If you're like most R users, you have deep knowledge and love for statistics. But as your organization continues to collect huge amounts of data, adding tools such as Apache Spark makes a lot of sense. With this practical book, data scientists and professionals working with large-scale data applications will learn how to use Spark from R to tackle big data and big compute problems. Authors Javier Luraschi, Kevin Kuo, and Edgar Ruiz show you how to use R with Spark to solve different data analysis problems. This book covers relevant data science topics, cluster computing, and issues that should interest even the most advanced users. Analyze, explore, transform, and visualize data in Apache Spark with R Create statistical models to extract information and predict outcomes; automate the process in production-ready workflows Perform analysis and modeling across many machines using distributed computing techniques Use large-scale data from multiple sources and different formats with ease from within Spark Learn about alternative modeling frameworks for graph processing, geospatial analysis, and genomics at scale Dive into advanced topics including custom transformations, real-time data processing, and creating custom Spark extensions

Proper analysis of image and multimedia data requires efficient extraction and segmentation techniques. Among the many computational intelligence approaches, the soft computing paradigm is best equipped with several tools and techniques that incorporate intelligent concepts and principles. This book is dedicated to object extraction, image segmentation, and edge detection using soft computing techniques with extensive real-life application to image and multimedia data. The authors start with a comprehensive tutorial on the basics of brain structure and learning, and then the key soft computing techniques, including evolutionary computation, neural networks, fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic, and rough sets. They then present seven chapters that detail the application of representative techniques to complex image processing tasks such as image recognition, lighting control, target tracking, object extraction, and edge detection. These chapters follow a structured approach with detailed explanations of the problems, solutions, results, and conclusions. This is both a standalone textbook for graduates in computer science, electrical engineering, system science, and information technology, and a reference for researchers and engineers engaged with pattern recognition, image processing, and soft computing.

This graduate textbook explains image geometry, and elaborates on image enhancement in spatial and frequency domain, unconstrained and constrained restoration and restoration from projection, and discusses various coding technologies such as predictive coding and transform coding. Rich in examples and exercises, it prepares electrical engineering and computer science students for further studies on image analysis and understanding.

This graduate textbook explains image reconstruction technologies based on region-based binocular and trinocular stereo vision, and object, pattern and relation matching. It further discusses principles and applications of multi-sensor fusion and content-based retrieval. Rich in examples and excises, the book concludes image engineering studies for electrical engineering and computer science students.

The LNCS journal Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems focuses on data management, knowledge discovery, and knowledge processing, which are core and hot topics in computer science. Since the 1990s, the Internet has become the main driving force behind application development in all domains. An increase in the demand for resource sharing across different sites connected through networks has led to an evolution of data- and knowledge-management systems from centralized systems to decentralized systems enabling large-scale distributed applications providing high scalability. Current decentralized systems still focus on data and knowledge as their main resource. Feasibility of these systems relies basically on P2P (peer-to-peer) techniques and the support of agent systems with scaling and decentralized control. Synergy between grids, P2P systems, and agent technologies is the key to data- and knowledge-centered systems in large-scale environments. This, the 29th issue of Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems, contains four revised selected regular papers. Topics covered include optimization and cluster validation processes for entity matching, business intelligence systems, and data profiling in the Semantic Web.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the second Asia Pacific Requirements Engineering Symposium, APRES 2015, held in Wuhan, China, in October 2015. The 9 full papers presented together with 3 tool demos papers and one short paper, were carefully reviewed and selected from 18 submissions. The papers deal with various aspects of requirements engineering in the big data era, such as automated requirements analysis, requirements acquisition via crowdsourcing, requirement processes and specifications, requirements engineering tools.requirements engineering in the big data era, such as automated requirements analysis, requirements acquisition via crowdsourcing, requirement processes and specifications, requirements engineering tools.

This book presents an overview of a variety of contemporary statistical, mathematical and computer science techniques which are used to further the knowledge in the medical domain. The authors focus on applying data mining to the medical domain, including mining the sets of clinical data typically found in patient's medical records, image mining, medical mining, data mining and machine learning applied to generic genomic data and more. This work also introduces modeling behavior of cancer cells, multi-scale computational models and simulations of blood flow through vessels by using patient-specific models. The authors cover different imaging techniques used to generate patient-specific models. This is used in computational fluid dynamics software to analyze fluid flow. Case studies are provided at the end of each chapter. Professionals and researchers with quantitative backgrounds will find Computational Medicine in Data Mining and Modeling useful as a reference. Advanced-level students studying computer science, mathematics, statistics and biomedicine will also find this book valuable as a reference or secondary text book.

