Search results for "SELECTION"
showing 10 items of 1940 documents
Biological adaptation in light of the Lewontin–Williams (a)symmetry
2022
Neo-Darwinism characterises biological adaptation as a one-sided process, in which organisms adapt to their environment but not vice versa. This asymmetric relationship – here called Williams’ asymmetry – is called into question by Niche Construction Theory, which emphasises that organisms and their environments often mutually affect each other. Here we clarify that Williams’ asymmetry is specifically concerned with (quasi-) directed modifications towards phenotypes that increase individual fitness. This directedness – which drives the adaptive fit between organism and environment – entails far more than the mere presence of cause-effect relationships. We argue that difficulties with invoki…
Signal processing techniques for robust sound event recognition
2019
The computational analysis of acoustic scenes is today a topic of major interest, with a growing community focused on designing machines capable of identifying and understanding the sounds produced in our environment, similar to how humans perform this task. Although these domains have not reached the industrial popularity of other related audio domains, such as speech recognition or music analysis, applications designed to identify the occurrence of sounds in a given scenario are rapidly increasing. These applications are usually limited to a set of sound classes, which must be defined beforehand. In order to train sound classification models, representative sets of sound events are record…
Intelligent solutions for real-life data-driven applications
2017
The subject of this thesis belongs to the topic of machine learning or, specifically, to the development of advanced methods for regression analysis, clustering, and anomaly detection. Industry is constantly seeking improved production practices and minimized production time and costs. In connection to this, several industrial case studies are presented in which mathematical models for predicting paper quality were proposed. The most important variables for the prediction models are selected based on information-theoretic measures and regression trees approach. The rest of the original papers are devoted to unsupervised machine learning. The main focus is developing advanced spectral cluster…
Conception de documents numériques : Parcours méthodologique
2009
There is a strong social demand for studies of digital document. Yet our models of society and education are struggling to integrate issues related to these types of documents. However, the subject is less than half a century old, and so it is hardly surprising that the writing and training practices are just being developed. Like the book, the digital document involves many different skills and techniques in its development. The list of jobs tends to grow steadily: ergonomists, referencing specialists, information architects, programmers, designers, integrators ... It is therefore difficult to have a global view on all this know-how and the related methodologies. This special edition seeks…
Multiple mini-interviews as a selection tool for initial teacher education admissions
2022
This study investigates the reliability of multiple mini interviews (MMIs) to select students for classroom and special education teacher programs (n = 418) using intraclass correlations and cross-classified multilevel modeling. The results indicated mostly small effects of clustering of applicants to different interviewers and five-station circuits. The largest variance components in the MMI total score were for applicants (63.3%) and measurement error (20.6%), while the variance component for the interviewer was relatively small (11.6–14.4%). The applicants' and interviewers' perceptions were positive. This study provides evidence for the use of MMIs as a reliable tool for initial teacher…
Comparative transcriptomics of albino and warningly‐coloured caterpillars
2021
Abstract Coloration is perhaps one of the most prominent adaptations for survival and reproduction of many taxa. Coloration is of particular importance for aposematic species, which rely on their coloring and patterning acting as a warning signal to deter predators. Most research has focused on the evolution of warning coloration by natural selection. However, little information is available for color mutants of aposematic species, particularly at the genomic level. Here, I compare the transcriptomes of albino mutant caterpillars of the aposematic wood tiger moth (Arctia plantaginis) to those of their full sibs having their distinctive orange‐black warning coloration. The results showed >29…
Camouflage accuracy in Sahara-Sahel desert rodents
2020
1.Camouflage helps animals to hide from predators and is therefore key to survival. Although widespread convergence of animal phenotypes to their natural environment is well established, there is a lack of knowledge about how species compromise camouflage accuracy across different background types in their habitat. 2.Here we tested how background matching has responded to top‐down selection by avian and mammalian predators using Sahara‐Sahel desert rodents in North Africa. 3.We show that the fur coloration of several species has become an accurate match to different types of desert habitats. This is supported by a correlation analysis of colour and pattern metrics, investigation of animal‐t…
The Eurasian Treecreeper (Certhia familiaris) has an effective camouflage against mammalian but not avian vision in boreal forests
2022
A well-known example of visual camouflage in birds is the plumage coloration of the Eurasian Treecreeper Certhia familiaris, yet this species’ camouflage has never been objectively quantified. Here, we quantify treecreeper camouflage in its boreal forest habitat, test whether treecreepers better match tree backgrounds at nest site, territory or habitat spatial scales, and explore which common tree species provide the best background match. Using photographic data of the birds and forested backgrounds, we test their background match using human, ferret and avian vision modelling. We found that a treecreeper’s wing and mantle provided closest background matching, whereas the wing stripe and t…
Automatic surrogate modelling technique selection based on features of optimization problems
2019
A typical scenario when solving industrial single or multiobjective optimization problems is that no explicit formulation of the problem is available. Instead, a dataset containing vectors of decision variables together with their objective function value(s) is given and a surrogate model (or metamodel) is build from the data and used for optimization and decision-making. This data-driven optimization process strongly depends on the ability of the surrogate model to predict the objective value of decision variables not present in the original dataset. Therefore, the choice of surrogate modelling technique is crucial. While many surrogate modelling techniques have been discussed in the liter…
A comparison between two feature selection algorithms
2017
This article provides a comparison of two feature selection algorithms, Information Gain Thresholding and Koller and Sahami's algorithm in the context of text document classification on the Reuters Corpus Volume 1 dataset. The algorithms were evaluated by testing the performance of classifiers trained on the features they select from a given dataset. Results show that Koller and Sahami's algorithm consistently outperforms Information Gain Thresholding by capturing interactions between features and avoiding redundancy among features, although it achieves its gains through increased complexity and longer running time.