Plenary Lecture
Advanced Classification and Regression Algorithms

Assoc. Professor Dana Simian
Faculty of Sciences
University Lucian Blaga of Sibiu
ROMANIA
E-mail: dana.simian@ulbsibiu.ro
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to present and analyzed new
classification and regression algorithms and applications of these
algorithms for different kind of data. One of the practical applications of
our algorithms is in the ecological characterization of different areas.
Generally, the task of classification is to find a rule, which based on
external observations assigns an object to one of several classes. A
classification task supposes the existence of training and testing data
given in the form of data instances. Each instance in the training set
contains one target value, named class label and several attributes named
features. One of the approaches used for solving the problem of binary or
multiclass classification is represented by SVM algorithm. SVM models are
obtained by convex optimization and are able to learn and generalize in high
dimensional input spaces. The goal of SVM is to produce a model which
predicts target value of data instances in the testing set which are given
only the attributes. A very powerful idea, which can be used not only in SVM
algorithms, is the kernel method. Using an appropriate kernel, the data are
projected in a space with higher dimension in which they are separable by a
hyperplane. Usually simple kernels are used but the real problems require
more complex kernels. The kernel substitution can be used to define many
other types of learning machines distinct from SVMs.
We introduce and analyze multiple kernels based on simple kernels. Our
intention was to study the possibility of obtaining nonlinear multiple
kernels using simple classifiers and to analyze their performance comparing
with other multiple kernels. Therefore we choose, first, for experiments the
most common data sets, used in a great number of papers and taken from
libsvm website. Second, we used different types of data obtained in the
monitoring process of many ecological areas from Romania.
In order to take advantage of possible correlations between the outputs to
improve the quality of the predictions, we also consider the Support Vector
Regression method (SVR). SVR is based on the theory of Support Vector
Machines and belongs to the category of reproducing kernel methods. The
kernel is viewed as the covariance of a second order Gaussian process. SVR
builds a model, f, of the output of a system that depends on a set of
factors. One of the problems we confront with, in the ecological
characterization of different areas is the quantification of the outputs of
our system. In order to apply SVR method, we make a regression analysis for
studying the relationships among the outputs of our system.
Brief
Biography of the Speaker:
Dana Simian received the diploma. in
engineering from the University of Sibiu, Romania, the diploma. in
Mathematics - Informatics from the University Babes-Bolyai of Cluj-Napoca,
Romania and the Ph.D. from Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj- Napoca, Romania.
She graduated many courses in Computer Science. She is the head of the
Department of Computer Science from the Faculty of Sciences, University
Lucian Blaga of Sibiu, Romania. She has a great experience in algorithms and
numerical methods for modelling and optimization. She published 15 books,
more than 60 articles and participated in the editorial board of 22
scientific publications (proceedings of international conferences).
She organized 5 special sessions within WSEAS conferences and 2
international workshops on topics related to algorithms and computational
techniques in modeling, approximation and optimization. She was a member of
many scientific committees of international conferences.. She was plenary
speakers in 3 international conferences. She is reviewer of many scientific
publications. She was involved as director of many research grants. She has
been included in “Who is Who in the World” in 2006 and in the “IBC Foremost
Engineers of the World”, 2008.