8185115
On the combination and normalization of interval-valued belief structures
This paper investigates the issues of combination and normalization of interval-valued belief structures within the framework of Dempster-Shafer theory (DST) of evidence. Existing approaches are reviewed, examined and critically analysed. They either ignore the normalization or separate it from the combination process, leading to irrational or suboptimal interval-valued belief structures. A new logically correct optimality approach is developed, where the combination and the normalization are optimised together rather than separately. Numerical examples are provided throughout the paper.
13993519
Interval efficiency assessment using data envelopment analysis
This paper studies how to conduct efficiency assessment using data envelopment analysis (DEA) in interval and/or fuzzy input-output environments. A new pair of interval DEA models is constructed on the basis of interval arithmetic, which differs from the existing DEA models handling interval data in that the former is a linear CCR model without the need of extra variable alternations and uses a fixed and unified production frontier (i.e. the same constraint set) to measure the efficiencies of decision-making units (DMUs) with interval input and output data, while the latter is usually a nonlinear optimization problem with the need of extra variable alternations or scale transformations and utilizes variable production frontiers (i.e. different constraint sets) to measure interval efficiencies. Ordinal preference information and fuzzy data are converted into interval data through the estimation of permissible intervals and @a-level sets, respectively, and are incorporated into the interval DEA models. The proposed interval DEA models are developed for measuring the lower and upper bounds of the best relative efficiency of each DMU with interval input and output data, which are different from the interval formed by the worst and the best relative efficiencies of each DMU. A minimax regret-based approach (MRA) is introduced to compare and rank the efficiency intervals of DMUs. Two numerical examples are provided to show the applications of the proposed interval DEA models and the preference ranking approach.
207143686
Estimating The Attribute Weights Through Evidential Reasoning And Mathematical Programming
An approach for estimating attribute weight is proposed, which is addressed to the problem inverse to the aggregation assessment based on a hierarchy of attributes. Evidential reasoning framework is employed since the assessment on some basic attributes may be uncertain and incomplete. As a by-product, a simple formula for evidence combination for our special case is obtained. The weights are estimated based on the preference given by the decision-maker, and represented as intervals. The more abundant preference the decision-maker shows, the clearer the relation among the basic attributes.
14920261
BOXes: efficient maintenance of order-based labeling for dynamic XML data
Order-based element labeling for tree-structured XML data is an important technique in XML processing. It lies at the core of many fundamental XML operations such as containment join and twig matching. While labeling for static XML documents is well understood, less is known about how to maintain accurate labeling for dynamic XML documents, when elements and subtrees are inserted and deleted. Most existing approaches do not work well for arbitrary update patterns; they either produce unacceptably long labels or incur enormous relabeling costs. We present two novel I/O-efficient data structures, W-BOX and B-BOX that efficiently maintain labeling for large, dynamic XML documents. We show analytically and experimentally that both, despite consuming minimal amounts of storage, gracefully handle arbitrary update patterns without sacrificing lookup efficiency. The two structures together provide a nice tradeoff between update and lookup costs: W-BOX has logarithmic amortized update cost and constant worst-case lookup cost, while B-BOX has constant amortized update cost and logarithmic worst-case lookup cost. We further propose techniques to eliminate the lookup cost for read-heavy workloads.
5924956
On joining and caching stochastic streams
We consider the problem of joining data streams using limited cache memory, with the goal of producing as many result tuples as possible from the cache. Many cache replacement heuristics have been proposed in the past. Their performance often relies on implicit assumptions about the input streams, e.g., that the join attribute values follow a relatively stationary distribution. However, in general and in practice, streams often exhibit more complex behaviors, such as increasing trends and random walks, rendering these "hardwired" heuristics inadequate.In this paper, we propose a framework that is able to exploit known or observed statistical properties of input streams to make cache replacement decisions aimed at maximizing the expected number of result tuples. To illustrate the complexity of the solution space, we show that even an algorithm that considers, at every time step, all possible sequences of future replacement decisions may not be optimal. We then identify a condition between two candidate tuples under which an optimal algorithm would always choose one tuple over the other to replace. We develop a heuristic that behaves consistently with an optimal algorithm whenever this condition is satisfied. We show through experiments that our heuristic outperforms previous ones.As another evidence of the generality of our framework, we show that the classic caching/paging problem for static objects can be reduced to a stream join problem and analyzed under our framework, yielding results that agree with or extend classic ones.
