Recent studies have indicated that circular RNAs (circRNAs) play a significant role in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. However, the prediction of associations between circRNAs and diseases using conventional biological methods is constrained by numerous factors. In this study, we proposed a novel computational model called EELMCDA that combines evolutionary ensemble learning (EEL) approach and matrix feature decomposition method to predict potential circRNA-disease associations. The model firstly integrates circRNA function information, disease semantic information, and circRNA and disease gaussian interaction profile kernel (GIPK) information into an integrated matrix and constructed the corresponding feature matrix, then uses the matrix feature decomposition algorithm to obtain its important feature, and finally adopted evolutionary ensemble learning module to predict circRNA-disease associations. The average accuracy of the EELMCDA model by 5-fold cross-validation on CircR2Disease, CircAtlasv2.0, Circ2Disease, and CircRNADisease datasets were 92.40%, 92.90%, 88.91%, and 90.74%, respectively. Moreover, in case studies, the 21 of the top 30 circRNA-disease pairs with the highest EELMCDA scores were validated in recent literatures. These results further demonstrate the effectiveness of EELMCDA in predicting circRNA-disease associations.

Summary Predicting the daily tourism flow of scenic spots is of great significance for improving the management quality and the tourist experience. Affected by complex factors, daily tourism flow data have strong nonlinear characteristics. In this article, a multilayer neural network S‐CNNLSTM is put forward to make accurate short‐term tourism flow prediction. First, to reduce the redundant information between the influencing factors, sparse principal component analysis is adopted to reduce the data dimension. Then the processed data is input into a deep neural network framework that combines the convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short‐term memory (LSTM) network. CNN extracts local trends, and LSTM is introduced to learn the inner law of time series and make prediction. Finally, through the experiments with real data and the comparison algorithms, the stability and practicability of the proposed method are verified.

An effective and scalable metaheuristic algorithm termed Phase Based Optimization (PBO) for solving big optimization problems is proposed. In the natural system, the individuals with three phases which are gas phase, liquid phase and solid phase have completely different motional characteristics. PBO mimics the above three kinds of motional characteristics of individuals, and three corresponding operators, diffusion operator of gas individuals, flowing operator of liquid individuals and perturbation operator of solid individuals are devised. The diffusion operator and the flowing operator are utilized to perform the task of divergence and convergence respectively, and the perturbation operator plays a role of fine-tune search. Despite its algorithmic simplicity, PBO can effectively find a very better solution even in a high dimensional search space. The experimental results demonstrate that PBO can provide much better accuracy on optimized solutions and lower time complexity than the other state-of-the-art optimization algorithms.

In recent years, community detection has become a hot research topic in complex networks. Many of the proposed algorithms are for detecting community based on the modularity Q. However, there is a resolution limit problem in modularity optimization methods. In order to detect the community structure more effectively, a memetic particle swarm optimization algorithm (MPSOA) is proposed to optimize the modularity density by introducing particle swarm optimization-based global search operator and tabu local search operator, which is useful to keep a balance between diversity and convergence. For comparison purposes, two state-of-the-art algorithms, namely, meme-net and fast modularity, are carried on the synthetic networks and other four real-world network problems. The obtained experiment results show that the proposed MPSOA is an efficient heuristic approach for the community detection problems.

Cooperative Coevolution (CC) was introduced into evolutionary algorithms as a promising framework for tackling large scale optimization problems through a divide-and-conquer strategy. A number of decomposition methods to identify interacting variables have been proposed to construct subcomponents of a large scale problem, but if the variables are all non-separable, all the CC-based algorithms of decomposition will lose the functionality, therefore, classical CC-based algorithms are inefficient in processing non-separable problems that have many interacting variables. In this paper, a new CC framework which integrates global and local search algorithms is proposed for solving large scale optimization problems. In the stage of global cooperative coevolution, we introduce a new interacting variables grouping method named Sequential Sliding Window. When the performance of global search reaches a deviation tolerance or the variables are fully non-separable, we then use a more effective local search algorithm to subsequently search the solution space of the large scale optimization problem. The integration of global and local algorithms into CC framework can efficiently improve the capability in processing large scale non-separable problems. Experimental results on large scale optimization benchmarks show that the proposed framework is more effective than other existing CC frameworks.

Optimal approximation of linear system models is an important task in the controller design and simulation for complex dynamic systems. In this paper, we put forward a novel nature-based meta-heuristic method, called artificial raindrop algorithm, which is inspired from the phenomenon of natural rainfall, and apply it for optimal approximation of a stable linear system. It mimics the changing process of a raindrop, including the generation of raindrop, the descent of raindrop, the collision of raindrop, the flowing of raindrop and the updating of raindrop. Five corresponding operators are designed in the algorithm. Numerical experiment is carried on the optimal approximation of a typical stable linear system in two fixed search intervals. The result demonstrates better performance of the proposed algorithm comparing with that of other five state-of-the-art optimization algorithms.

The artificial endocrine system (AES) is a new branch of natural computing which uses ideas and takes inspiration from the information processing mechanisms contained in the mammalian endocrine system. It is a fast growing research field in which a variety of new theoretical models and technical methods have been studied for dealing with complex and significant problems. An overview of some recent advances in AES modeling and its applications is provided in this paper, based on the major and latest works. This review covers theoretical modeling, combinations of algorithms, and typical application fields. A number of challenges that can be undertaken to help move the field forward are discussed according to the current state of the AES approach.

The natural immune system is an important resource full of inspirations for the theory researchers and the engineering developers to design some powerful information processing methods aiming at difficult problems. Based on this consideration, a novel optimal-searching algorithm, the immune mechanism based evolutionary algorithm - IMEA, is proposed for the purpose of finding an optimal/quasi-optimal solution in a multi-dimensional space. Different from the ordinary evolutionary algorithms, on one hand, due to the long-term memory, IMEA has a better capability of learning from its experience, and on the other hand, with the clonal selection, it is able to keep from the premature convergence of population. With the simulation on autonomous robot control, it is proved that IMEA is good at the task of adaptive adjustment (offline), and it can improve the robot's capability of reinforcement learning, so as to make itself able to sense its surrounding dynamic environment.