A Novel Incremental Attribute Reduction Algorithm Based on Intuitionistic Fuzzy Partition Distance

Attribute reduction,also known as feature selection,for decision information systems is one of the most pivotal issues in machine learning and data mining.Approaches based on the rough set theory and some extensions were proved to be efficient for dealing with the problemof attribute reduction.Unfortunately,the intuitionistic fuzzy sets based methods have not received much interest,while these methods are well-known as a very powerful approach to noisy decision tables,i.e.,data tables with the low initial classification accuracy.Therefore,this paper provides a novel incremental attribute reductionmethod to dealmore effectivelywith noisy decision tables,especially for highdimensional ones.In particular,we define a new reduct and then design an original attribute reduction method based on the distance measure between two intuitionistic fuzzy partitions.It should be noted that the intuitionistic fuzzypartitiondistance iswell-knownas aneffectivemeasure todetermine important attributes.More interestingly,an incremental formula is also developed to quickly compute the intuitionistic fuzzy partition distance in case when the decision table increases in the number of objects.This formula is then applied to construct an incremental attribute reduction algorithm for handling such dynamic tables.Besides,some experiments are conducted on real datasets to show that our method is far superior to the fuzzy rough set based methods in terms of the size of reduct and the classification accuracy.

Inference of Global HIV-1 Sequence Patterns and Preliminary FeatureAnalysis

The epidemiology of HIV-1 varies in different areas of the world, and it is possible that this complexity may leave unique footprints in the viral genome. Thus, we attempted to find significant patterns in global HIV-1 genome sequences. By applying the rule inference algorithm RIPPER (Repeated Incremental Pruning to Produce Error Reduction) to multiple sequence alignments of Env sequences from four classes of compiled datasets, we generated four sets of signature patterns. We found that these patterns were able to distinguish southeastern Asian from non- southeastern Asian sequences with 97.5% accuracy, Chinese from non-Chinese sequences with 98.3% accuracy, African from non-African sequences with 88.4% accuracy, and southern African from non-southern African sequences with 91.2% accuracy. These patterns showed different associations with subtypes and with amino acid positions. In addition, some signature patterns were characteristic of the geographic area from which the sample was taken. Amino acid features corresponding to the phylogenetic clustering of HIV-1 sequences were consistent with some of the deduced patterns. Using a combination of patterns inferred from subtypes B, C, and all subtypes chimeric with CRF01_AE worldwide, we found that signature patterns of subtype C were extremely common in some sampled countries (for example, Zambia in southern Africa), which may hint at the origin of this HIV-1 subtype and the need to pay special attention to this area of Africa. Signature patterns of subtype B sequences were associated with different countries. Even more, there are distinct patterns at single position 21 with glycine, leucine and isoleucine corresponding to subtype C, B and all possible recombination forms chimeric with CRF01_AE, which also indicate distinct geographic features. Our method widens the scope of inference of signature from geographic, genetic, and genomic viewpoints. These findings may provide a valuable reference for epidemiological research or vaccine design.