This book addresses the need for a unified framework describing how soft computing and machine learning techniques can be judiciously formulated and used in building efficient pattern recognition models. The text reviews both established and cutting-edge research, providing a careful balance of theory, algorithms, and applications, with a particular emphasis given to applications in computational biology and bioinformatics. Features: integrates different soft computing and machine learning methodologies with pattern recognition tasks; discusses in detail the integration of different techniques for handling uncertainties in decision-making and efficiently mining large biological datasets; presents a particular emphasis on real-life applications, such as microarray expression datasets and magnetic resonance images; includes numerous examples and experimental results to support the theoretical concepts described; concludes each chapter with directions for future research and a comprehensive bibliography.

Statistical Decision Problems presents a quick and concise introduction into the theory of risk, deviation and error measures that play a key role in statistical decision problems. It introduces state-of-the-art practical decision making through twenty-one case studies from real-life applications. The case studies cover a broad area of topics and the authors include links with source code and data, a very helpful tool for the reader. In its core, the text demonstrates how to use different factors to formulate statistical decision problems arising in various risk management applications, such as optimal hedging, portfolio optimization, cash flow matching, classification, and more. The presentation is organized into three parts: selected concepts of statistical decision theory, statistical decision problems, and case studies with portfolio safeguard. The text is primarily aimed at practitioners in the areas of risk management, decision making, and statistics. However, the inclusion of a fair bit of mathematical rigor renders this monograph an excellent introduction to the theory of general error, deviation, and risk measures for graduate students. It can be used as supplementary reading for graduate courses including statistical analysis, data mining, stochastic programming, financial engineering, to name a few. The high level of detail may serve useful to applied mathematicians, engineers, and statisticians interested in modeling and managing risk in various applications.

Learn how to develop powerful data analytics applications quickly for SQL Server database administrators and developers. Organizations will be able to sift data and derive the business intelligence needed to drive business decisions and profit. The addition of R to SQL Server 2016 places a powerful analytical processor into an environment most developers are already comfortable with - Visual Studio. This book walks even the newest of users through the creation process of a powerful R-language tool set for use in analyzing and reporting on your data. As a SQL Server database administrator or developer, it is sometimes difficult to stay on the bleeding edge of technology. Microsoft's addition of R to SQL Server 2016 is sure to be a game-changer, and the language will certainly become an integral part of future releases. R is in fact widely used today in statistical and related applications, and its use is only growing. Beginning SQL Server R Services helps you jump on board this important trend by providing good examples with detailed explanations of the WHY and not just the HOW. Walks you through setup and installation of SQL Server R Services. Explains the basics of working with R Tools for Visual Studio. Provides a road map to successfully creating custom R code. What You Will Learn Discover R's role in the SQL Server 2016 hierarchy. Manage the components needed to run SQL Server R Services code. Run R-language analytics and queries inside the database. Create analytic solutions that run across multiple datasets. Gain in-depth knowledge of the R language itself. Implement custom SQL Server R Services solutions. Who This Book Is For Any level of database administrator or developer, but specifically it's for those developers with the need to develop powerful data analytics applications quickly. Seasoned R developers will appreciate the book for its robust learning pattern, using visual aids in combination with properties explanations and scenarios. Beginning SQL Server R Services is the perfect "new hire" gift for new database developers in any organization.

Modern medicine generates, almost daily, huge amounts of heterogeneous data. For example, medical data may contain SPECT images, signals like ECG, clinical information like temperature, cholesterol levels, etc., as well as the physician's interpretation. Those who deal with such data understand that there is a widening gap between data collection and data comprehension. Computerized techniques are needed to help humans address this problem. This volume is devoted to the relatively young and growing field of medical data mining and knowledge discovery. As more and more medical procedures employ imaging as a preferred diagnostic tool, there is a need to develop methods for efficient mining in databases of images. Other significant features are security and confidentiality concerns. Moreover, the physician's interpretation of images, signals, or other technical data, is written in unstructured English which is very difficult to mine. This book addresses all these specific features.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed short papers and workshop papers of the 19th East European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems, ADBIS 2015, held in Poitiers, France, in September 2015. The 31 revised full papers and 18 short papers presented were carefully selected and reviewed from 135 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ADBIS Short Papers; Second International Workshop on Big Data Applications and Principles, BigDap 2015; First International Workshop on Data Centered Smart Applications, DCSA 2015; Fourth International Workshop on GPUs in Databases, GID 2015; First International Workshop on Managing Evolving Business Intelligence Systems, MEBIS 2015; Fourth International Workshop on Ontologies Meet Advanced Information Systems, OAIS 2015; First International Workshop on Semantic Web for Cultural Heritage, SW4CH 2015; First International Workshop on Information Systems for AlaRm Diffusion, WISARD 2015.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference, MTSR 2016, held in Goettingen, Germany, in November 2016. The 26 full papers and 6 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 67 submissions. The papers are organized in several sessions and tracks: Digital Libraries, Information Retrieval, Linked and Social Data, Metadata and Semantics for Open Repositories, Research Information Systems and Data Infrastructures, Metadata and Semantics for Agriculture, Food and Environment, Metadata and Semantics for Cultural Collections and Applications, European and National Projects.

