Call for Papers WCCI 2016 Special Session: Evolutionary Feature Selection and Construction

Many data mining and machine learning problems involve a large number of features/attributes, which leads to "the curse of dimensionality". However, not all the features are essential since many of them are redundant or even irrelevant, and the "useful" features are typically not equally important. This problem can be solved by feature selection to select a small subset of original (relevant) features or feature construction to create a smaller set of high-level features using the original low-level features and mathematical or logical operators. Feature selection and construction are challenging tasks due to the large search space and feature interaction problems. Recently, there has been increasing interest in using evolutionary computation techniques to solve feature selection and construction tasks.

The theme of this special session is the use of evolutionary computation for feature reduction, covering ALL different evolutionary computation paradigms, including Genetic algorithms (GAs), Genetic programming (GP), Evolutionary programming (EP), Evolution strategies (ES), Learning classifier systems (LCS), Particle swarm optimization (PSO), Ant colony optimization (ACO), Differential evolution (DE), Artificial immune systems (AIS), Evolutionary Multi-objective optimization (EMO), Estimation of distribution algorithms (EDA), and Cultural algorithms (CA).

The aim is to investigate both the new theories and methods in different evolutionary computation paradigms to feature reduction, and the applications of evolutionary computation for feature reduction. Authors are invited to submit their original and unpublished work to this special session. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Feature ranking/weighting
• Feature subset ranking
• Feature subset selection
• Filter, wrapper, and embedded methods for feature selection
• Multi-objective feature selection
• Feature construction/extraction
• Single feature or multiple features construction
• Filter, wrapper, and embedded methods for feature construction
• Multi-objective feature construction
• Analysis on evolutionary feature selection and construction algorithms
• Feature selection and construction in classification, clustering, regression, and other tasks
• Feature selection and construction on high-dimensional and large-scale data
• Hybridisation of evolutionary computation and neural networks, and fuzzy systems for feature selection and construction
• Hybridisation of evolutionary computation and machine learning, information theory, statistics, mathematical modelling, etc., for feature selection and construction
• Real-world applications of evolutionary feature selection and construction, e.g. images and video sequences/analysis, face recognition, gene analysis, biomarker detection, medical data classification, diagnosis, and analysis, hand written digit recognition, text mining, instrument recognition, power system, financial and business data analysis, et al.

 

Important dates:

15 Nov 2015 Special Session & Workshop Proposals Deadline
15 Dec 2015 Competition & Tutorial Proposals Deadline
15 Jan 2016 Paper Submission Deadline
15 Mar 2016 Paper Acceptance and Notification Date
15 Apr 2016 Final Paper Submission and Early Registration Deadline
25-29 Jul 2016 IEEE WCCI 2016 Vancouver, Canada

Paper Submission:

Please follow the IEEE WCCI/CEC 2016 Submission Web Site. Special session papers are treated the same as regular conference papers. Please specify that your paper is for the Special Session on Evolutionary Feature Selection and Construction. All papers accepted and presented at WCCI/CEC 2016 will be included in the conference proceedings published by IEEE Explore, which are typically indexed by EI.

Organizers:

Bing Xue
School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand.
Bing.Xue@ecs.vuw.ac.nz
Phone: +64-4-463 5233+8874; Fax: +64-4-463 5045.

Yaochu Jin
Department of Computing, University of Surrey, United Kingdom.
yaochu.jin@surrey.ac.uk
Phone: +44-1483-686037; Fax: +44-1483-686051

Mengjie Zhang
School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand.
Mengjie.Zhang@ecs.vuw.ac.nz
Phone: +64-4-463 5654; Fax: +64-4-463 5045

