Information Sciences: an International Journal

Some researchers have framed the extraction of association rules as a multi-objective problem, jointly optimizing several measures to obtain a set with more interesting and accurate rules. In this paper, we propose a new multi-objective evolutionary ...

Many real-world problems have multiple competing objectives and can often be formulated as multi-objective optimisation problems. Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) have proven very effective in obtaining a set of trade-off solutions for ...

Meta-heuristic search algorithms are developed to solve optimization problems. Such algorithms are appropriate for global searches because of their global exploration and local exploitation abilities. Swarm intelligence (SI) algorithms comprise a branch ...

Swarm intelligence (SI) has generated growing interest in recent decades as an algorithm replicating biological and other natural systems. Several SI algorithms have been developed that replicate the behavior of honeybees. This study integrates two of ...

Metaheuristics are general search strategies that, at the exploitation stage, intensively exploit areas of the solution space with high quality solutions and, at the exploration stage, move to unexplored areas of the solution space when necessary. The ...

Gene selection, which is a well-known NP-hard problem, is a challenging task that has been the subject of a large amount of research, especially in relation to classification tasks. This problem addresses the identification of the smallest possible set ...

A fundamental question in the field of approximation algorithms, for a given problem instance, is the selection of the best (or a suitable) algorithm with regard to some performance criteria. A practical strategy for facing this problem is the ...

The genetic algorithm technique known as crowding preserves population diversity by pairing each offspring with a similar individual in the current population (pairing phase) and deciding which of the two will survive (replacement phase). The ...

Decision tree induction algorithms represent one of the most popular techniques for dealing with classification problems. However, traditional decision-tree induction algorithms implement a greedy approach for node splitting that is inherently ...

An autonomous mobile robot requires a robust onboard controller that makes intelligent responses in dynamic environments. Current solutions tend to lead to unnecessarily complex solutions that only work in niche environments. Evolutionary techniques ...

Ensemble techniques have been widely used to improve classification performance also in the case of GP-based systems. These techniques should improve classification accuracy by using voting strategies to combine the responses of different classifiers. ...

Decision making is a process common to human beings. The uncertainty and fuzziness of problems demand the use of the fuzzy linguistic approach to model qualitative aspects of problems related to decision. The recent proposal of hesitant fuzzy linguistic ...

Computing with words (CWW) explores the brain's ability to handle and evaluate perceptions through language, i.e., by means of the linguistic representation of information and knowledge. On the other hand, standard preference structures examine decision ...

In this paper we propose a decision-making procedure where the agents judge the alternatives through linguistic terms such as 'very good', 'good', 'acceptable', etc. If the agents are not confident about their opinions, they can use a linguistic ...

In real decision making problems, it is always more natural for decision makers to use linguistic terms to express their preferences/opinions in a qualitative way among alternatives than to provide quantitative values. Additionally, many of these ...

In recent years, several different linguistic computational models for dealing with linguistic information in processes of computing with words have been proposed. However, until now all of them rely on the special semantics of the linguistic terms, ...

In this paper, we propose a method to identify groups of similarly shaped membership functions representing criterion preferences provided by a large group of experts in the context of group decision-making. Our hypothesis hereby is that similarly ...

The paper analyses the challenges and problems posed by the use of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in citizen science and a proposal is formulated for assessing VGI quality based on a linguistic decision making approach so as to allow its ...

Nowadays, it is imperative need for the State to support Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) operation in this difficult business environment through the development and adoption of appropriate policies, fostering green entrepreneurship and green energy ...

In this paper we address the problem of color image segmentation transforming it into a decision making paradigm. A set of experts is provided, so that each expert assigns a preference degree of each pixel to every object of the image considering also ...

A fundamental approach for secure data sharing in a cloud environment is to let the data owner encrypt data before outsouring. To simultaneously achieve fine-grained access control on encrypted data and scalable user revocation, existing work combines ...

Cloud computing emerges as a new computing paradigm that aims to provide reliable, customized and quality of service guaranteed computation environments for cloud users. Applications and databases are moved to the large centralized data centers, called ...

Recommender systems select the most interesting products for costumers based on their interests. The move of a recommender system to a cloud faces many challenges from the perspective of the protection of the participants. Little work has been done ...

Cloud computing represents a new paradigm where computing resources are offered as services in the world via communication Internet. As many new types of attacks are arising at a high frequency, the cloud computing services are exposed to an increasing ...

Cloud computing has been rapidly adopted over the last few years. However, techniques on Web services, one of the most important enabling technologies for cloud computing, are still not mature yet. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that ...

A cloud does not have infinite computational and storage resources in its infrastructure. If it saturates, it will not be able to satisfy new requests for service allocations sent by its customers. Clouds should interrelate through networking protocols ...