Abstract
Viticulture has a major impact in the European economy and over the years the intensive grapevine production led to the proliferation of many varieties. Traditionally these varieties are manually catalogued in the field, which is a costly and slow process and being, in many cases, very challenging to classify even for an experienced ampelographer. This article presents a cost-effective and automatic method for grapevine varieties classification based on the analysis of the leaf’s images, taken with an RGB sensor. The proposed method is divided into three steps: (1) color and shape features extraction; (2) training and; (3) classification using Linear Discriminant Analysis. This approach was applied in 240 leaf images of three different grapevine varieties acquired from the Douro Valley region in Portugal and it was able to correctly classify 87% of the grapevine leaves. The proposed method showed very promising classification capabilities considering the challenges presented by the leaves which had many shape irregularities and, in many cases, high color similarities for the different varieties. The obtained results compared with manual procedure suggest that it can be used as an effective alternative to the manual procedure for grapevine classification based on leaf features. Since the proposed method requires a simple and low-cost setup it can be easily integrated on a portable system with real-time processing to assist technicians in the field or other staff without any special skills and used offline for batch classification. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

Abstract
The present paper sets a milestone on incremental recommender systems approaches by comparing several state-of-the-art algorithms with two different mathematical foundations - matrix and tensor factorization. Traditional Pairwise Interaction Tensor Factorization is revisited and converted into a scalable and incremental option that yields the best predictive power. A novel tensor inspired approach is described. Finally, experiments compare contextless vs context-aware scenarios, the impact of noise on the algorithms, discrepancies between time complexity and execution times, and are run on five different datasets from three different recommendation areas - music, gross retail and garment. Relevant conclusions are drawn that aim to help choosing the most appropriate algorithm to use when faced with a novel recommender tasks. © 2019 M.S. Ramalho, J. Vinagre, A.M. Jorge & R. Bastos.

Abstract
Nature inspired metaheuristics algorithms have been the target of several studies in the most varied scientific areas due to their high efficiency in solving real world problems. This is also the case of agriculture. Among the most well-established nature inspired metaheuristics the ones selected to be addressed in this work are the following: genetic algorithms, differential evolution, simulated annealing, harmony search, particle swarm optimization, ant colony optimization, firefly algorithm and bat algorithm. For each of them, the mechanism that inspired it and a brief description of its operation is presented, followed by a review of their most relevant agricultural applications. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

Abstract
Exceptional preferences mining (EPM) is a crossover between two subfields of data mining: local pattern mining and preference learning. EPM can be seen as a local pattern mining task that finds subsets of observations where some preference relations between labels significantly deviate from the norm. It is a variant of subgroup discovery, with rankings of labels as the target concept. We employ several quality measures that highlight subgroups featuring exceptional preferences, where the focus of what constitutes exceptional' varies with the quality measure: two measures look for exceptional overall ranking behavior, one measure indicates whether a particular label stands out from the rest, and a fourth measure highlights subgroups with unusual pairwise label ranking behavior. We explore a few datasets and compare with existing techniques. The results confirm that the new task EPM can deliver interesting knowledge.

Abstract
Multi-label classification is a methodology that tries to solve classification problems where multiple classes are associated with each data example. Data streams pose new challenges to this methodology caused by the massive amounts of structured data production. In fact, most of the existent batch mode methods may not support this condition. Therefore, this paper proposes two multi-label classification methods based on rule and ensembles learning from continuous flow of data. These methods are derived from a multi-target regression algorithm. The main contribution of this work is the rule specialization for subsets of class labels, instead of the usual local (individual models for each output) or a global (one model for all outputs) methods. Prequential evaluation was conducted where global, local and subset operation modes were compared against other online classifiers found in the literature. Six real-world data sets were used. The evaluation demonstrated that the subset specialization presents competitive performance, when compared to local and global approaches and online classifiers found in the literature.

Abstract
Phonocardiogram signals contain very useful information about the condition of the heart. It is a method of registration of heart sounds, which can be visually represented on a chart. By analyzing these signals, early detections and diagnosis of heart diseases can be done. Intelligent and automated analysis of the phonocardiogram is therefore very important, to determine whether the patient's heart works properly or should be referred to an expert for further evaluation. In this work, we use electrocardiograms and phonocardiograms collected simultaneously, from the Physionet challenge database, and we aim to determine whether a phonocardiogram corresponds to a "normal" or "abnormal" physiological state. The main idea is to translate a 1D phonocardiogram signal into a 2D image that represents temporal and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients features. To do that, we develop a novel approach that uses both features. First we segment the phonocardiogram signals with an algorithm based on a logistic regression hidden semi-Markov model, which uses the electrocardiogram signals as reference. After that, we extract a group of features from the time and frequency domain (Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients) of the phonocardiogram. Then, we combine these features into a two-dimensional time-frequency heat map representation. Lastly, we run a binary classifier to learn a model that discriminates between normal and abnormal phonocardiogram signals. In the experiments, we study the contribution of temporal and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients features and evaluate three classification algorithms: Support Vector Machines, Convolutional Neural Network, and Random Forest. The best results are achieved when we map both temporal and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients features into a 2D image and use the Support Vector Machines with a radial basis function kernel. Indeed, by including both temporal and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients features, we obtain sligthly better results than the ones reported by the challenge participants, which use large amounts of data and high computational power.