Biography of the Organizers

Bing Xue is currently a Lecturer in Evolutionary Computation Research Group, School of Engineering and Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington and leading the strategic research direction on evolutionary feature selection and construction. Her research focuses mainly on evolutionary computation, feature selection, feature construction, multi-objective optimisation, data mining and machine learning. She has over 40 papers published in fully referred international journals and conferences and 30 of them are on evolutionary feature selection and construction. She is currently co-supervising six PhD students and visiting scholars, and over 10 Honours and summer research projects. Dr Xue is the chair of the special session on Evolutionary Feature Selection and Construction in IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) 2015 and the chair of the special session on Evolutionary Feature Reduction in the international conference on Simulated Evolution And Learning (SEAL) 2014. She is a Guest Editor for the Special Issue on Evolutionary Feature Reduction and Machine Learning for the Springer Journal of Soft Computing. Dr Xue is serving as a reviewer of over 10 international journals including IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transaction on Cybernetics and Information Sciences, and many international conferences including IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), and International Conference on Simulated Evolution and Learning (SEAL). Dr Xue is a member of IEEE and IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. She is also serving as the Director of Women in Engineering for the IEEE New Zealand Central Section and the Secretary of the IEEE Chapter on Computational Intelligence in that Section.

Yaochu Jin received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 1988, 1991, and 1996 respectively, and the Dr. Ing. degree from Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany, in 2001. Dr Jin is a Professor and the Chair in Computational Intelligence with the Department of Computing, University of Surrey, Guildford, U.K., where he heads the Nature Inspired Computing and Engineering Group. His science-driven research interests lie in interdisciplinary areas that bridge the gap between computational intelligence, computational neuroscience, and computational systems biology. He is also particularly interested in nature-inspired, real-world driven problem-solving, such as aerodynamic optimisation, natural gas terminal design, intelligent heating systems, and process optimisation and control. Recently, he has also been carrying out research in feature extraction and construction in images.
Dr Jin has (co)edited five books and three conference proceedings, authored a monograph, and (co)authored over 150 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. He has been granted eight US, EU and Japan patents. His current research is funded by EC FP7, UK EPSRC and industries, including Airbus, Bosch UK, HR Wallingford and Honda. He has delivered 16 invited keynote speeches at international conferences. He is an Associate Editor/Editorial Board Member of IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on NanoScience, and IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, Evolutionary Computation (MIT), BioSystems (Elsevier) and Soft Computing (Springer). He is a past Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, IEEE Transactions on Systems man and Cybernetics, Part C, and IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology. Dr Jin is currently an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, Vice President for Technical Activities and an AdCom Member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He was the recipient of the Best Paper Award of the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. He is a Fellow of BCS and Senior Member of IEEE.

Mengjie Zhang is currently Professor of Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington, where he heads the interdisciplinary Evolutionary Computation Research Group. He is a member of the University Academic Board, a member of the University Postgraduate Scholarships Committee, a member of the Faculty of Graduate Research Board at the University, Associate Dean (Research and Innovation) for Faculty of Engineering, and Chair of the Research Committee of the Faculty and School of Engineering and Computer Science. His research is mainly focused on evolutionary computation, particularly genetic programming, particle swarm optimization, multi-objective optimization and learning classifier systems with application areas of classification with unbalanced data, feature selection and dimensionality reduction, computer vision and image processing, job shop scheduling, and bioinformatics. He is also interested in data mining, machine learning, and web information extraction. Prof Zhang has published over 300 academic papers in refereed international journals and conferences in these areas. He has been serving as an associated editor or editorial board member for five international journals including IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, the Evolutionary Computation Journal (MIT Press) and Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (Springer), and as a reviewer of over 20 international journals. He has been a general/program/technical chair for eight international conferences. He has also been serving as a steering committee member and a program committee member for over 100 international conferences including all major conferences in evolutionary computation. Since 2007, he has been listed as one of the top ten world genetic programming researchers by the GP bibliography (http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~wbl/biblio/gp-html/index.html). Prof Zhang is a senior member of IEEE, Chair of the IEEE CIS Evolutionary Computation Technical Committee, a member of IEEE CIS Intelligent System Applications Technical Committee, a vice-chair of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Evolutionary Computer Vision and Image Processing, and the founding chair of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Chapter in the IEEE New Zealand Central Section.