This paper investigates the capabilities of the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) meta-heuristic for solving the maximum clique problem, the goal of which is to find a largest set of pairwise adjacent vertices in a graph. We propose and compare two different instantiations of a generic ACO algorithm for this problem. Basically, the generic ACO algorithm successively generates maximal cliques throug...

The accountable care organization (ACO) model of health care delivery is rapidly being implemented under government and private-sector initiatives. The model requires that each ACO have a defined patient population for which the ACO will be held accountable for both total cost of care and quality performance. However, there is no empirical evidence about the best way to define how patients are ...

We study the class of polynomial threshold functions using harmonic analysis and apply the results to derive lower bounds related to ACo functions. A Boolean function is polynomial threshold if it can be represented as a sign function of a sparse polynomial (one that consists of a polynomial number of terms). Our main result is that the class of polynomial threshold functions can be characteriz...

BACKGROUND The Accountable Care Organization (ACO) is one of the new models of health care delivery in the U.S. To date, little is known about the characteristics of health care organizations that have joined ACOs. We report on the findings of a survey of primary care clinics, the objective of which was to investigate the opinions of clinic management about participation in ACOs, and the charac...

In this article, we study the relationship between the two techniques known as ant colony optimization (ACO) and stochastic gradient descent. More precisely, we show that some empirical ACO algorithms approximate stochastic gradient descent in the space of pheromones, and we propose an implementation of stochastic gradient descent that belongs to the family of ACO algorithms. We then use this i...

The crowding population based ant colony optimization algorithm (CP-ACO) uses a different pheromone update in comparison to other ACO algorithms. In this paper, crowding population based ant colony optimization algorithm is proposed to solve service restoration problem. The most notable achievement featured in this paper is run time reduction of algorithm to solve the service restoration task. ...

In this article we study the feasibility of the Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) algorithm for finding optimal Kanban allocations in Kanban systems represented by Stochastic Petri Net (SPN) models. Like other optimisation algorithms inspired by nature, such as Simulated Annealing/Genetic Algorithms, the ACO algorithm contains a large number of adjustable parameters. Thus we study the influence of ...

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been considered for visible light communication (VLC) thanks to its ability to boost data rates as well as its robustness against frequency-selective fading channels. A major disadvantage of OFDM is the large dynamic range of its time-domain waveforms, making OFDM vulnerable to nonlinearity of light emitting diodes (LEDs). DC biased optical ...

The edges of an image define the image boundary. When the image is noisy, it does not become easy to identify the edges. Therefore, a method requests to be developed that can identify edges clearly in a noisy image. Many methods have been proposed earlier using filters, transforms and wavelets with Ant colony optimization (ACO) that detect edges. We here used ACO for edge detection of noisy ima...