Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a metaheuristic global optimization paradigm that has gained prominence in the last two decades due to its ease of application in unsupervised, complex multidimensional problems which cannot be solved using traditional deterministic algorithms. The canonical particle swarm optimizer is based on the flocking behavior and social cooperation of birds and fish schools and draws heavily from the evolutionary behavior of these organisms. This paper serves to provide a thorough survey of the PSO algorithm with special emphasis on the development, deployment and improvements of its most basic as well as some of the very recent state-of-the-art implementations. Concepts and directions on choosing the inertia weight, constriction factor, cognition and social weights and perspectives on convergence, parallelization, elitism, niching and discrete optimization as well as neighborhood topologies are outlined. Hybridization attempts with other evolutionary and swarm paradigms in selected applications are covered and an up-to-date review is put forward for the interested reader.

Deep learning has solved a problem that as little as five years ago was thought by many to be intractable -the automatic recognition of patterns in data; and it can do so with an accuracy that often surpasses that of human beings. It has solved problems beyond the realm of traditional, hand-crafted machine learning algorithms and captured the imagination of practitioners trying to make sense out of the flood of data that now inundates our society. As public awareness of the efficacy of deep learning increases so does the desire to make use of it. But even for highly trained professionals it can be daunting to approach the rapidly increasing body of knowledge produced by experts in the field. Where does one start? How does one determine if a particular Deep Learning model is applicable to their problem? How does one train and deploy such a network? A primer on the subject can be a good place to start. With that in mind, we present an overview of some of the key multilayer artificial neural networks that comprise deep learning. We also discuss some new automatic architecture optimization protocols that use multi-agent approaches. Further, since guaranteeing system uptime is becoming critical to many computer applications, we include a section on using neural networks for fault detection and subsequent mitigation. This is followed by an exploratory survey of several application areas where deep learning has emerged as a game-changing technology: anomalous behavior detection in financial applications or in financial time-series forecasting, predictive and prescriptive analytics, medical image processing and analysis and power systems research. The thrust of this review is to outline emerging areas of application-oriented research within the deep learning community as well as to provide a handy reference to researchers seeking to use deep learning in their work for what it does best: statistical pattern recognition with unparalleled learning capacity with the ability to scale with information.

Deep learning has taken over - both in problems beyond the realm of traditional, hand-crafted machine learning paradigms as well as in capturing the imagination of the practitioner sitting on top of petabytes of data. While the public perception about the efficacy of deep neural architectures in complex pattern recognition tasks grows, sequentially up-to-date primers on the current state of affairs must follow. In this review, we seek to present a refresher of the many different stacked, connectionist networks that make up the deep learning architectures followed by automatic architecture optimization protocols using multi-agent approaches. Further, since guaranteeing system uptime is fast becoming an indispensable asset across multiple industrial modalities, we include an investigative section on testing neural networks for fault detection and subsequent mitigation. This is followed by an exploratory survey of several application areas where deep learning has emerged as a game-changing technology - be it anomalous behavior detection in financial applications or financial time-series forecasting, predictive and prescriptive analytics, medical imaging, natural language processing or power systems research. The thrust of this review is on outlining emerging areas of application-oriented research within the deep learning community as well as to provide a handy reference to researchers seeking to embrace deep learning in their work for what it is: statistical pattern recognizers with unparalleled hierarchical structure learning capacity with the ability to scale with information.

Fuzzy clustering has become a widely used data mining technique and plays an important role in grouping, traversing and selectively using data for user specified applications. The deterministic Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm may result in suboptimal solutions when applied to multidimensional data in real-world, time-constrained problems. In this paper the Quantum-behaved Particle Swarm Optimization (QPSO) with a fully connected topology is coupled with the Fuzzy C-Means Clustering algorithm and is tested on a suite of datasets from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. The global search ability of the QPSO algorithm helps in avoiding stagnation in local optima while the soft clustering approach of FCM helps to partition data based on membership probabilities. Clustering performance indices such as F-Measure, Accuracy, Quantization Error, Intercluster and Intracluster distances are reported for competitive techniques such as PSO K-Means, QPSO K-Means and QPSO FCM over all datasets considered. Experimental results indicate that QPSO FCM provides comparable and in most cases superior results when compared to the others.

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