Nicolas Durand

Charlie Vanaret, Jean-Baptiste Gotteland, Nicolas Durand et al.

The only rigorous approaches for achieving a numerical proof of optimality in global optimization are interval-based methods that interleave branching of the search-space and pruning of the subdomains that cannot contain an optimal solution. State-of-the-art solvers generally integrate local optimization algorithms to compute a good upper bound of the global minimum over each subspace. In this document, we propose a cooperative framework in which interval methods cooperate with evolutionary algorithms. The latter are stochastic algorithms in which a population of candidate solutions iteratively evolves in the search-space to reach satisfactory solutions. Within our cooperative solver Charibde, the evolutionary algorithm and the interval-based algorithm run in parallel and exchange bounds, solutions and search-space in an advanced manner via message passing. A comparison of Charibde with state-of-the-art interval-based solvers (GlobSol, IBBA, Ibex) and NLP solvers (Couenne, BARON) on a benchmark of difficult COCONUT problems shows that Charibde is highly competitive against non-rigorous solvers and converges faster than rigorous solvers by an order of magnitude.

Mohammad Ghasemi Hamed, Mathieu Serrurier, Nicolas Durand

Having a regression model, we are interested in finding two-sided intervals that are guaranteed to contain at least a desired proportion of the conditional distribution of the response variable given a specific combination of predictors. We name such intervals predictive intervals. This work presents a new method to find two-sided predictive intervals for non-parametric least squares regression without the homoscedasticity assumption. Our predictive intervals are built by using tolerance intervals on prediction errors in the query point's neighborhood. We proposed a predictive interval model test and we also used it as a constraint in our hyper-parameter tuning algorithm. This gives an algorithm that finds the smallest reliable predictive intervals for a given dataset. We also introduce a measure for comparing different interval prediction methods yielding intervals having different size and coverage. These experiments show that our methods are more reliable, effective and precise than other interval prediction methods.

Mustapha Aznag, Mohamed Quafafou, Nicolas Durand et al.

This paper shows that the problem of web services representation is crucial and analyzes the various factors that influence on it. It presents the traditional representation of web services considering traditional textual descriptions based on the information contained in WSDL files. Unfortunately, textual web services descriptions are dirty and need significant cleaning to keep only useful information. To deal with this problem, we introduce rules based text tagging method, which allows filtering web service description to keep only significant information. A new representation based on such filtered data is then introduced. Many web services have empty descriptions. Also, we consider web services representations based on the WSDL file structure (types, attributes, etc.). Alternatively, we introduce a new representation called symbolic reputation, which is computed from relationships between web services. The impact of the use of these representations on web service discovery and recommendation is studied and discussed in the experimentation using real world web services.