Data science teams looking to turn research into useful analytics applications require not only the right tools, but also the right approach if they're to succeed. With the revised second edition of this hands-on guide, up-and-coming data scientists will learn how to use the Agile Data Science development methodology to build data applications with Python, Apache Spark, Kafka, and other tools. Author Russell Jurney demonstrates how to compose a data platform for building, deploying, and refining analytics applications with Apache Kafka, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, d3.js, scikit-learn, and Apache Airflow. You'll learn an iterative approach that lets you quickly change the kind of analysis you're doing, depending on what the data is telling you. Publish data science work as a web application, and affect meaningful change in your organization. Build value from your data in a series of agile sprints, using the data-value pyramid Extract features for statistical models from a single dataset Visualize data with charts, and expose different aspects through interactive reports Use historical data to predict the future via classification and regression Translate predictions into actions Get feedback from users after each sprint to keep your project on track

This book contains a selection of refereed and revised papers from three special tracks: Ad-hoc and Wireless Sensor Networks, Intelligent Distributed Computing and, Business Intelligence and Big Data Analytics originally presented at the International Symposium on Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications (ISTA), August 10-13, 2015, Kochi, India.

The two-volume set CCIS 662 and CCIS 663 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition, CCPR 2016, held in Chengdu, China, in November 2016.The 121 revised papers presented in two volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 199 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on robotics; computer vision; basic theory of pattern recognition; image and video processing; speech and language; emotion recognition.

This book reports on practical approaches for facilitating the process of achieving excellence in the management and leadership of organizational resources. It shows how the principles of creating shared value can be applied to ensure faster learning, training, business development, and social renewal. In particular, the book presents novel methods and tools for tackling the complexity of management and learning in both business organizations and society. It covers ontologies, intelligent management systems, methods for creating knowledge and value added. It gives novel insights into time management and operations optimization, as well as advanced methods for evaluating customers' satisfaction and conscious experience. Based on two conferences, the AHFE 2017 International Conference on Human Factors, Business Management and Society and the AHFE 2017 International Conference on Human Factors in Management and Leadership, held on July 17-21, 2017, in Los Angeles, California, USA, the book provides both researchers and professionals with new tools and inspiring ideas for achieving excellence in various business activities.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Soft Computing in Data Science, SCDS 2016, held in Putrajaya, Malaysia, in September 2016. The 27 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 66 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on artificial neural networks; classification, clustering, visualization; fuzzy logic; information and sentiment analytics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and the Semantic Web, KESW 2016, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in September 2016.The 17 revised full papers presented together with 9 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 53 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ontologies; information and knowledge extraction; data management; applications.

In this book, the authors describe how Mind Genomics works - a revolutionary marketing method that combines the three sciences of Mathematics, Psychology, and Economics - in a masterful way. Mind Genomics helps the seller of products and services to know what people are thinking about them before one ever commits to an approach by knowing what is important to the people one is trying to influence. Mind Genomics identifies what aspects of a general topic are important to the audience, how different people in the audience will respond to different aspects of that topic, and how to pinpoint the viewpoints of different audience segments to each aspect of the topic. A careful step by step approach explains what activities ought to be taken and what scenarios must be followed while applying this method in order to find the right way to capture the hearts and minds of targeted audiences. This book explains how Mind Genomics plays a matching game with one's potential audience and various ways one can present the products and ideas resulting in a systematic approach to influencing others, backed by real data; how one can play with ideas, see patterns imposed by the mind and create new, inductive, applied sciences of the mind, measuring the world using the mind of man as the yardstick. In details it describes how everyday thought is transferred into actionable data and results. Whether one is a senior marketer for a large corporation, a professor at a university, or administrator at a hospital, one could use Mind Genomics to learn how to transform available information into actionable steps that will increase the products sales, or increase the number of interested students for a new university program, or the number of satisfied patients in the hospital with their medical conditions kept at highest levels after leaving it. Mind Genomics was first introduced by Dr. Howard Moskowitz, an alumnus of Harvard University and the father of Horizontal Segmentation - a widely accepted business model for targeted marketing and profit maximization.

