Knowledge and Data Engineering (KDE) in Predictive Modeling for Concrete Properties

Kernel methods have long played a central role in machine learning by enabling nonlinear modeling in high dimensional feature spaces. Among them, the Gaussian Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel is widely used due to its smoothness, universality, and excellent performance in supervised learning. In contrast, the Jaccard/Tanimoto coefficient, originally defined over sets and binary vectors, has achieved notable success in chemoinformatics and information retrieval. Recent studies have shown that the Jaccard/Tanimoto coefficient can be extended to real-valued vectors and interpreted as a valid kernel. In this paper, we propose a natural generalization of the Tanimoto kernel by introducing a bandwidth-like parameter, leading to the Bandwidth-Adjustable Tanimoto (BAT) kernel. We focus on the shared structure of the BAT and the Gaussian RBF kernels in terms of their infinite polynomial expansions and investigate the universality of the BAT kernels, clarifying their relationship to the universal Taylor kernels. In particular, we show that by incorporating a bias term, the BAT kernel attains the universal approximation property comparable to that of the Gaussian kernel. Through experiments on classification, regression, and clustering tasks using benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that the BAT kernel performs comparably to the Gaussian kernel, while even the original Tanimoto kernel achieves competitive results. In particular, the BAT kernel attains performance on par with the Gaussian kernel in classification tasks, and it slightly surpasses the Gaussian kernel in regression and clustering tasks. A comparison of their functional forms, together with experiments on both regression and classification tasks involving nonlinear structures, further shows that the BAT kernel yields smoother predictive surfaces than the RBF kernel. Overall, our results indicate that the BAT kernel offers universality and practical performance, making it an alternative to the Gaussian kernel.

Indonesia holds vast tourism potential, including Nusa Penida, Bali, renowned for its natural beauty. However, the adoption of modern technology to support tourism promotion and management remains limited. This study aims to compare the performance of Support Vector Machine (SVM) with Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel and Random Forest algorithms in classifying images of three main tourist attractions in Nusa Penida: Angel’s Billabong, Broken Beach, and Kelingking Beach. The dataset consists of 450 images processed using the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) method for feature extraction. Two data split scenarios (80:20 and 70:30) were applied to evaluate the algorithms based on accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics. The experimental results revealed that SVM with RBF kernel outperformed Random Forest in all scenarios, achieving the best results in the 70% training and 30% testing data split with an accuracy of 0.967, precision of 0.969, recall of 0.967, and F1-score of 0.967. While Random Forest demonstrated stable performance, it remained inferior to SVM with RBF kernel. This study concludes that SVM with RBF kernel is superior for image classification tasks, offering opportunities for implementing artificial intelligence technologies to advance the tourism sector in Indonesia.

Objective. The quantitative assessment of Parkinsonian tremor, e.g. (0, 1, 2, 3, 4) according to the Movement Disorder Society-Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale, is crucial for treating Parkinson’s disease. However, the tremor amplitude constantly fluctuates due to environmental and psychological effects on the patient. In clinical practice, clinicians assess the tremor severity for a short duration, whereas manual tremor labeling relies on the clinician’s physician experience. Therefore, automatic tremor quantification based on wearable inertial sensors and machine learning algorithms is affected by the manual labels of clinicians. In this study, an automatic modification method for the labels judged by clinicians is presented to improve Parkinsonian tremor quantitation. Approach. For the severe overlapping of dynamic feature range between different severities, an outlier modification algorithm (PCA-IQR) based on the combination of principal component analysis and interquartile range statistic rule is proposed to learn the blurred borders between different severity scores, thereby optimizing the labels. Afterward, according to the modified feature vectors, a support vector machine (SVM) with a radial basis function (RBF) kernel is proposed to classify the tremor severity. The classifier models of SVM with RBF kernel, k-nearest neighbors, and SVM with the linear kernel are compared. Main results. Experimental results show that the proposed method has high classification performance and excellent model generalization ability for tremor quantitation (accuracy: 97.93%, precision: 97.96%, sensitivity: 97.93%, F1-score: 97.94%). Significance. The proposed method may not only provide valuable assistance for clinicians to assess the tremor severity accurately, but also provides self-monitoring for patients at home and improve the assessment skills of clinicians.

