Abstract
In this work we explore the dissimilarity between symmetric word pairs, by comparing the inter-word distance distribution of a word to that of its reversed complement. We propose a new measure of dissimilarity between such distributions. Since symmetric pairs with different patterns could point to evolutionary features, we search for the pairs with the most dissimilar behaviour. We focus our study on the complete human genome and its repeat-masked version. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.

Abstract
Utility companies rely on solar radiation forecasting models to control the supply and demand of energy as well as the operability of the grid. They use these predictive models to schedule power plan operations, negotiate prices in the electricity market and improve the performance of solar technologies in general. This paper proposes a novel method for global horizontal irradiance forecasting. The method is based on an ensemble approach, in which individual competing models are arbitrated by a metalearning layer. The goal of arbitrating individual forecasters is to dynamically combine them according to their aptitude in the input data. We validate our proposed model for solar radiation forecasting using data collected by a real-world provider. The results from empirical experiments show that the proposed method is competitive with other methods, including current state-of-the-art methods used for time series forecasting tasks.

Abstract
We describe different scenarios where a learning mechanism is capable of acquiring experience on a source task, and subsequently exploit such experience on a target task. The core ideas behind this ability to transfer knowledge from one task to another have been studied in the machine learning literature under different titles and perspectives. Here we describe some of them under the names of inductive transfer, transfer learning, multitask learning, meta-searching, meta-generalization, and domain adaptation. © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2011, 2017

Abstract
The problem of Label Ranking is receiving increasing attention from several research communities. The algorithms that have been developed/adapted to treat rankings of a fixed set of labels as the target object, including several different types of decision trees (DT). One DT-based algorithm, which has been very successful in other tasks but which has not been adapted for label ranking is the Random Forests (RF) algorithm. RFs are an ensemble learning method that combines different trees obtained using different randomization techniques. In this work, we propose an ensemble of decision trees for Label Ranking, based on Random Forests, which we refer to as Label Ranking Forests (LRF). Two different algorithms that learn DT for label ranking are used to obtain the trees. We then compare and discuss the results of LRF with standalone decision tree approaches. The results indicate that the method is highly competitive.

Abstract
This work addresses the problem of selecting Tensor Factorization algorithms for the Context-aware Filtering recommendation task using a metalearning approach. The most important challenge of applying metalearning on new problems is the development of useful measures able to characterize the data, i.e. metafeatures. We propose an extensive and exhaustive set of metafeatures to characterize Context-aware Filtering recommendation task. These metafeatures take advantage of the tensor's hierarchical structure via slice operations. The algorithm selection task is addressed as a Label Ranking problem, which ranks the Tensor Factorization algorithms according to their expected performance, rather than simply selecting the algorithm that is expected to obtain the best performance. A comprehensive experimental work is conducted on both levels, baselevel and metalevel (Tensor Factorization and Label Ranking, respectively). The results show that the proposed metafeatures lead to metamodels that tend to rank Tensor Factorization algorithms accurately and that the selected algorithms present high recommendation performance.

Abstract
Machine Learning (ML) has been successfully applied to a wide range of domains and applications. One of the techniques behind most of these successful applications is Ensemble Learning (EL), the field of ML that gave birth to methods such as Random Forests or Boosting. The complexity of applying these techniques together with the market scarcity on ML experts, has created the need for systems that enable a fast and easy drop-in replacement for ML libraries. Automated machine learning (autoML) is the field of ML that attempts to answers these needs. We propose autoBagging, an autoML system that automatically ranks 63 bagging workflows by exploiting past performance and metalearning. Results on 140 classification datasets from the OpenML platform show that autoBagging can yield better performance than the Average Rank method and achieve results that are not statistically different from an ideal model that systematically selects the best workflow for each dataset. For the purpose of reproducibility and generalizability, autoBagging is publicly available as an R package on CRAN.