The latest inventions in internet technology influence most of business and daily activities. Internet security, internet data management, web search, data grids, cloud computing, and web-based applications play vital roles, especially in business and industry, as more transactions go online and mobile. Issues related to ubiquitous computing are becoming critical. Internet technology and data engineering should reinforce efficiency and effectiveness of business processes. These technologies should help people make better and more accurate decisions by presenting necessary information and possible consequences for the decisions. Intelligent information systems should help us better understand and manage information with ubiquitous data repository and cloud computing. This book is a compilation of some recent research findings in Internet Technology and Data Engineering. This book provides state-of-the-art accounts in computational algorithms/tools, database management and database technologies, intelligent information systems, data engineering applications, internet security, internet data management, web search, data grids, cloud computing, web-based application, and other related topics.

Edge computing is quickly becoming an important technology throughout a number of fields as businesses and industries alike embrace the benefits it can have in their companies. The streamlining of data is crucial for the development and evolution of businesses in order to keep up with competition and improve functions overall. In order to appropriately utilize edge computing to its full potential, further study is required to examine the potential pitfalls and opportunities of this innovative technology. The Research Anthology on Edge Computing Protocols, Applications, and Integration establishes critical research on the current uses, innovations, and challenges of edge computing across disciplines. The text highlights the history of edge computing and how it has been adapted over time to improve industries. Covering a range of topics such as bandwidth, data centers, and security, this major reference work is ideal for industry professionals, computer scientists, engineers, practitioners, researchers, academicians, scholars, instructors, and students.

Formal specifications are an important tool for the construction, verification and analysis of systems, since without it is hardly possible to explain whether a system worked correctly or showed an expected behavior. This book proposes the use of representation theorems as a means to develop an understanding of all models of a specification in order to exclude possible unintended models, demonstrating the general methodology with representation theorems for applications in qualitative spatial reasoning, data stream processing, and belief revision. For qualitative spatial reasoning, it develops a model of spatial relatedness that captures the scaling context with hierarchical partitions of a spatial domain, and axiomatically characterizes the resulting relations. It also shows that various important properties of stream processing, such as prefix-determinedness or various factorization properties can be axiomatized, and that the axioms are fulfilled by natural classes of stream functions. The third example is belief revision, which is concerned with the revision of knowledge bases under new, potentially incompatible information. In this context, the book considers a subclass of revision operators, namely the class of reinterpretation operators, and characterizes them axiomatically. A characteristic property of reinterpretation operators is that of dissolving potential inconsistencies by reinterpreting symbols of the knowledge base. Intended for researchers in theoretical computer science or one of the above application domains, the book presents results that demonstrate the use of representation theorems for the design and evaluation of formal specifications, and provide the basis for future application-development kits that support application designers with automatically built representations.

Biomarker discovery is an important area of biomedical research that may lead to significant breakthroughs in disease analysis and targeted therapy. Biomarkers are biological entities whose alterations are measurable and are characteristic of a particular biological condition. Discovering, managing, and interpreting knowledge of new biomarkers are challenging and attractive problems in the emerging field of biomedical informatics. This volume is a collection of state-of-the-art research into the application of data mining to the discovery and analysis of new biomarkers. Presenting new results, models and algorithms, the included contributions focus on biomarker data integration, information retrieval methods, and statistical machine learning techniques. This volume is intended for students, and researchers in bioinformatics, proteomics, and genomics, as well engineers and applied scientists interested in the interdisciplinary application of data mining techniques.

This illuminating text/reference surveys the state of the art in data science, and provides practical guidance on big data analytics. Expert perspectives are provided by authoritative researchers and practitioners from around the world, discussing research developments and emerging trends, presenting case studies on helpful frameworks and innovative methodologies, and suggesting best practices for efficient and effective data analytics. Features: reviews a framework for fast data applications, a technique for complex event processing, and agglomerative approaches for the partitioning of networks; introduces a unified approach to data modeling and management, and a distributed computing perspective on interfacing physical and cyber worlds; presents techniques for machine learning for big data, and identifying duplicate records in data repositories; examines enabling technologies and tools for data mining; proposes frameworks for data extraction, and adaptive decision making and social media analysis.

