Abstract
Taxi trip duration affects the efficiency of operation, the satisfaction of drivers, and, mainly, the satisfaction of the customers, therefore, it is an important metric for the taxi companies. Especially, knowing the predicted trip duration beforehand is very useful to allocate taxis to the taxi stands and also finding the best route for different trips. The existence of hyperconnected network can help to collect data from connected taxis in the city environment and use it collaboratively between taxis for a better prediction. As a matter of fact, the existence of high volume of data, for each individual taxi, several models can be generated. Moreover, taking into account the difference between the data collected by taxis, this data can be organized into different levels of hierarchy. However, finding the best level of granularity which leads to the best model for an individual taxi could be computationally expensive. In this paper, the use of metalearning for addressing the problem of selection of the right level of the hierarchy and the right algorithm that generates the model with the best performance for each taxi is proposed. The proposed approach is evaluated by the data collected in the Drive-In project. The results show that metalearning helps the selection of the algorithm with the best performance.

Abstract
We describe a data mining workflow for predictive maintenance of the Air Pressure System in heavy trucks. Our approach is composed by four steps: (i) a filter that excludes a subset of features and examples based on the number of missing values (ii) a metafeatures engineering procedure used to create a meta-level features set with the goal of increasing the information on the original data; (iii) a biased sampling method to deal with the class imbalance problem; and (iv) boosted trees to learn the target concept. Results show that the metafeatures engineering and the biased sampling method are critical for improving the performance of the classifier.

Abstract
With rising healthcare costs, using health personnel and resources efficiently and effectively is critical. International cross-country and simple worker-to-population ratio comparisons are frequently used for improving the efficiency of health systems, planning of health human resources and guiding policy changes. These comparisons are made between countries typically of the same continental region. However, if used imprudently, inconsistencies arising from frail comparisons of health systems may outweigh the positive benefits brought by new policy insights. In this work, we propose a different approach to international health system comparisons. We present a methodology to group similar countries in terms of mortality, morbidity, utilisation levels, and human and physical resources, which are all factors that influence health gains. Instead of constructing an absolute rank or comparing against the average, the method finds countries that share similar ground, upon which more reliable comparisons can then be conducted, including performance analysis. We apply this methodology using data from the World Health Organization's Health for All database, and we present some interesting empirical relationships between indicators that may provide new insights into how such information can be used to promote better healthcare planning and policy guidance.

Abstract
The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the most studied optimization problems. Various meta heuristics (MHs) have been proposed and investigated on many instances of this problem. It is widely accepted that the best MH varies for different instances. Ideally, one should be able to recommend the best MHs for a new TSP instance without having to execute them. However, this is a very difficult task. We address this task by using a meta-learning approach based on label ranking algorithms. These algorithms build a mapping that relates the characteristics of those instances (i.e., the meta-features) with the relative performance (i.e., the ranking) of MHs, based on (meta-)data extracted from TSP instances that have been already solved by those MHs. The success of this approach depends on the quality of the meta-features that describe the instances. In this work, we investigate four different sets of meta-features based on different measurements of the properties of TSP instances: edge and vertex measures, complex network measures, properties from the MHs, and subsampling landmarkers properties. The models are investigated in four different TSP scenarios presenting symmetry and connection strength variations. The experimental results indicate that meta-learning models can accurately predict rankings of MHs for different TSP scenarios. Good solutions for the investigated TSP instances can be obtained from the prediction of rankings of MHs, regardless of the learning algorithm used at the meta level. The experimental results also show that the definition of the set of meta-features has an important impact on the quality of the solutions obtained.

Abstract
We present a dynamic web tool that allows interactive search and visualization of large news archives using an entity-centric approach. Users are able to search entities using keyword phrases expressing news stories or events and the system retrieves the most relevant entities to the user query based on automatically extracted and indexed entity profiles. From the computational journalism perspective, TimeMachine allows users to explore media content through time using automatic identification of entity names, jobs, quotations and relations between entities from co-occurrences networks extracted from the news articles. TimeMachine demo is available at http://maquinadotempo.sapo.pt/. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.

Abstract
The selection of metafeatures for metalearning (MtL) is often an ad hoc process. The lack of a proper motivation for the choice of a metafeature rather than others is questionable and may originate a loss of valuable information for a given problem (e.g., use of class entropy and not attribute entropy). We present a framework to systematically generate metafeatures in the context of MtL. This framework decomposes a metafeature into three components: meta-function, object and post-processing. The automatic generation of metafeatures is triggered by the selection of a meta-function used to systematically generate metafeatures from all possible combinations of object and post-processing alternatives. We executed experiments by addressing the problem of algorithm selection in classification datasets. Results show that the sets of systematic metafeatures generated from our framework are more informative than the non-systematic ones and the set regarded as state-of-the-art.