Metaheuristic Algorithms in Artificial Intelligence with Applications to Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, Ecology and, the Manufacturing Industries

Nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms are important components of artificial intelligence, and are increasingly used across disciplines to tackle various types of challenging optimization problems. We apply a newly proposed nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm called competitive swarm optimizer with mutated agents (CSO-MA) and demonstrate its flexibility and out-performance relative to its competitors in a variety of optimization problems in the statistical sciences. In particular, we show the algorithm is efficient and can incorporate various cost structures or multiple user-specified nonlinear constraints. Our applications include (i) finding maximum likelihood estimates of parameters in a single cell generalized trend model to study pseudotime in bioinformatics, (ii) estimating parameters in a commonly used Rasch model in education research, (iii) finding M-estimates for a Cox regression in a Markov renewal model and (iv) matrix completion to impute missing values in a two compartment model. In addition we discuss applications to (v) select variables optimally in an ecology problem and (vi) design a car refueling experiment for the auto industry using a logistic model with multiple interacting factors.

Dual Path Structural Contrastive Embeddings for Learning Novel Objects

Learning novel classes from a very few labeled samples has attracted increasing attention in machine learning areas. Recent research on either meta-learning based or transfer-learning based paradigm demonstrates that gaining information on a good feature space can be an effective solution to achieve favorable performance on few-shot tasks. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective paradigm that decouples the tasks of learning feature representations and classifiers and only learns the feature embedding architecture from base classes via the typical transfer-learning training strategy. To maintain both the generalization ability across base and novel classes and discrimination ability within each class, we propose a dual path feature learning scheme that effectively combines structural similarity with contrastive feature construction. In this way, both inner-class alignment and inter-class uniformity can be well balanced, and result in improved performance. Experiments on three popular benchmarks show that when incorporated with a simple prototype based classifier, our method can still achieve promising results for both standard and generalized few-shot problems in either an inductive or transductive inference setting.