Dissertation
WoC-Bots: swarms of biologically inspired prediction agents
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Drexel University
Jun 2023
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17918/00001634
Abstract
This dissertation presents Wisdom-of-Crowds-Bots (WoC-Bots), biologically-inspired, simple, and modular agents which work together in a multi-agent environment to collectively make binary predictions. Building on the theoretical underpinnings of Wisdom of Crowds, WoC-Bots represent a knowledge-diverse crowd where each agent is trained on a subset of available information. A honeybee-derived swarm aggregation mechanism was developed to elicit a collective prediction with an associated confidence score. Due to the multi-agent architecture, WoC-Bots can be distributed across multiple compute nodes, reducing training and inference time. Importantly, this architecture demonstrates significant key advantages over traditional classification methods while maintaining comparable predictive performance. Specifically, new and previously unknown input features can be included in an existing classification problem without retraining existing agents. New input features, combined with existing features, are encapsulated into newly generated agents before agents are injected into an existing classification task. Further development led to a "meta- swarm", where an external prediction is used as the core belief of an agent, replacing a simple multi-layer perceptron network. The external prediction requires zero knowledge of source data, maintaining the localization and privacy of the data used to generate the prediction, enabling collaboration between institutions unable to share their data externally.
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Details
- Title
- WoC-Bots
- Creators
- Sean P. Grimes
- Contributors
- David E. Breen (Advisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Drexel University
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
- Publisher
- Drexel University; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Number of pages
- vii, 109 pages
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Computer Science (Computing) (2013-2026); College of Computing and Informatics (2013-2026); Drexel University
- Other Identifier
- 991020668710604721