Feature construction, encompassing both feature engineering, which involves the manual design of features by domain experts, and representation learning, which refers to the automated discovery of useful data representations during model construction, is a fundamental aspect of machine learning. Its goal is to transform raw data into a more suitable …
The rapid advancements in Machine Learning (ML) and Black-Box Optimization (BBO) have led to an increased reliance on benchmarking data for evaluating and comparing algorithms across diverse domain tasks. However, the effective exploitation of this data is hindered by challenges such as syntactic variability, semantic ambiguity, and lack of standardization. …
In optimization, it is well known that algorithm performance is dependent on the problem being solved. As a consequence of this, achieving good optimization results requires correctly matching an optimization problem to a specific optimization algorithm that performs well on that problem. For this to be possible, knowledge of both …
The problem of structure determination of membrane proteins is addressed with a new combination of site-directed spin labelling (SDSL) electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy and structure modelling of a protein and its conformational spaces. This new approach is aimed at structural characterization of membrane proteins and intrinsically disordered proteins. In …
Developing metaheuristics to solve optimization problems is a rapidly growing field of research. This is due to the importance of optimization problems in the scientific as well as the industrial world. The methods developed in this dissertation are based on stigmergy: a method of communication in emergent systems, where the …