This work reviews the state of the art in SVM and perceptron classifiers. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) is easily the most popular tool for dealing with a variety of machine-learning tasks, including classification. SVMs are associated with maximizing the margin between two classes. The concerned optimization problem is a convex optimization guaranteeing a globally optimal solution. The weight vector associated with SVM is obtained by a linear combination of some of the boundary and noisy vectors. Further, when the data are not linearly separable, tuning the coefficient of the regularization term becomes crucial. Even though SVMs have popularized the kernel trick, in most of the practical applications that are high-dimensional, linear SVMs are popularly used. The text examines applications to social and information networks. The work also discusses another popular linear classifier, the perceptron, and compares its performance with that of the SVM in different application areas.>

Hyperspectral Image Fusion is the first text dedicated to the fusion techniques for such a huge volume of data consisting of a very large number of images. This monograph brings out recent advances in the research in the area of visualization of hyperspectral data. It provides a set of pixel-based fusion techniques, each of which is based on a different framework and has its own advantages and disadvantages. The techniques are presented with complete details so that practitioners can easily implement them. It is also demonstrated how one can select only a few specific bands to speed up the process of fusion by exploiting spatial correlation within successive bands of the hyperspectral data. While the techniques for fusion of hyperspectral images are being developed, it is also important to establish a framework for objective assessment of such techniques. This monograph has a dedicated chapter describing various fusion performance measures that are applicable to hyperspectral image fusion. This monograph also presents a notion of consistency of a fusion technique which can be used to verify the suitability and applicability of a technique for fusion of a very large number of images. This book will be a highly useful resource to the students, researchers, academicians and practitioners in the specific area of hyperspectral image fusion, as well as generic image fusion.

In education today, technology alone doesn't always lead to immediate success for students or institutions. In order to gauge the efficacy of educational technology, we need ways to measure the efficacy of educational practices in their own right. Through a better understanding of how learning takes place, we may work toward establishing best practices for students, educators, and institutions. These goals can be accomplished with learning analytics.

"Learning Analytics: From Research to Practice "updates this emerging field with the latest in theories, findings, strategies, and tools from across education and technological disciplines. Guiding readers through preparation, design, and examples of implementation, this pioneering reference clarifies LA methods as not mere data collection but sophisticated, systems-based analysis with practical applicability inside the classroom and in the larger world.

Case studies illustrate applications of LA throughout academic settings (e.g., intervention, advisement, technology design), and their resulting impact on pedagogy and learning. The goal is to bring greater efficiency and deeper engagement to individual students, learning communities, and educators, as chapters show diverse uses of learning analytics to:

Enhance student and faculty performance.Improve student understanding of course material.Assess and attend to the needs of struggling learners.Improve accuracy in grading.Allow instructors to assess and develop their own strengths.Encourage more efficient use of resources at the institutional level.

Researchers and practitioners in educational technology, IT, and the learning sciences will hail the information in "Learning Analytics: From Research to Practice "as a springboard to new levels of student, instructor, and institutional success.

The book will focus on exploiting state of the art research in semantic web and web science. The rapidly evolving world-wide-web has led to revolutionary changes in the whole of society. The research and development of the semantic web covers a number of global standards of the web and cutting edge technologies, such as: linked data, social semantic web, semantic web search, smart data integration, semantic web mining and web scale computing. These proceedings are from the 6th Chinese Semantics Web Symposium.

Abstraction is a fundamental mechanism underlying both human and artificial perception, representation of knowledge, reasoning and learning. This mechanism plays a crucial role in many disciplines, notably Computer Programming, Natural and Artificial Vision, Complex Systems, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Art, and Cognitive Sciences. This book first provides the reader with an overview of the notions of abstraction proposed in various disciplines by comparing both commonalities and differences. After discussing the characterizing properties of abstraction, a formal model, the KRA model, is presented to capture them. This model makes the notion of abstraction easily applicable by means of the introduction of a set of abstraction operators and abstraction patterns, reusable across different domains and applications. It is the impact of abstraction in Artificial Intelligence, Complex Systems and Machine Learning which creates the core of the book. A general framework, based on the KRA model, is presented, and its pragmatic power is illustrated with three case studies: Model-based diagnosis, Cartographic Generalization, and learning Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models.