Scholarships Source

PhD Scholarship in Genetic Programming for Data Mining Tasks

Genetic Programming and Evolutionary Computing research group

Background
The Genetic Programming and Evolutionary Computing research group at
Victoria University of Wellington was recently awarded a large research
grant in Genetic Programming (GP) for data mining tasks by the Marsden
Fund of New Zealand (similar to the National Science Foundation in USA).
We are looking for a good PhD student in this field. The grant will
provide full funding for the student to cover the tuition fees, living
allowance, and travel cost.

The Project
Data mining tasks arise in a wide variety of practical situations,
ranging from classification to regression, clustering, and optimisation
tasks. Since the 1990s, genetic programming (GP) has become a promising
approach to building reliable data mining models quickly and
automatically. GP uses ideas analogous to biological evolution to search
the space of possible models to evolve a good solution for a particular
task. GP has been applied to many data mining tasks and achieved some
success. However, there are still limitations in program structures,
representations, genetic operators, search algorithms and theoretical
foundations in GP that restrict GP for difficult data mining tasks.

Applicants are invited from excellent and enthusiastic students wishing
to undertake a PhD in this area. The successful applicant will extend
the current research and address the methodological/ theoretical issues
in GP and/or a real-world engineering applications in data mining using
GP and related evolutionary learning techniques.

The Student
Applications from both domestic and international students are invited.
A strong background in C/C++/Java programming and a basic background in
machine learning and pattern recognition are required. A good background
in genetic programming, evolutionary computing, neural networks,
statistics, or statistics/operatio ns research is desired. Students
should have a first class Honour or a Masters degree in computer
science.

Contact
Dr Mengjie Zhang
mengjie.zhang@ mcs.vuw.ac. nz
http://homepages. mcs.vuw.ac. nz/~mengjie/


Closing date: 1 May 2009