Nearly everyone knows K-means algorithm in the fields of data mining and business intelligence. But the ever-emerging data with extremely complicated characteristics bring new challenges to this "old" algorithm. This book addresses these challenges and makes novel contributions in establishing theoretical frameworks for K-means distances and K-means based consensus clustering, identifying the "dangerous" uniform effect and zero-value dilemma of K-means, adapting right measures for cluster validity, and integrating K-means with SVMs for rare class analysis. This book not only enriches the clustering and optimization theories, but also provides good guidance for the practical use of K-means, especially for important tasks such as network intrusion detection and credit fraud prediction. The thesis on which this book is based has won the "2010 National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award", the highest honor for not more than 100 PhD theses per year in China.

Big data is a well-trafficked subject in recent IT discourse and does not lack for current research. In fact, there is such a surfeit of material related to big data-and so much of it of questionably reliability, thanks to the high-gloss efforts of savvy tech-marketing gurus-that it can, at times, be difficult for a serious academician to navigate. The Handbook of Research on Trends and Future Directions in Big Data and Web Intelligence cuts through the haze of glitz and pomp surrounding big data and offers a simple, straightforward reference-source of practical academic utility. Covering such topics as cloud computing, parallel computing, natural language processing, and personalized medicine, this volume presents an overview of current research, insight into recent advances, and gaps in the literature indicative of opportunities for future inquiry and is targeted toward a broad, interdisciplinary audience of students, academics, researchers, and professionals in fields of IT, networking, and data-analytics.

Social media data contains our communication and online sharing, mirroring our daily life. This book looks at how we can use and what we can discover from such big data: Basic knowledge (data & challenges) on social media analytics Clustering as a fundamental technique for unsupervised knowledge discovery and data mining A class of neural inspired algorithms, based on adaptive resonance theory (ART), tackling challenges in big social media data clustering Step-by-step practices of developing unsupervised machine learning algorithms for real-world applications in social media domain Adaptive Resonance Theory in Social Media Data Clustering stands on the fundamental breakthrough in cognitive and neural theory, i.e. adaptive resonance theory, which simulates how a brain processes information to perform memory, learning, recognition, and prediction. It presents initiatives on the mathematical demonstration of ART's learning mechanisms in clustering, and illustrates how to extend the base ART model to handle the complexity and characteristics of social media data and perform associative analytical tasks. Both cutting-edge research and real-world practices on machine learning and social media analytics are included in the book and if you wish to learn the answers to the following questions, this book is for you: How to process big streams of multimedia data? How to analyze social networks with heterogeneous data? How to understand a user's interests by learning from online posts and behaviors? How to create a personalized search engine by automatically indexing and searching multimodal information resources? .

This work provides an innovative look at the use of open data for extracting information to detect and prevent crime, and also explores the link between terrorism and organized crime. In counter-terrorism and other forms of crime prevention, foresight about potential threats is vitally important and this information is increasingly available via electronic data sources such as social media communications. However, the amount and quality of these sources is varied, and researchers and law enforcement need guidance about when and how to extract useful information from them. The emergence of these crime threats, such as communication between organized crime networks and radicalization towards terrorism, is driven by a combination of political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental factors. The contributions to this volume represent a major step by researchers to systematically collect, filter, interpret, and use the information available. For the purposes of this book, the only data sources used are publicly available sources which can be accessed legally and ethically. This work will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly in police science, organized crime, counter-terrorism and crime science. It will also be of interest to those in related fields such as applications of computer science and data mining, public policy, and business intelligence.

