Workload coverage through nonsmooth optimization
- Authors: Sukhorukova, Nadezda , Ugon, Julien , Yearwood, John
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Optimization Methods and Software Vol. 24, no. 2 (2009), p. 285-298
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- Description: In this paper, workload coverage is the problem of identifying a pattern of days worked and days off, along with the number of hours worked on each work day. This pattern must satisfy certain work-related constraints and fit best to a predefined workload. In our study, we formulate the problem of workload coverage as an optimization problem. We propose a number of models which take into consideration various staffing constraints. For each of these models, our study aims to find a compromise between an accurate workload coverage and the ability to solve the corresponding optimization problems in a reasonable time. Numerical experiments on each model are carried out and the results are presented. Interestingly, the nonlinear programming approaches are found to be competitive with linear programming ones. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.
The choice of a similarity measure with respect to its sensitivity to outliers
- Authors: Rubinov, Alex , Sukhorukova, Nadezda , Ugon, Julien
- Date: 2010
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Dynamics of Continuous, Discrete and Impulsive Systems Series B: Applications and Algorithms Vol. 17, no. 5 (2010), p. 709-721
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- Description: This paper examines differences in the choice of similarity measures with respect to their sensitivity to outliers in clustering problems, formulated as mathematical programming problems. Namely, we are focusing on the study of norms (norm-based similarity measures) and convex functions of norms (function-norm-based similarity measures). The study consists of two parts: the study of theoretical models and numerical experiments. The main result of this study is a criterion for the outliers sensitivity with respect to the corresponding similarity measure. In particular, the obtained results show that the norm-based similarity measures are not sensitive to outliers whilst a very widely used square of the Euclidean norm similarity measure (least squares) is sensitive to outliers. Copyright © 2010 Watam Press.
Fast modified global k-means algorithm for incremental cluster construction
- Authors: Bagirov, Adil , Ugon, Julien , Webb, Dean
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Pattern Recognition Vol. 44, no. 4 (2011), p. 866-876
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP0666061
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- Description: The k-means algorithm and its variations are known to be fast clustering algorithms. However, they are sensitive to the choice of starting points and are inefficient for solving clustering problems in large datasets. Recently, incremental approaches have been developed to resolve difficulties with the choice of starting points. The global k-means and the modified global k-means algorithms are based on such an approach. They iteratively add one cluster center at a time. Numerical experiments show that these algorithms considerably improve the k-means algorithm. However, they require storing the whole affinity matrix or computing this matrix at each iteration. This makes both algorithms time consuming and memory demanding for clustering even moderately large datasets. In this paper, a new version of the modified global k-means algorithm is proposed. We introduce an auxiliary cluster function to generate a set of starting points lying in different parts of the dataset. We exploit information gathered in previous iterations of the incremental algorithm to eliminate the need of computing or storing the whole affinity matrix and thereby to reduce computational effort and memory usage. Results of numerical experiments on six standard datasets demonstrate that the new algorithm is more efficient than the global and the modified global k-means algorithms. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Piecewise linear classifiers based on nonsmooth optimization approaches
- Authors: Bagirov, Adil , Kasimbeyli, Refail , Ozturk, Gurkan , Ugon, Julien
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Optimization in Science and Engineering p. 1-32
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- Description: Nonsmooth optimization provides efficient algorithms for solving many machine learning problems. In particular, nonsmooth optimization approaches to supervised data classification problems lead to the design of very efficient algorithms for their solution. In this chapter, we demonstrate how nonsmooth optimization algorithms can be applied to design efficient piecewise linear classifiers for supervised data classification problems. Such classifiers are developed using a max–min and a polyhedral conic separabilities as well as an incremental approach. We report results of numerical experiments and compare the piecewise linear classifiers with a number of other mainstream classifiers.