Below you may find the slides of the GECCO 2009 tutorial that Jaume Bacardit and I put together. Hope you enjoy it.
Slides
Abstract
We are living in the peta-byte era.We have larger and larger data to analyze, process and transform into useful answers for the domain experts. Robust data mining tools, able to cope with petascale volumes and/or high dimensionality producing human-understandable solutions are key on several domain areas. Genetics-based machine learning (GBML) techniques are perfect candidates for this task, among others, due to the recent advances in representations, learning paradigms, and theoretical modeling. If evolutionary learning techniques aspire to be a relevant player in this context, they need to have the capacity of processing these vast amounts of data and they need to process this data within reasonable time. Moreover, massive computation cycles are getting cheaper and cheaper every day, allowing researchers to have access to unprecedented parallelization degrees. Several topics are interlaced in these two requirements: (1) having the proper learning paradigms and knowledge representations, (2) understanding them and knowing when are they suitable for the problem at hand, (3) using efficiency enhancement techniques, and (4) transforming and visualizing the produced solutions to give back as much insight as possible to the domain experts are few of them. This tutorial will try to answer this question, following a roadmap that starts with the questions of what large means, and why large is a challenge for GBML methods. Afterwards, we will discuss different facets in which we can overcome this challenge: Efficiency enhancement techniques, representations able to cope with large dimensionality spaces, scalability of learning paradigms. We will also review a topic interlaced with all of them: how can we model the scalability of the components of our GBML systems to better engineer them to get the best performance out of them for large datasets. The roadmap continues with examples of real applications of GBML systems and finishes with an analysis of further directions.
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