Objective: Delirium is an important syndrome found in patients in the intensive care unit (ICU), however, it is usually under-recognized during treatment. This study was performed to investigate whether delirious patients can be successfully distinguished from non-delirious patients by using heart rate variability (HRV) and machine learning. Approach: Electrocardiography data of 140 patients was acquired during daily ICU care, and HRV data were analyzed. Delirium, including its type, severity, and etiologies, was evaluated daily by trained psychiatrists. HRV data and various machine learning algorithms including linear support vector machine (SVM), SVM with radial basis function (RBF) kernels, linear extreme learning machine (ELM), ELM with RBF kernels, linear discriminant analysis, and quadratic discriminant analysis were utilized to distinguish delirium patients from non-delirium patients. Main results: HRV data of 4797 ECGs were included, and 39 patients had delirium at least once during their ICU stay. The maximum classification accuracy was acquired using SVM with RBF kernels. Our prediction method based on HRV with machine learning was comparable to previous delirium prediction models using massive amounts of clinical information. Significance: Our results show that autonomic alterations could be a significant feature of patients with delirium in the ICU, suggesting the potential for the automatic prediction and early detection of delirium based on HRV with machine learning.

For hyperspectral image classification, feature extraction is a crucial pre-process for avoiding the Hughes phenomena. Some feature extraction methods such as linear discriminant analysis (LDA), nonparametric weighted feature extraction (NWFE), and their kernel versions, generalized discriminant analysis (GDA) and kernel nonparametric weighted feature extraction method (KNWFE) have been shown that they can improve the classification performance. However, for GDA and KNWFE, it is hard to find the suitable kernel parameters. Hence, although they have been published about 14 or 6 years, respectively, researchers rarely implement them for dealing with hyperspectral image classification problem. An automatic kernel parameter selection method (APS) was proposed to predetermine the appropriate radial basis function (RBF) kernel for support vector machine (SVM) and GDA. In this study, APS was applied to find the suitable RBF kernel function for KNWFE. From the experiment results on PAVIA data set, the classification performance of KNWFE still outperforms those of GDA [10] and SVM [10]. The most important of this research, the kernel parameters of GDA and KNWFE based on RBF kernel can be “automatically” determined and the researcher can implement them directly without tuning the kernel parameter.

Palm tree detection using remote sensing images has received increasing attention in recent years, concerning the issues of sustainability, productivity and profitability. There has been significant progress in the research of using machine learning techniques, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for automatic palm tree detection. However, whether CNNs can actually outperform traditional human-engineered approaches in terms of classification accuracy and detection speed is yet unknown. In the present study, we have compared human-engineered features namely histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), local binary pattern (LBP) and scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) with features extracted using pre-trained AlexNet model for detecting palm trees in high resolution images obtained via unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Support vector machines (SVM) with linear and non-linear kernels were used to classify feature vectors obtained by different feature extractors. Haar-like features used in Viola-Jones framework was also tested in the study. Results showed that features extracted from the fifth convolutional layer of AlexNet achieved the highest accuracy of 96.1% using SVM with RBF kernel as classifier, which surpassed the accuracy obtained by fully-connected CNN, namely 95.6%. The results also suggest that SVM classifier with radial basis function (RBF) kernel using LBP as features is the optimal combination as it achieved comparable accuracy but higher detection speed than CNN approaches.

Kernel functions are used in support vector machines (SVM) to compute inner product in a higher dimensional feature space. SVM classification performance depends on the chosen kernel. The radial basis function (RBF) kernel is a distance-based kernel that has been successfully applied in many tasks. This paper focuses on improving the accuracy of SVM by proposing a non-linear combination of multiple RBF kernels to obtain more flexible kernel functions. Multi-scale RBF kernels are weighted and combined. The proposed kernel allows better discrimination in the feature space. This new kernel is proved to be a Mercer’s kernel. Furthermore, evolutionary strategies (ESs) are used for adjusting the hyperparameters of SVM. Training accuracy, the bound of generalization error, and subset cross-validation on training accuracy are considered to be objective functions in the evolutionary process. The experimental results show that the accuracy of multi-scale RBF kernels is better than that of a single RBF kernel. Moreover, the subset cross-validation on training accuracy is more suitable and it yields the good results on benchmark datasets.

