Victoria Peterson

Victoria Peterson, Akshat Srivastava, Raghav Prabhakar

We present a Spatially Embedded Evolutionary Algorithm where robot individuals exist in a physically simulated 2D environment, must navigate to encounter potential mates, and compete for survival under various spatially-aware selection pressures. Using HyperNEAT evolved neural controllers for ARIEL gecko-inspired quadrupeds in MuJoCo, we investigate how spatial structure fundamentally alters evolutionary dynamics. Our experiments show a modest 4.9% difference in peak fitness between proximity-based and random pairing possibly within stochastic variation while combining spatial parent selection with stochastic death selection produces unstable population dynamics. We discover a continuous phase transition in energy-based selection experiments, with critical zone count separating extinction-dominated and explosion-dominated regimes. Our density-dependent death selection mechanism achieves 97% completion rates but causes fitness decline, revealing a fundamental dilemma where decoupled mechanisms produce bistable dynamics, positively coupled mechanisms create counter-selection pressures, and only deterministic fitness-based selection maintains stability. These findings provide important constraints for future spatial EA design.

Nicolás Nieto, Francisco Ibarrola, Victoria Peterson et al.

Extreme Learning Machines (ELMs) have become a popular tool in the field of Artificial Intelligence due to their very high training speed and generalization capabilities. Another advantage is that they have a single hyper-parameter that must be tuned up: the number of hidden nodes. Most traditional approaches dictate that this parameter should be chosen smaller than the number of available training samples in order to avoid over-fitting. In fact, it has been proved that choosing the number of hidden nodes equal to the number of training samples yields a perfect training classification with probability 1 (w.r.t. the random parameter initialization). In this article we argue that in spite of this, in some cases it may be beneficial to choose a much larger number of hidden nodes, depending on certain properties of the data. We explain why this happens and show some examples to illustrate how the model behaves. In addition, we present a pruning algorithm to cope with the additional computational burden associated to the enlarged ELM. Experimental results using electroencephalography (EEG) signals show an improvement in performance with respect to traditional ELM approaches, while diminishing the extra computing time associated to the use of large architectures.

Victoria Peterson, Hugo Leonardo Rufiner, Ruben Daniel Spies

A brain computer interface (BCI) is a system which provides direct communication between the mind of a person and the outside world by using only brain activity (EEG). The event-related potential (ERP)-based BCI problem consists of a binary pattern recognition. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is widely used to solve this type of classification problems, but it fails when the number of features is large relative to the number of observations. In this work we propose a penalized version of the sparse discriminant analysis (SDA), called Kullback-Leibler penalized sparse discriminant analysis (KLSDA). This method inherits both the discriminative feature selection and classification properties of SDA and it also improves SDA performance through the addition of Kullback-Leibler class discrepancy information. The KLSDA method is design to automatically select the optimal regularization parameters. Numerical experiments with two real ERP-EEG datasets show that this new method outperforms standard SDA.