This book provides an overview of data mining methods demonstrated by software. Knowledge management involves application of human knowledge (epistemology) with the technological advances of our current society (computer systems) and big data, both in terms of collecting data and in analyzing it. We see three types of analytic tools. Descriptive analytics focus on reports of what has happened. Predictive analytics extend statistical and/or artificial intelligence to provide forecasting capability. It also includes classification modeling. Diagnostic analytics can apply analysis to sensor input to direct control systems automatically. Prescriptive analytics applies quantitative models to optimize systems, or at least to identify improved systems. Data mining includes descriptive and predictive modeling. Operations research includes all three. This book focuses on descriptive analytics. The book seeks to provide simple explanations and demonstration of some descriptive tools. This second edition provides more examples of big data impact, updates the content on visualization, clarifies some points, and expands coverage of association rules and cluster analysis. Chapter 1 gives an overview in the context of knowledge management. Chapter 2 discusses some basic software support to data visualization. Chapter 3 covers fundamentals of market basket analysis, and Chapter 4 provides demonstration of RFM modeling, a basic marketing data mining tool. Chapter 5 demonstrates association rule mining. Chapter 6 is a more in-depth coverage of cluster analysis. Chapter 7 discusses link analysis. Models are demonstrated using business related data. The style of the book is intended to be descriptive, seeking to explain how methods work, with some citations, but without deep scholarly reference. The data sets and software are all selected for widespread availability and access by any reader with computer links.

The need for both organizations and government agencies to generate, collect, and utilize data in public and private sector activities is rapidly increasing, placing importance on the growth of data mining applications and tools. Data Mining in Public and Private Sectors: Organizational and Government Applications explores the manifestation of data mining and how it can be enhanced at various levels of management. This innovative publication provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings useful to governmental agencies, practicing managers, and academicians.

This book presents the complex topic of using computational intelligence for pattern recognition in a straightforward and applicable way, using Matlab to illustrate topics and concepts. The author covers computational intelligence tools like particle swarm optimization, bacterial foraging, simulated annealing, genetic algorithm, and artificial neural networks. The Matlab based illustrations along with the code are given for every topic. Readers get a quick basic understanding of various pattern recognition techniques using only the required depth in math. The Matlab program and algorithm are given along with the running text, providing clarity and usefulness of the various techniques. Presents pattern recognition and the computational intelligence using Matlab; Includes mixtures of theory, math, and algorithms, letting readers understand the concepts quickly; Outlines an array of classifiers, various regression models, statistical tests and the techniques for pattern recognition using computational intelligence.

This book studies mathematical theories of machine learning. The first part of the book explores the optimality and adaptivity of choosing step sizes of gradient descent for escaping strict saddle points in non-convex optimization problems. In the second part, the authors propose algorithms to find local minima in nonconvex optimization and to obtain global minima in some degree from the Newton Second Law without friction. In the third part, the authors study the problem of subspace clustering with noisy and missing data, which is a problem well-motivated by practical applications data subject to stochastic Gaussian noise and/or incomplete data with uniformly missing entries. In the last part, the authors introduce an novel VAR model with Elastic-Net regularization and its equivalent Bayesian model allowing for both a stable sparsity and a group selection.

This book presents the proceedings of the Conference on Algorithms and Applications (ALAP 2018), which focuses on various areas of computing, like distributed systems and security, big data and analytics and very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design. The book provides solutions to a broad class of problems in diverse areas of algorithms in our daily lives in a world designed for, and increasingly controlled by algorithms. Written by eminent personalities from academia and industry, the papers included offer insights from a number of perspectives, providing an overview of the state of the art in the field. The book consists of invited talks by respected speakers, papers presented in technical sessions, and tutorials to offer ideas, results, work-in-progress and experiences of various algorithmic aspects of computational science and engineering.