In the practical implementation of control of electromyography (sEMG) driven devices, algorithms should recognize the human’s motion from sEMG with fast speed and high accuracy. This study proposes two feature engineering (FE) techniques, namely, feature-vector resampling and time-lag techniques, to improve the accuracy and speed of least square support vector machine (LSSVM) for wrist palmar angle estimation from sEMG feature. The root mean square error and correlation coefficients of LSSVM with FE are 9.50 2.32 degree and 0.971 0.018 respectively. The average training time and average execution time of LSSVM with FE in processing 12600 sEMG points are 0.016 s and 0.053 s respectively. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, its estimation results are compared with those of three other methods, namely, LSSVM, radial basis function (RBF) neural network, and RBF with FE. Experimental results verify that introduction of time-lag into feature vector can greatly improve the estimation accuracy of both RBF and LSSVM; meanwhile the application of feature-vector resampling technique can significantly increase the training and execution speed of RBF neural network and LSSVM. Among different algorithms applied in this study, LSSVM with FE techniques performed best in terms of training and execution speed, as well as estimation accuracy.

Optical image provides a unique spectral and textural opportunity to acquire data free of charge in cloud-free weather conditions. However, textural information from recent Sentinel-2A data has not been sufficiently recognized. Several researches have shown that texture features are essential for extracting crop information. This study presents a new scheme that integrates spectral bands and textural features for mapping maize fields and other land cover types (i.e., build-up, trees, others, and water) and evaluates the effectiveness of random forest (RF) and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers with different kernel functions based on Sentinel 2A (S-2A) data. The textural features were derived from multiple bands of S-2A image using a grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) algorithm. To normalize the analysis of these features, Random Forest feature selection was employed. The outcomes show that S-2A images are appropriate for mapping maize fields and other land covers when the image is accessible during the growing season. The SVM classifier with a radial basis function (RBF) kernel is superior to a polynomial (P), linear (L), and sigmoid (S) kernel functions, and the RF classifiers. For the SVM_RBF, the highest overall accuracy was obtained from the integration of spectral bands and textural features at scenario 2 SVM_RBF (87.40%), followed by the combination of spectral and textural features at scenario 2 SVM_P kernel (86.56%). However, scenario 5 SVM_P kernel (85.54%), scenario 4 SVM_P kernel function (85.30%), the spectral features alone, and the SVM_P kernel function, have the highest O/A (83.90%) than that of the SVM_RBF (83.66%). The inclusion of textural features contributed significantly in mapping the smallholder’s maize field in the study area. This demonstrated the value of S-2A in agricultural research.

Nonlinear classifiers, e.g., support vector machines (SVMs) with radial basis function (RBF) kernels, have been used widely for automatic diagnosis of diseases because of their high accuracies. However, it is difficult to visualize the classifiers, and thus difficult to provide intuitive interpretation of results to physicians. We developed a new nonlinear kernel, the localized radial basis function (LRBF) kernel, and new visualization system visualization for risk factor analysis (VRIFA) that applies a nomogram and LRBF kernel to visualize the results of nonlinear SVMs and improve the interpretability of results while maintaining high prediction accuracy. Three representative medical datasets from the University of California, Irvine repository and Statlog dataset-breast cancer, diabetes, and heart disease datasets-were used to evaluate the system. The results showed that the classification performance of the LRBF is comparable with that of the RBF, and the LRBF is easy to visualize via a nomogram. Our study also showed that the LRBF kernel is less sensitive to noise features than the RBF kernel, whereas the LRBF kernel degrades the prediction accuracy more when important features are eliminated. We demonstrated the VRIFA system, which visualizes the results of linear and nonlinear SVMs with LRBF kernels, on the three datasets.

In this paper, we propose M-estimator based robust kernels for support vector machine. The main motivation for our proposed kernels is that the sum of squared difference in the widely used Gaussian radial basis function kernels is not robust to outlier or noise. In addition, inspired by using a robust loss function in support vector machine regression to control training error and the idea of robust template matching with M-estimator, we apply M-estimator techniques to Gaussian radial basis functions and form a new class of robust kernels for support vector machines. We test our proposed kernels in several classification benchmark datasets and experimental results show that SVM with proposed kernels are better than SVM with Gaussian radial basis function kernels.

