Onay Urfalioglu

Self-adaptive randomized and rank-based differential evolution for multimodal problems

Differential Evolution (DE) is a widely used successful evolutionary algorithm (EA) based on a population of individuals, which is especially well suited to solve problems that have non-linear, multimodal cost functions. However, for a given population, the set of possible new populations is finite and a true subset of the cost function domain. Furthermore, the update formula of DE does not use any information about the fitness of the population. This paper presents a novel extension of DE called Randomized and Rank-based Differential Evolution (R2DE) and its self-adaptive version SAR2DE to improve robustness and global convergence speed on multimodal problems by introducing two multiplicative terms in the DE update formula. The first term is based on a random variate of a Cauchy distribution, which leads to a randomization. The second term is based on ranking of individuals, so that R2DE exploits additional information provided by the population fitness. In extensive experiments conducted with a wide range of complexity settings, we show that the proposed heuristics lead to an overall improvement in robustness and speed of convergence compared to several global optimization techniques, including DE, Opposition based Differential Evolution (ODE), DE with Random Scale Factor (DERSF) and the self-adaptive Cauchy distribution based DE (NSDE).

Flame detection using PIR sensors

In this paper, a flame detection system based on a pyroelectric (or passive) infrared (PIR) sensor is described. The flame detection system can be used for fire detection in large rooms. The flame flicker process of an uncontrolled fire and ordinary activity of human beings are modeled using a set of hidden Markov models (HMM), which are trained using the wavelet transform of the PIR sensor signal. Whenever there is an activity within the viewing range of the PIR sensor system, the sensor signal is analyzed in the wavelet domain and the wavelet signals are fed to a set of HMMs. A fire or no fire decision is reached according to the HMM producing the highest probability.

Levy walk evolution for global optimization

A novel evolutionary global optimization approach based on adaptive covariance estimation is proposed. The proposed method samples from a multivariate Levy Skew Alpha-Stable distribution with the estimated covariance matrix to realize a random walk and so to generate new solution candidates in the mutation step. The proposed method is compared to the popular Differential Evolution method, which is one of the best general evolutionary global optimizers available. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach yields a general improvement in the required number of function evaluations to solve global optimization problems. Especially, as shown in experiments, the underlying heavy tailed alpha-stable distribution enables a considerably more effective global search in more complex problems.

Algebraic error analysis of collinear feature points for camera parameter estimation

In general, feature points and camera parameters can only be estimated with limited accuracy due to noisy images. In case of collinear feature points, it is possible to benefit from this geometrical regularity by correcting the feature points to lie on the supporting estimated straight line, yielding increased accuracy of the estimated camera parameters. However, regarding Maximum-Likelihood (ML) estimation, this procedure is incomplete and suboptimal. An optimal solution must also determine the error covariance of corrected features. In this paper, a complete theoretical covariance propagation analysis starting from the error of the feature points up to the error of the estimated camera parameters is performed. Additionally, corresponding Fisher Information Matrices are determined and fundamental relationships between the number and distance of collinear points and corresponding error variances are revealed algebraically. To demonstrate the impact of collinearity, experiments are conducted with covariance propagation analyses, showing significant reduction of the error variances of the estimated parameters.

Randomized and Rank Based Differential Evolution

Many real world problems which can be assigned to the machine learning domain are inverse problems. The available data is often noisy and may contain outliers, which requires the application of global optimization. Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are one class of possible global optimization methods for solving such problems. Within population based EAs, Differential Evolution (DE) is a widely used and successful algorithm. However, due to its differential update nature, given a current population, the set of possible new populations is finite and a true subset of the cost function domain. Furthermore, the update formula of DE does not use any information about the fitnesses of the population. This paper presents a novel extension of DE called Randomized and Rank based Differential Evolution (R2DE) to improve robustness and global convergence speed on multimodal problems by introducing two multiplicative terms in the DE update formula. The first term is based on a random variate of a Cauchy distribution, which leads to a randomization. The second term is based on ranking of individuals, so that R2DE exploits additional information provided by the fitnesses. In experiments including non-linear dimension reduction by autoencoders, it is shown that R2DE improves robustness and speed of global convergence.

Superimposed Event Detection by Sequential Monte Carlo Methods

In this paper, we consider the detection of rare events by applying particle filtering. We model the rare event as an AR signal superposed on a background signal. The activation and deactivation times of the AR-signal are unknown. We solve the online detection problem of this superpositional rare event by extending the state space dimension by one. The additional parameter of the state represents the AR-signal, which is zero when deactivated. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.