Rough set theory, as one of the most useful soft computing methods dealing with vague and uncertain information, has been successfully applied to many fields, and one of its main applications is to perform attribute reduction. Although many heuristic attribute reduction algorithms have been proposed within the framework of the rough set theory, these methods are still computationally time consuming. In order to overcome this deficit, we propose, in this paper, two quick feature selection algorithms based on the neighbor inconsistent pair, which can reduce the time consumed in finding a reduct. At first, we propose several concepts regarding simplified decision table(U') and neighbor inconsistent pairs. Based on neighbor inconsistent pairs, we constructed two new attribute significance measures. Furthermore, we put forward two new attribute reduction algorithms based on quick neighbor inconsistent pairs. The key characteristic of the presented algorithms is that they only need to calculate U'/R once under the process of selecting the best attribute from attribute sets: C - R, while most existing algorithms need to calculate partition of U' for |C - R| times. In addition, the proposed algorithms need only to deal with the equivalent classes in U'/R that contain at least one neighbor inconsistent pair, while most existing algorithms need to consider all objects in U'. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms are feasible and efficient.

In complex pattern recognition tasks, objects are typically characterized by means of multimodality attributes, including categorical, numerical, text, image, audio, and even videos. In these cases, data are usually high dimensional, structurally complex, and granular. Those attributes exhibit some redundancy and irrelevant information. The evaluation, selection, and combination of multimodality attributes pose great challenges to traditional classification algorithms. Multikernel learning handles multimodality attributes by using different kernels to extract information coming from different attributes. However, it cannot consider the aspects fuzziness in fuzzy classification. Fuzzy rough sets emerge as a powerful vehicle to handle fuzzy and uncertain attribute reduction. In this paper, we design a framework of multimodality attribute reduction based on multikernel fuzzy rough sets. First, a combination of kernels based on set theory is defined to extract fuzzy similarity for fuzzy classification with multimodality attributes. Then, a model of multikernel fuzzy rough sets is constructed. Finally, we design an efficient attribute reduction algorithm for large scale multimodality fuzzy classification based on the proposed model. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and the corresponding algorithm.

Product quantization (PQ) seems to have become the most efficient framework of performing approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search for high-dimensional data. However, almost all existing PQ-based ANN techniques uniformly allocate precious bit budget to each subspace. This is not optimal, because data are often not evenly distributed among different subspaces. A better strategy is to achieve an improved balance between data distribution and bit budget within each subspace. Motivated by this observation, we propose to develop an optimized PQ (OPQ) technique, named distribution sensitive PQ (DSPQ) in this paper. The DSPQ dynamically analyzes and compares the data distribution based on a newly defined aggregate degree for high-dimensional data; whenever further optimization is feasible, resources such as memory and bits can be dynamically rearranged from one subspace to another. Our experimental results have shown that the strategy of bit rearrangement based on aggregate degree achieves modest improvements on most datasets. Moreover, our approach is orthogonal to the existing optimization strategy for PQ; therefore, it has been found that distribution sensitive OPQ can even outperform previous OPQ in the literature.

Wind power curve modeling is a challenging task due to the existence of inconsistent data, in which the recorded wind power is far away from the theoretical wind power at a given wind speed. In this case, confronted with these samples, the estimated errors of wind power will become large. Thus, the estimated errors will present two properties: heteroscedasticity and error distribution with a long tail. In this paper, according to the above-mentioned error characteristics, the heteroscedastic spline regression model (HSRM) and robust spline regression model (RSRM) are proposed to obtain more accurate power curves even in the presence of the inconsistent samples. The results of power curve modeling on the real-world data show the effectiveness of HSRM and RSRM in different seasons. As HSRM and RSRM are optimized by variational Bayesian, except the deterministic power curves, probabilistic power curves, which can be used to detect the inconsistent samples, can also be obtained. Additionally, with the data processed by replacing the wind power in the detected inconsistent samples with the wind power on the estimated power curve, the forecasting results show that more accurate wind power forecasts can be obtained using the above-mentioned data processing method.

In conventional wisdom of video modeling, the background is often treated as the primary target and foreground is derived using the technique of background subtraction. Based on the observation that foreground and background are two sides of the same coin, we propose to treat them as peer unknown variables and formulate a joint estimation problem, called Hierarchical modeling and Alternating Optimization (HMAO). The motivation behind our hierarchical extensions of background and foreground models is to better incorporate a priori knowledge about the disparity between background and foreground. For background, we decompose it into temporally low-frequency and high-frequency components for the purpose of better characterizing the class of video with dynamic background; for foreground, we construct a Markov random field prior at a spatially low resolution as the pivot to facilitate the noise-resilient refinement at higher resolutions. Built on hierarchical extensions of both models, we show how to successively refine their joint estimates under a unified framework known as alternating direction multipliers method. Experimental results have shown that our approach produces more discriminative background and demonstrates better robustness to noise than other competing methods. When compared against current state-of-the-art techniques, HMAO achieves at least comparable and often superior performance in terms of F-measure scores, especially for video containing dynamic and complex background.