sets. Comparison results obtained by using three algorithms are given. The results show that the training accuracy and the testing one of the proposed algorithm are higher than those of One-against-One and FLS-SVM.