CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY Eleni Anthippi Chatzimichali ...
CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY Eleni Anthippi Chatzimichali ...
CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY Eleni Anthippi Chatzimichali ...
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The generated suite of tools, as presented throughout this thesis, has covered with<br />
equal emphasis a wide range of chemometric fields, including data aggregation,<br />
integration, analysis and visualisation. The software tools show the most promise in<br />
terms of performance, flexibility and simplicity. Exceptional attention and precision<br />
has been given to the application of rigorous validation and evaluation techniques as a<br />
means of generating as accurate, robust and unbiased models as possible; as stated in<br />
Brereton (2006) and Westerhuis et al. (2008), even though proper validation of<br />
machine learning models has received special attention over the past decade, it is<br />
most often lacking in the recent applications. Furthermore, a novelty of this research<br />
was the application of advanced optimisation techniques, which resulted in a striking<br />
speedup of the end-to-end analyses without however compromising the integrity of<br />
the validation and evaluation process; the minimisation of the computational cost and<br />
complexity was so impressive, it reached the point where all end-to-end analyses<br />
within the pipeline were executed within a few hours on a personal computer,<br />
obviating any need of a server or supercomputer. In addition, the analysis pipeline<br />
was built in the context of reproducible research in an extremely simple,<br />
straightforward and user-friendly way. The functionality of the implemented<br />
statistical tools can be further fused into a unified form of a single R package. The<br />
package can be uploaded on CRAN, the official R repository, where it will be freely<br />
available to others users. Having confirmed the generic nature and applicability of the<br />
developed tools by testing them on new real-world case studies, the package can be<br />
equally efficient when applied by other scientists to areas of inquiry far wider and<br />
more diverse than the present study. Finally, the package provides a great degree of<br />
extendibility, since it allows its users to conduct completely personalised analyses in<br />
addition to modifying and expanding its functionality.<br />
In summary, the project aims and objectives set out in Chapter 1 have been<br />
successfully met. In addition, the project has generated ideas for further work, which<br />
are explored in the following Section.<br />
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