Artificial intelligence (AI) emphasises the creation of intelligent machines/systems that function like humans. AI has been applied to many real‐world applications. Machine learning is a branch of AI based on the idea that systems can learn from data, identify hidden patterns, and make decisions with little/minimal human intervention. Evolutionary computation is an umbrella of population‐based intelligent/learning algorithms inspired by nature, where New Zealand has a good international reputation. This paper provides a review on evolutionary machine learning, i.e. evolutionary computation techniques for major machine learning tasks such as classification, regression and clustering, and emerging topics including combinatorial optimisation, computer vision, deep learning, transfer learning, and ensemble learning. The paper also provides a brief review of evolutionary learning applications, such as supply chain and manufacturing for milk/dairy, wine and seafood industries, which are important to New Zealand. Finally, the paper presents current issues with future perspectives in evolutionary machine learning.

The failure of a rolling bearing may cause the shutdown of mechanical equipment and even induce catastrophic accidents, resulting in tremendous economic losses and a severely negative impact on society. Fault diagnosis of rolling bearings becomes an important topic with much attention from researchers and industrial pioneers. There are an increasing number of publications on this topic. However, there is a lack of a comprehensive survey of existing works from the perspectives of fault detection and fault type recognition in rolling bearings using vibration signals. Therefore, this paper reviews recent fault detection and fault type recognition methods using vibration signals. First, it provides an overview of fault diagnosis of rolling bearings and typical fault types. Then, existing fault diagnosis methods are categorized into fault detection methods and fault type recognition methods, which are separately revised and discussed. Finally, a summary of existing datasets, limitations/challenges of existing methods, and future directions are presented to provide more guidance for researchers who are interested in this field. Overall, this survey paper conducts a review and analysis of the methods used to diagnose rolling bearing faults and provide comprehensive guidance for researchers in this field.

Computer vision (CV) is a big and important field in artificial intelligence covering a wide range of applications. Image analysis is a major task in CV aiming to extract, analyse and understand the visual content of images. However, image-related tasks are very challenging due to many factors, e.g., high variations across images, high dimensionality, domain expertise requirement, and image distortions. Evolutionary computation (EC) approaches have been widely used for image analysis with significant achievement. However, there is no comprehensive survey of existing EC approaches to image analysis. To fill this gap, this paper provides a comprehensive survey covering all essential EC approaches to important image analysis tasks including edge detection, image segmentation, image feature analysis, image classification, object detection, and others. This survey aims to provide a better understanding of evolutionary computer vision (ECV) by discussing the contributions of different approaches and exploring how and why EC is used for CV and image analysis. The applications, challenges, issues, and trends associated to this research field are also discussed and summarised to provide further guidelines and opportunities for future research.

Feature extraction is an essential process in the intelligent fault diagnosis of rotating machinery. Although existing feature extraction methods can obtain representative features from the original signal, domain knowledge and expert experience are often required. In this article, a novel diagnosis approach based on evolutionary learning, namely, automatic feature extraction and construction using genetic programming (AFECGP), is proposed to automatically generate informative and discriminative features from original vibration signals for identifying different fault types of rotating machinery. To achieve this, a new program structure, a new function set, and a new terminal set are developed in AFECGP to allow it to detect important subband signals and extract and construct informative features, automatically and simultaneously. More important, AFECGP can produce a flexible number of features for classification. Having the generated features, k-Nearest Neighbors is employed to perform fault diagnosis. The performance of the AFECGP-based fault diagnosis approach is evaluated on four fault diagnosis datasets of varying difficulty and compared with 14 baseline methods. The results show that the proposed approach achieves better fault diagnosis accuracy on all the datasets than the competitive methods and can effectively identify different fault conditions of rolling bearing, gear, and rotor.

Feature extraction is essential for solving image classification by transforming low-level pixel values into high-level features. However, extracting effective features from images is challenging due to high variations across images in scale, rotation, illumination, and background. Existing methods often have a fixed model complexity and require domain expertise. Genetic programming with a flexible representation can find the best solution without the use of domain knowledge. This paper proposes a new genetic programming-based approach to automatically learning informative features for different image classification tasks. In the new approach, a number of image-related operators, including filters, pooling operators and feature extraction methods, are employed as functions. A flexible program structure is developed to integrate different functions and terminals into a single tree/solution. The new approach can evolve solutions of variable depths to extract various numbers and types of features from the images. The new approach is examined on 12 different image classification tasks of varying difficulty and compared with a large number of effective algorithms. The results show that the new approach achieves better classification performance than most benchmark methods. The analysis of the evolved programs/solutions and the visualisation of the learned features provide deep insights on the proposed approach.

Image classification is a popular task in machine learning and computer vision, but it is very challenging due to high variation crossing images. Using ensemble methods for solving image classification can achieve higher classification performance than using a single classification algorithm. However, to obtain a good ensemble, the component (base) classifiers in an ensemble should be accurate and diverse. To solve image classification effectively, feature extraction is necessary to transform raw pixels into high-level informative features. However, this process often requires domain knowledge. This article proposes an evolutionary approach based on genetic programming to automatically and simultaneously learn informative features and evolve effective ensembles for image classification. The new approach takes raw images as inputs and returns predictions of class labels based on the evolved classifiers. To achieve this, a new individual representation, a new function set, and a new terminal set are developed to allow the new approach to effectively find the best solution. More important, the solutions of the new approach can extract informative features from raw images and can automatically address the diversity issue of the ensembles. In addition, the new approach can automatically select and optimize the parameters for the classification algorithms in the ensemble. The performance of the new approach is examined on 13 different image classification datasets of varying difficulty and compared with a large number of effective methods. The results show that the new approach achieves better classification accuracy on most datasets than the competitive methods. Further analysis demonstrates that the new approach can evolve solutions with high accuracy and diversity.