Dots-And-Boxes is a well-known and widely-played combinatorial game. While the rules of play are very simple, the state space for even very small games is extremely large, and finding the outcome under optimal play is correspondingly hard. In this paper we introduce a Dots-And-Boxes solver which is significantly faster than the current state-of-the-art: over an order-of-magnitude faster on seve...

In this work we investigate several issues in order to improve the performance of probabilistic estimation trees (PETs). First, we derive a new probability smoothing that takes into account the class distributions of all the nodes from the root to each leaf. Secondly, we introduce or adapt some new splitting criteria aimed at improving probability estimates rather than improving classification ...

Internet Traffic classification is vital for various network activities such as detection of malware. Security is major issue of concern which accounts for the reputation and reliability of system. Malware effects the system adversely results in data loss or abnormal functioning. Hence, detection and as well as removal of malware is crucial. Combining set of classifiers called as ensembling pro...

We describe an experimental study of pruning methods for decision tree classiiers when the goal is minimizing loss rather than error. In addition to two common methods for error minimization, CART's cost-complexity pruning and C4.5's error-based pruning, we study the extension of cost-complexity pruning to loss and one pruning variant based on the Laplace correction. We perform an empirical com...

A new class of algorithms based on the triangle inequality has recently been proposed for use in contentbased image retrieval. These algorithms rely on comparing a set of key images to the database images, and storing the computed distances. Query images are later compared to the keys, and the triangle inequality is used to speedily compute lower bounds on the distance from the query to each of...

Pretropisms are candidates for the leading exponents of Puiseux series that represent positive dimensional solution sets of polynomial systems. We propose a new algorithm to both horizontally and vertically prune the tree of edges of a tuple of Newton polytopes. We provide experimental results with our preliminary implementation in Sage that demonstrates that our algorithm compares favorably to...

In saliency based pruning algorithms a pruning decision is made based on an ordering of the parameters. We will in this article focus on the fact that this ordering is invariant under certain transformations, and with that knowledge an equivalence class of algorithms is developed all yielding identical prunings. A sub-class is demonstrated to have a simple but sensible interpretation in terms o...

In this article we review standard null-move pruning and introduce our extended version of it, which we call verified null-move pruning. In verified null-move pruning, whenever the shallow null-move search indicates a fail-high, instead of cutting off the search from the current node, the search is continued with reduced depth. Our experiments with verified null-move pruning show that on averag...