Department/Unit: Department of Decision Sciences
Qualifications: PhD (Computer Science)
PhD Institution: University of Pretoria
PhD dissertation title: Characterising Continuous Optimisation Problems for Particle Swarm Optimisation Performance Prediction
Current research interests and projects: Computational intelligence, Automated algorithm selection in optimisation and machine learning,
Selected publication 1: Malan, K.M. and Engelbrecht, A.P. (2013). A survey of techniques for characterising fitness landscapes and some possible ways forward. Information Sciences, 241:148-163, DOI:10.1016/j.ins.2013.04.015.
Selected publication 2: Malan, K.M. and Moser, I. (2019). Constraint Handling Guided by Landscape Analysis in Combinatorial and Continuous Search Spaces, Evolutionary Computation, 27 (2): 267-289, DOI:10.1162/evco_a_00222.
Selected publication 3: Ochoa, G., Malan, K.M. and Blum, C. (2021). Search trajectory networks: A tool for analysing and visualising the behaviour of metaheuristics, Applied Soft Computing, 109, DOI:10.1016/j.asoc.2021.107492
Selected publication 4: Malan, K.M. (2021). A Survey of Advances in Landscape Analysis for Optimisation, Algorithms, 14(2), DOI:10.3390/a14020040.
Selected publication 5: Rodrigues, N.M., Malan, K.M., Ochoa, G., Vanneschi, L. and Silva, S. (2022). Fitness landscape analysis of convolutional neural network architectures for image classification, Information Sciences, DOI:10.1016/j.ins.2022.07.040
Selected publication 6: Malan, K.M. and Engelbrecht, A.P. (2014). Characterising the searchability of continuous optimisation problems for PSO, Swarm Intelligence, 8 (4): 275-302, DOI:10.1007/s11721-014-0099-x.
Selected publication 7: Mostert, W., Malan, K.M. and Engelbrecht, A.P. (2021). A Feature Selection Algorithm Performance Metric for Comparative Analysis, Algorithms, 14(3), DOI:10.3390/a14030100.
Selected publication 8: Stapelberg, B. and Malan, K.M. (2020). A survey of benchmarking frameworks for reinforcement learning, South African Computer Journal, 32(2): 258-292, DOI:10.18489/sacj.v32i2.746.
Selected publication 9: Engelbrecht, A.P., Bosman, P., and Malan, K.M. (2022). The influence of fitness landscape characteristics on particle swarm optimisers, Natural Computing, DOI: 10.1007/s11047-020-09835-x.
Selected publication 10: Mongwe, W.T. and Malan, K.M. (2020). A Survey of Automated Financial Statement Fraud Detection with Relevance to the South African Context, South African Computer Journal, 32(1): 74-112, DOI:10.18489/sacj.v32i1.777.
Capstone assignment title: An inter-university doctoral programme for computational intelligence research in South Africa
Capstone assignment abstract: This paper proposes a doctoral programme in computational intelligence – a branch of artificial intelligence that is an essential component of many new innovations and systems that have become indispensable to industry with the fourth industrial revolution. There are limited number of potential supervisors who are active researchers in computational intelligence, so it is argued that a sharing of resources is required for the field to grow. The aim of the proposed programme is to address the two main issues of (1) attracting students to industry-relevant doctoral studies, and (2) creating a supportive environment to share the burden of supervision. It is hoped that this will result in an increase in the number of doctorates from Africa in the exciting new field of computational intelligence.
