Support Vector Machines (SVMs) deliver stateof-the-art performance in real-world applications and are now established as one of the standard tools for machine learning and data mining. A key problem of these methods is how to choose an optimal kernel and how to optimise its parameters. The real-world applications have also emphasised the need to consider a combination of kernelsa multiple kernel-in order to boost the classification accuracy by adapting the kernel to the characteristics of heterogeneous data. This combination could be linear or non-linear, weighted or un-weighted. Several approaches have been already proposed to find a linear weighted kernel combination and to optimise its parameters together with the SVM parameters, but no approach has tried to optimise a non-linear weighted combination. Therefore, our goal is to automatically generate and adapt a kernel combination (linear or nonlinear, weighted or un-weighted, according to the data) and to optimise both the kernel parameters and SVM parameters by evolutionary means in a unified framework. We will denote our combination as a kernel of kernels (KoK). Numerical experiments show that the SVM algorithm, involving the evolutionary kernel of kernels (eKoK) we propose, performs better than well-known classic kernels whose parameters were optimised and a state of the art convex linear and an evolutionary linear, respectively, kernel combinations. These results emphasise the fact that the SVM algorithm could require a non-linear weighted combination of kernels.

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Manual design of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) capable of performing very well on a wide range of problems is a difficult task. This is why we have to find other manners to construct algorithms that perform very well on some problems. One possibility (which is explored in this paper) is to let the evolution discover the optimal structure and parameters of the EA used for solving a specific problem. To this end a new model for automatic generation of EAs by evolutionary means is proposed here. The model is based on a simple Genetic Algorithm (GA). Every GA chromosome encodes an EA, which is used for solving a particular problem. Several Evolutionary Algorithms for function optimization are generated by using the considered model. Numerical experiments show that the EAs perform similarly and sometimes even better than standard approaches for several well-known benchmarking problems.

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Genetic Programming (GP) is an automated method for creating computer programs starting from a high-level description of the problem to be solved. Many variants of GP have been proposed in the recent years. In this paper we are reviewing the main GP variants with linear representation. Namely, Linear Genetic Programming, Gene Expression Programming, Multi Expression Programming, Grammatical Evolution, Cartesian Genetic Programming and Stack-Based Genetic Programming. A complete description is provided for each method. The set of applications where the methods have been applied and several Internet sites with more information about them are also given.

The stability and robustness of a complex network can be significantly improved by determining important nodes and by analyzing their tendency to group into clusters. Several centrality measures for evaluating the importance of a node in a complex network exist in the literature, each one focusing on a different perspective. Community detection algorithms can be used to determine clusters of nodes based on the network structure. This paper shows by empirical means that node importance can be evaluated by a dual perspective—by combining the traditional centrality measures regarding the whole network as one unit, and by analyzing the node clusters yielded by community detection. Not only do these approaches offer overlapping results but also complementary information regarding the top important nodes. To confirm this mechanism, we performed experiments for synthetic and real-world networks and the results indicate the interesting relation between important nodes on community and network level.