In the evolving field of cybersecurity, detecting malicious activity in high-dimensional network data remains a persistent challenge for traditional machine learning (ML) techniques. This study investigates the use of convolutional variational autoencoders (VAEs) to generate latent features that enhance the performance of various ML classifiers on the 2015 NSL-KDD dataset. Classifiers, including Gaussian Naïve Bayes (GNB), support vector machines (SVMs) with Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel, decision trees, and dense neural networks, were evaluated using metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and the Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC). To assess the effectiveness of VAEs, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used as a baseline dimensionality reduction method, and performance comparisons were made. The best-performing model was an SVM with an RBF kernel, a PCA (threshold = 0.92), and a VAE with six latent features, achieving an accuracy of 82.8%, an F1 score of 0.830, and an MCC of 0.682. The results indicate that VAEs can significantly enhance classifier performance, particularly in GNB and SVM models, suggesting their value in developing more effective intrusion detection systems. Received: 23 August 2024 | Revised: 3 June 2025 | Accepted: 15 July 2025 Conflicts of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work. Data Availability Statement The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in NSL-KDD Dataset at https://github.com/t-taylor/cvaes-research/tree/main/results. Author Contribution Statement Thomas Taylor: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization. Amna Eleyan: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration. Mohammed Al-Khalidi: Validation, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision.

A movie review can be considered as an essential data source for both movie producers and potential consumers. The reviews are usually used as a benchmark for knowing the movie’s quality and are utilized as references to whether the film is worth watching. The study of sentiment analysis has received more attention from researchers. This current study aims to classify the sentiment analysis of movie reviews obtained from the IMDb site. The support vector machine (SVM) method was employed to classify the movie review’s sentiments. Meanwhile, the radial basis function (RBF) kernel and information gain (IG) were used to enhance classification. Feature selection was conducted by removing irrelevant features and selecting features with a strong correlation to classification. The IG algorithm was used for feature selection. The current study revealed that the classification accuracy of movie review sentiment analysis using the SVM algorithm, SVM + RBF kernel, and SVM+RBF Kernel+IG are 81.50%, 82.25%, and 87.25%, respectively.

In this paper, we develop an approach to exploiting kernel methods with manifold-valued data. In many computer vision problems, the data can be naturally represented as points on a Riemannian manifold. Due to the non-Euclidean geometry of Riemannian manifolds, usual Euclidean computer vision and machine learning algorithms yield inferior results on such data. In this paper, we define Gaussian radial basis function (RBF)-based positive definite kernels on manifolds that permit us to embed a given manifold with a corresponding metric in a high dimensional reproducing kernel Hilbert space. These kernels make it possible to utilize algorithms developed for linear spaces on nonlinear manifold-valued data. Since the Gaussian RBF defined with any given metric is not always positive definite, we present a unified framework for analyzing the positive definiteness of the Gaussian RBF on a generic metric space. We then use the proposed framework to identify positive definite kernels on two specific manifolds commonly encountered in computer vision: the Riemannian manifold of symmetric positive definite matrices and the Grassmann manifold, i.e., the Riemannian manifold of linear subspaces of a Euclidean space. We show that many popular algorithms designed for Euclidean spaces, such as support vector machines, discriminant analysis and principal component analysis can be generalized to Riemannian manifolds with the help of such positive definite Gaussian kernels.

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that affects people of any age, which can be detected by Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. This paper proposes a novel method called Volume of Phase Space Representation (VOPSR) to classify seizure and seizure-free EEG signals automatically. Primarily, the recorded EEG signal is disintegrated into several Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) using the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) method and the three-dimensional phase space have been reconstructed for the obtained IMFs. The volume is measured for the obtained 3D-PSR for different IMFs called VOPSR, which is used as a feature set for the classification of Epileptic seizure EEG signals. Support vector machine (SVM) is used as a classifier for the classification of epileptic and epileptic-free EEG signals. The classification performance of the proposed method is evaluated under different kernels such as Linear, Polynomial and Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernels. Finally, the proposed method outperforms noteworthy state-of-the-art classification methods in the context of epileptic EEG signals, achieving 99.13% accuracy (average) with the Linear, Polynomial, and RBF kernels. The proposed technique can be used to detect epilepsy from the EEG signals automatically without human intervention.