2150215
Multiresolution indexing of XML for frequent queries
XML and other types of semistructured data are typically represented by a labeled directed graph. To speed up path expression queries over the graph, a variety of structural indexes have been proposed. They usually work by partitioning nodes in the data graph into equivalence classes and storing equivalence classes as index nodes. A(k)-index introduces the concept of local bisimilarity for partitioning, allowing the trade-off between index size and query answering power. However, all index nodes in A(k)-index have the same local similarity k, which cannot take advantage of the fact that a workload may contain path expressions of different lengths, or that different parts of the data graph may have different local similarity requirements. To overcome these limitations, we propose M(k)- and M*(k)-indexes. The basic M(k)-index is workload-aware: Like the previously proposed D(k)-index, it allows different index nodes to have different local similarity requirements, providing finer partitioning only for parts of the data graph targeted by longer path expressions. Unlike D(k)-index, M(k)-index is never over-refined for irrelevant index or data nodes. However, the workload-aware feature still incurs overrefinement due to over-qualified parent index nodes. Moreover, fine partitions penalize the performance of short path expressions. To solve these problems, we further propose the M*(k)-index. An M*(k)-index consists of a collection of indexes whose nodes are organized in a partition hierarchy, allowing successively coarser partitioning information to co-exist with the finest partitioning information required. Experiments show that our indexes are superior to previously proposed indexes in terms of index size and query performance.
26384016
A new evolutionary approach to developing neural autonomous agents
This paper explores the use of neural networks to control robots in tasks requiring sequential and learning behavior. We propose a family competition evolutionary algorithm (FCEA) to evolve networks that can integrate these different types of behavior in a smooth and continuous manner. The approach integrates self-adaptive Gaussian mutation, self-adaptive Cauchy mutation, decreasing-based Gaussian mutation, and family competition. In order to illustrate the power of the approach, we apply this approach to two different task domains: the "artificial ant" problem and a sequential behavior problem - an agent learns to play football. From the experimental results, we find our approach performs much better than other evolutionary algorithms in these two tasks. Based on the results from our experiments, it is shown that our approach can evolve neural networks to provide a means of integrating, sequencing and learning within a single control system.
14440555
AUTOBIB: automatic extraction of bibliographic information on the Web
The Web has greatly facilitated access to information. However, information presented in HTML is mainly intended to be browsed by humans, and the problem of automatically extracting such information remains an important and challenging task. In this work, we focus on building a system called AUTOBIB to automate extraction of bibliographic information on the Web. We use a combination of bootstrapping, statistical, and heuristic methods to achieve a high degree of automation. To set up extraction from a new site, we only need to provide a few lines of code specifying how to download pages containing bibliographic information. We do not need to be concerned with each site's presentation format, and the system can cope with changes in the presentation format without human intervention. AUTOBIB bootstraps itself with a small seed database of structured bibliographic records. For each bibliographic Web site, we identify segments within its pages that represent bibliographic records, using state-of-the-art record-boundary discovery techniques. Next, we find matches for some of these "raw records" in the seed database using a set of heuristics. These matches serve as a training set for a parser based on the hidden Markov model (HMM), which is then used to parse the rest of the raw records into structured records. We have found an effective HMM structure with special states that correspond to delimiters and HTML tags in raw records. Experiments demonstrate that for our application, this HMM structure achieves high success rates without the complexity of previously proposed structures.