We are very pleased to announce that Dr. Luis Paulo Faina Garcia, a researcher from SDA received the prize for the best PhD thesis in Computer Science in 2016 from the Brazilian Government Council. The title of his thesis is “Noise Detection in Classification Problems” with the supervision of Prof. Dr. André de Carvalho from the University of São Paulo. In 2017 his thesis was also selected between the best thesis by the Brazilian Computer Science Society.
The main contributions of his work improved the accuracy in a Machine Learning system based on noise detection to predict non-native species in protected areas of the Brazilian state of São Paulo. The results obtained were several publications in good conferences and and high-quality journals.
Short Abstract: Large volumes of data have been produced in many application domains. Nonetheless, when data quality is low, the performance of Machine Learning techniques is harmed. Real data are frequently affected by the presence of noise, which, when used in the training of Machine Learning techniques for predictive tasks, can result in complex models, with high induction time and low predictive performance. Identification and removal of noise can improve data quality and, as a result, the induced model. This thesis proposes new techniques for noise detection and the development of a recommendation system based on meta-learning to recommend the most suitable filter for new tasks. Experiments using artificial and real datasets show the relevance of this research.