This textbook grew out of notes for the ECE143 Programming for Data Analysis class that the author has been teaching at University of California, San Diego, which is a requirement for both graduate and undergraduate degrees in Machine Learning and Data Science. This book is ideal for readers with some Python programming experience. The book covers key language concepts that must be understood to program effectively, especially for data analysis applications. Certain low-level language features are discussed in detail, especially Python memory management and data structures. Using Python effectively means taking advantage of its vast ecosystem. The book discusses Python package management and how to use third-party modules as well as how to structure your own Python modules. The section on object-oriented programming explains features of the language that facilitate common programming patterns. After developing the key Python language features, the book moves on to third-party modules that are foundational for effective data analysis, starting with Numpy. The book develops key Numpy concepts and discusses internal Numpy array data structures and memory usage. Then, the author moves onto Pandas and details its many features for data processing and alignment. Because strong visualizations are important for communicating data analysis, key modules such as Matplotlib are developed in detail, along with web-based options such as Bokeh, Holoviews, Altair, and Plotly. The text is sprinkled with many tricks-of-the-trade that help avoid common pitfalls. The author explains the internal logic embodied in the Python language so that readers can get into the Python mindset and make better design choices in their codes, which is especially helpful for newcomers to both Python and data analysis. To get the most out of this book, open a Python interpreter and type along with the many code samples.

The last decade has witnessed the rise of big data in game development as the increasing proliferation of Internet-enabled gaming devices has made it easier than ever before to collect large amounts of player-related data. At the same time, the emergence of new business models and the diversification of the player base have exposed a broader potential audience, which attaches great importance to being able to tailor game experiences to a wide range of preferences and skill levels. This, in turn, has led to a growing interest in data mining techniques, as they offer new opportunities for deriving actionable insights to inform game design, to ensure customer satisfaction, to maximize revenues, and to drive technical innovation. By now, data mining and analytics have become vital components of game development. The amount of work being done in this area nowadays makes this an ideal time to put together a book on this subject. Data Analytics Applications in Gaming and Entertainment seeks to provide a cross section of current data analytics applications in game production. It is intended as a companion for practitioners, academic researchers, and students seeking knowledge on the latest practices in game data mining. The chapters have been chosen in such a way as to cover a wide range of topics and to provide readers with a glimpse at the variety of applications of data mining in gaming. A total of 25 authors from industry and academia have contributed 12 chapters covering topics such as player profiling, approaches for analyzing player communities and their social structures, matchmaking, churn prediction and customer lifetime value estimation, communication of analytical results, and visual approaches to game analytics. This book's perspectives and concepts will spark heightened interest in game analytics and foment innovative ideas that will advance the exciting field of online gaming and entertainment.

Addressing a broad range of big data analytics in cross-disciplinary applications, this essential handbook focuses on the statistical prospects offered by recent developments in this field. To do so, it covers statistical methods for high-dimensional problems, algorithmic designs, computation tools, analysis flows and the software-hardware co-designs that are needed to support insightful discoveries from big data. The book is primarily intended for statisticians, computer experts, engineers and application developers interested in using big data analytics with statistics. Readers should have a solid background in statistics and computer science.

In this book, we primarily focus on studies that provide objective, unobtrusive, and innovative measures (e.g., indirect measures, content analysis, or analysis of trace data) of SEL skills (e.g., collaboration, creativity, persistence), relying primarily on learning analytics methods and approaches that would potentially allow for expanding the assessment of SEL skills and competencies at scale. What makes the position of learning analytics pivotal in this endeavor to redefine measurement of SEL skills are constant changes and advancements in learning environments and the quality and quantity of data collected about learners and the process of learning. Contemporary learning environments that utilize virtual and augmented reality to enhance learning opportunities accommodate for designing tasks and activities that allow learners to elicit behaviors (either in face-to-face or online context) not being captured in traditional educational settings. Novel insights provided in the book span across diverse types of learning contexts and learner populations. Specifically, the book addresses relevant and emerging theories and frameworks (in various disciplines such as education, psychology, or workforce) that inform assessments of SEL skills and competencies. In so doing, the book maps the landscape of the novel learning analytics methods and approaches, along with their application in the SEL assessment for K-12 learners as well as adult learners. Critical to the notion of the SEL assessment are data sources. In that sense, the book outlines where and how data related to learners' 21st century skills and competencies can be measured and collected. Linking theory to data, the book further discusses tools and methods that are being used to operationalize SEL and link relevant skills and competencies with cognitive assessment. Finally, the book addresses aspects of generalizability and applicability, showing promising approaches for translating research findings into actionable insights that would inform various stakeholders (e.g., learners, instructors, administrators, policy makers).

