Large scale data mining using genetics-based machine learning

We are living in the peta-byte era. We have larger and larger data to analyze, process and transform into useful answers for the domain experts. Robust data mining tools, able to cope with petascale volumes and/or high dimensionality producing human-understandable solutions are key on several domain areas. Genetics-based machine learning (GBML) techniques are perfect candidates for this task. Recent advances in representations, learning paradigms, and theoretical modelling have showed the competitiveness of non EC techniques in herding large scale data analysis. If evolutionary learning techniques aspire to be a relevant player in this context, they need to have the capacity of processing these vast amounts of data and they need to process this data within reasonable time. Moreover, massive computation cycles are getting cheaper and cheaper every day, allowing researchers to have access to unprecedented computational resources on the edge of petascale computing. Several topics are interlaced in these two requirements: (1) having the proper learning paradigms and knowledge representations, (2) understanding them and knowing when are they suitable for the problem at hand, (3) using efficiency enhancement techniques, and (4) transforming and visualizing the produced solutions to give back as much insight as possible to the domain experts are few of them. This tutorial will try to shed light to the above mentioned questions, following a roadmap that starts exploring what large scale means, and why large is a challenge and opportunity for GBML methods. As we will show later, opportunity has multiple facets: Efficiency enhancement techniques, representations able to cope with large dimensionality spaces, scalability of learning paradigms, and alternative programming models, each of them helping to make GBML very attractive for large-scale data mining. Given these building blocks, we will continue to unfold how we can model the scalability of the components of GBML systems targeting a better engineering effort that will make embracing large datasets routine. Finally, we will illustrate how all these ideas fit by reviewing real applications of GBML systems and what further directions will require serious consideration.