Seminar: Center for Biomedical Informatics
Faculty Candidate, Dr. Oguz Akbilgic
Thursday, November 20th, 11AM-12PM,
930 Madison Plaza Conference Room, Concourse Level (C-100)
Lunch Will Be Served
GENETIC ALGORITHM AIDED VARIABLE SELECTION WITH HYBRID RADIAL BASIS FUNCTION NEURAL NETWORKS: APPLICATIONS ON MEDICAL DATA
“Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.”
Occam’s Razor Principle
Followers of Occam’s Razor Principle in statistics, Akaike, Schwartz, Bozdogan etc., devoted themselves for discovering methods to find a tradeoff between simplicity and modeling accuracy. Variable Selection is the name of the methods for finding best (the simplest and most explanatory) subset of a number of given predictors. These methods are frequently implemented in almost all areas in statistics somehow related to linear regression analysis. However, linear regression is not a strong predictive tool because it can model linear relationships only. In lack of linearity, Machine Learning methods are good alternatives for modeling nonlinear statistical relationships. However, information complexity based variable selection methods have not been implemented enough in the area of machine learning. Thus, here we first introduce Hybrid Radial Basis Function Neural Networks (HRBF-NN) as a novel machine learning method for supervised prediction and classification. Then, we embed Variable Selection scheme into model to make HRBF-NN gain ability to recognize which predictors are necessary.
Dr. Oguz Akbilgic is a Post-doctoral Researcher in the Department of Chemical & Petroleum Engineering at the University of Calgary. Oguz received his BS in Mathematics and MS in Statistics. He completed his Ph.D. in Quantitative Methods at Istanbul University and his thesis research at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research interests lie in the area of statistics, and machine learning theory and applications on variety of disciplines including energy, medicine, finance and social sciences. Oguz has 20 published and under review articles in scientific journals and conferences. Also, he has been serving for several journals as a reviewer. Oguz has over ten years teaching experience in the area of statistics, mathematics, and operations research. He also taught Data Analysis for Hospital Management Certificate Program offered by Istanbul University for health care professionals. Oguz is currently carrying out a project in collaboration with MDs from University of Texas Medical Branch