The book proposes a systematic approach to big data collection, documentation and development of analytic procedures that foster collaboration on a large scale. This approach, designated as "data factoring" emphasizes the need to think of each individual dataset developed by an individual project as part of a broader data ecosystem, easily accessible and exploitable by parties not directly involved with data collection and documentation. Furthermore, data factoring uses and encourages pre-analytic operations that add value to big data sets, especially recombining and repurposing. The book proposes a research-development agenda that can undergird an ideal data factory approach. Several programmatic chapters discuss specialized issues involved in data factoring (documentation, meta-data specification, building flexible, yet comprehensive data ontologies, usability issues involved in collaborative tools, etc.). The book also presents case studies for data factoring and processing that can lead to building better scientific collaboration and data sharing strategies and tools. Finally, the book presents the teaching utility of data factoring and the ethical and privacy concerns related to it. Chapter 9 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

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.

Online social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, offer millions of members the opportunity to befriend one another, send messages to each other, and post content on the site - actions which generate mind-boggling amounts of data every day.To make sense of the massive data from these sites, we resort to social media mining to answer questions like the following:

In ancient games such as chess or go, the most brilliant players can improve by studying the strategies produced by a machine. Robotic systems practice their own movements. In arcade games, agents capable of learning reach superhuman levels within a few hours. How do these spectacular reinforcement learning algorithms work? With easy-to-understand explanations and clear examples in Java and Greenfoot, you can acquire the principles of reinforcement learning and apply them in your own intelligent agents. Greenfoot (M.Koelling, King's College London) and the hamster model (D. Bohles, University of Oldenburg) are simple but also powerful didactic tools that were developed to convey basic programming concepts. The result is an accessible introduction into machine learning that concentrates on reinforcement learning. Taking the reader through the steps of developing intelligent agents, from the very basics to advanced aspects, touching on a variety of machine learning algorithms along the way, one is allowed to play along, experiment, and add their own ideas and experiments.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to rough set-based feature selection. Rough set theory, first proposed by Zdzislaw Pawlak in 1982, continues to evolve. Concerned with the classification and analysis of imprecise or uncertain information and knowledge, it has become a prominent tool for data analysis, and enables the reader to systematically study all topics in rough set theory (RST) including preliminaries, advanced concepts, and feature selection using RST. The book is supplemented with an RST-based API library that can be used to implement several RST concepts and RST-based feature selection algorithms. The book provides an essential reference guide for students, researchers, and developers working in the areas of feature selection, knowledge discovery, and reasoning with uncertainty, especially those who are working in RST and granular computing. The primary audience of this book is the research community using rough set theory (RST) to perform feature selection (FS) on large-scale datasets in various domains. However, any community interested in feature selection such as medical, banking, and finance can also benefit from the book. This second edition also covers the dominance-based rough set approach and fuzzy rough sets. The dominance-based rough set approach (DRSA) is an extension of the conventional rough set approach and supports the preference order using the dominance principle. In turn, fuzzy rough sets are fuzzy generalizations of rough sets. An API library for the DRSA is also provided with the second edition of the book.

In this book, Helen Kennedy argues that as social media data mining becomes more and more ordinary, as we post, mine and repeat, new data relations emerge. These new data relations are characterised by a widespread desire for numbers and the troubling consequences of this desire, and also by the possibility of doing good with data and resisting data power, by new and old concerns, and by instability and contradiction. Drawing on action research with public sector organisations, interviews with commercial social insights companies and their clients, focus groups with social media users and other research, Kennedy provides a fascinating and detailed account of living with social media data mining inside the organisations that make up the fabric of everyday life.