This book integrates two areas of computer science, namely data mining and evolutionary algorithms. Both these areas have become increasingly popular in the last few years, and their integration is currently an active research area. In general, data mining consists of extracting knowledge from data. The motivation for applying evolutionary algorithms to data mining is that evolutionary algorithms are robust search methods which perform a global search in the space of candidate solutions. This book emphasizes the importance of discovering comprehensible, interesting knowledge, which is potentially useful for intelligent decision making. The text explains both basic concepts and advanced topics

Data mining is a very active research area with many successful real-world app- cations. It consists of a set of concepts and methods used to extract interesting or useful knowledge (or patterns) from real-world datasets, providing valuable support for decision making in industry, business, government, and science. Although there are already many types of data mining algorithms available in the literature, it is still dif cult for users to choose the best possible data mining algorithm for their particular data mining problem. In addition, data mining al- rithms have been manually designed; therefore they incorporate human biases and preferences. This book proposes a new approach to the design of data mining algorithms. - stead of relying on the slow and ad hoc process of manual algorithm design, this book proposes systematically automating the design of data mining algorithms with an evolutionary computation approach. More precisely, we propose a genetic p- gramming system (a type of evolutionary computation method that evolves c- puter programs) to automate the design of rule induction algorithms, a type of cl- si cation method that discovers a set of classi cation rules from data. We focus on genetic programming in this book because it is the paradigmatic type of machine learning method for automating the generation of programs and because it has the advantage of performing a global search in the space of candidate solutions (data mining algorithms in our case), but in principle other types of search methods for this task could be investigated in the future.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Bioinformatics, EvoBIO 2007, held in Valencia, Spain, April 2007. Coverage brings together experts in computer science with experts in bioinformatics and the biological sciences. It presents contributions on fundamental and theoretical issues along with papers dealing with different applications areas.

This book provides a collection of fourty articles containing new material on both theoretical aspects of Evolutionary Computing (EC), and demonstrating the usefulness/success of it for various kinds of large-scale real world problems. Around 23 articles deal with various theoretical aspects of EC and 17 articles demonstrate the success of EC methodologies. These articles are written by leading experts of the field from different countries all over the world.

Evolutionary Computation and Optimization Algorithms in Software Engineering: Applications and Techniques lays the foundation for the successful integration of evolutionary computation into software engineering. It surveys techniques ranging from genetic algorithms, to swarm optimization theory, to ant colony optimization, demonstrating their uses and capabilities. These techniques are applied to aspects of software engineering such as software testing, quality assessment, reliability assessment, and fault prediction models, among others, to providing researchers, scholars and students with the knowledge needed to expand this burgeoning application.

This book reviews the latest developments in nature-inspired computation, with a focus on the cross-disciplinary applications in data mining and machine learning. Data mining, machine learning and nature-inspired computation are current hot research topics due to their importance in both theory and practical applications. Adopting an application-focused approach, each chapter introduces a specific topic, with detailed descriptions of relevant algorithms, extensive literature reviews and implementation details. Covering topics such as nature-inspired algorithms, swarm intelligence, classification, clustering, feature selection, cybersecurity, learning algorithms over cloud, extreme learning machines, object categorization, particle swarm optimization, flower pollination and firefly algorithms, and neural networks, it also presents case studies and applications, including classifications of crisis-related tweets, extraction of named entities in the Tamil language, performance-based prediction of diseases, and healthcare services. This book is both a valuable a reference resource and a practical guide for students, researchers and professionals in computer science, data and management sciences, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Data Mining is the science and technology of exploring large and complex bodies of data in order to discover useful patterns. It is extremely important because it enables modeling and knowledge extraction from abundant data availability. This book introduces soft computing methods extending the envelope of problems that data mining can solve efficiently. It presents practical soft-computing approaches in data mining and includes various real-world case studies with detailed results.

Finding information hidden in data is as theoretically difficult as it is practically important. With the objective of discovering unknown patterns from data, the methodologies of data mining were derived from statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, and are being used successfully in application areas such as bioinformatics, banking, retail, and many others. Wang and Fu present in detail the state of the art on how to utilize fuzzy neural networks, multilayer perceptron neural networks, radial basis function neural networks, genetic algorithms, and support vector machines in such applications. They focus on three main data mining tasks: data dimensionality reduction, classification, and rule extraction. The book is targeted at researchers in both academia and industry, while graduate students and developers of data mining systems will also profit from the detailed algorithmic descriptions.

Evolutionary computation has emerged as a major topic in the scientific community as many of its techniques have successfully been applied to solve problems in a wide variety of fields. Modeling Applications and Theoretical Innovations in Interdisciplinary Evolutionary Computation provides comprehensive research on emerging theories and its aspects on intelligent computation. Particularly focusing on breaking trends in evolutionary computing, algorithms, and programming, this publication serves to support professionals, government employees, policy and decision makers, as well as students in this scientific field.

The authors have consolidated their research work in this volume titled Soft Computing for Data Mining Applications. The monograph gives an insight into the research in the ?elds of Data Mining in combination with Soft Computing methodologies. In these days, the data continues to grow - ponentially. Much of the data is implicitly or explicitly imprecise. Database discovery seeks to discover noteworthy, unrecognized associations between the data items in the existing database. The potential of discovery comes from the realization that alternate contexts may reveal additional valuable information. The rate at which the data is storedis growing at a phenomenal rate. Asaresult,traditionaladhocmixturesofstatisticaltechniquesanddata managementtools are no longer adequate for analyzing this vast collection of data. Severaldomainswherelargevolumesofdataarestoredincentralizedor distributeddatabasesincludesapplicationslikeinelectroniccommerce,bio- formatics, computer security, Web intelligence, intelligent learning database systems,?nance,marketing,healthcare,telecommunications,andother?elds. E?cient tools and algorithms for knowledge discovery in large data sets have been devised during the recent years. These methods exploit the ca- bility of computers to search huge amounts of data in a fast and e?ective manner. However,the data to be analyzed is imprecise and a?icted with - certainty. In the case of heterogeneous data sources such as text and video, the data might moreover be ambiguous and partly con?icting. Besides, p- terns and relationships of interest are usually approximate. Thus, in order to make the information mining process more robust it requires tolerance toward imprecision, uncertainty and exceptions.