This book is about the process of using analytics and the capabilities of analytics in today's organizations. Cutting through the buzz surrounding the term analytics and the overloaded expectations about using analytics, the book demystifies analytics with an in-depth examination of concepts grounded in operations research and management science. Analytics as a set of tools and processes is only as effective as: The data with which it is working The human judgment applying the processes and understanding the output of these processes. For this reason, the book focuses on the analytics process. What is intrinsic to analytics' real organizational impact are the careful application of tools and the thoughtful application of their outcomes. This work emphasizes analytics as part of a process that supports decision-making within organizations. It wants to debunk overblown expectations that somehow analytics outputs or analytics as applied to other concepts, such as Big Data, are the be-all and end-all of the analytics process. They are, instead, only a step within a holistic and critical approach to management thinking that can create real value for an organization. To develop this holistic approach, the book is divided into two sections that examine concepts and applications. The first section makes the case for executive management taking a holistic approach to analytics. It draws on rich research in operations and management science that form the context in which analytics tools are to be applied. There is a strong emphasis on knowledge management concepts and techniques, as well as risk management concepts and techniques. The second section focuses on both the use of the analytics process and organizational issues that are required to make the analytics process relevant and impactful.

If you are a manager who receives the results of any data analyst's work to help with your decision-making, this book is for you. Anyone playing a role in the field of analytics can benefit from this book as well. In the two decades the editors of this book spent teaching and consulting in the field of analytics, they noticed a critical shortcoming in the communication abilities of many analytics professionals. Specifically, analysts have difficulty in articulating in business terms what their analyses showed and what actionable recommendations were made. When analysts made presentations, they tended to lapse into the technicalities of mathematical procedures, rather than focusing on the strategic and tactical impact and meaning of their work. As analytics has become more mainstream and widespread in organizations, this problem has grown more acute. Data Analytics: Effective Methods for Presenting Results tackles this issue. The editors have used their experience as presenters and audience members who have become lost during presentation. Over the years, they experimented with different ways of presenting analytics work to make a more compelling case to top managers. They have discovered tried and true methods for improving presentations, which they share. The book also presents insights from other analysts and managers who share their own experiences. It is truly a collection of experiences and insight from academics and professionals involved with analytics. The book is not a primer on how to draw the most beautiful charts and graphs or about how to perform any specific kind of analysis. Rather, it shares the experiences of professionals in various industries about how they present their analytics results effectively. They tell their stories on how to win over audiences. The book spans multiple functional areas within a business, and in some cases, it discusses how to adapt presentations to the needs of audiences at different levels of management.

From the Foreword: "Big Data Management and Processing is [a] state-of-the-art book that deals with a wide range of topical themes in the field of Big Data. The book, which probes many issues related to this exciting and rapidly growing field, covers processing, management, analytics, and applications... [It] is a very valuable addition to the literature. It will serve as a source of up-to-date research in this continuously developing area. The book also provides an opportunity for researchers to explore the use of advanced computing technologies and their impact on enhancing our capabilities to conduct more sophisticated studies." ---Sartaj Sahni, University of Florida, USA "Big Data Management and Processing covers the latest Big Data research results in processing, analytics, management and applications. Both fundamental insights and representative applications are provided. This book is a timely and valuable resource for students, researchers and seasoned practitioners in Big Data fields. --Hai Jin, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China Big Data Management and Processing explores a range of big data related issues and their impact on the design of new computing systems. The twenty-one chapters were carefully selected and feature contributions from several outstanding researchers. The book endeavors to strike a balance between theoretical and practical coverage of innovative problem solving techniques for a range of platforms. It serves as a repository of paradigms, technologies, and applications that target different facets of big data computing systems. The first part of the book explores energy and resource management issues, as well as legal compliance and quality management for Big Data. It covers In-Memory computing and In-Memory data grids, as well as co-scheduling for high performance computing applications. The second part of the book includes comprehensive coverage of Hadoop and Spark, along with security, privacy, and trust challenges and solutions. The latter part of the book covers mining and clustering in Big Data, and includes applications in genomics, hospital big data processing, and vehicular cloud computing. The book also analyzes funding for Big Data projects.

This handbook provides an overarching view of cyber security and digital forensic challenges related to big data and IoT environment, prior to reviewing existing data mining solutions and their potential application in big data context, and existing authentication and access control for IoT devices. An IoT access control scheme and an IoT forensic framework is also presented in this book, and it explains how the IoT forensic framework can be used to guide investigation of a popular cloud storage service. A distributed file system forensic approach is also presented, which is used to guide the investigation of Ceph. Minecraft, a Massively Multiplayer Online Game, and the Hadoop distributed file system environment are also forensically studied and their findings reported in this book. A forensic IoT source camera identification algorithm is introduced, which uses the camera's sensor pattern noise from the captured image. In addition to the IoT access control and forensic frameworks, this handbook covers a cyber defense triage process for nine advanced persistent threat (APT) groups targeting IoT infrastructure, namely: APT1, Molerats, Silent Chollima, Shell Crew, NetTraveler, ProjectSauron, CopyKittens, Volatile Cedar and Transparent Tribe. The characteristics of remote-controlled real-world Trojans using the Cyber Kill Chain are also examined. It introduces a method to leverage different crashes discovered from two fuzzing approaches, which can be used to enhance the effectiveness of fuzzers. Cloud computing is also often associated with IoT and big data (e.g., cloud-enabled IoT systems), and hence a survey of the cloud security literature and a survey of botnet detection approaches are presented in the book. Finally, game security solutions are studied and explained how one may circumvent such solutions. This handbook targets the security, privacy and forensics research community, and big data research community, including policy makers and government agencies, public and private organizations policy makers. Undergraduate and postgraduate students enrolled in cyber security and forensic programs will also find this handbook useful as a reference.

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.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the field of pattern mining with evolutionary algorithms. To do so, it covers formal definitions about patterns, patterns mining, type of patterns and the usefulness of patterns in the knowledge discovery process. As it is described within the book, the discovery process suffers from both high runtime and memory requirements, especially when high dimensional datasets are analyzed. To solve this issue, many pruning strategies have been developed. Nevertheless, with the growing interest in the storage of information, more and more datasets comprise such a dimensionality that the discovery of interesting patterns becomes a challenging process. In this regard, the use of evolutionary algorithms for mining pattern enables the computation capacity to be reduced, providing sufficiently good solutions. This book offers a survey on evolutionary computation with particular emphasis on genetic algorithms and genetic programming. Also included is an analysis of the set of quality measures most widely used in the field of pattern mining with evolutionary algorithms. This book serves as a review of the most important evolutionary algorithms for pattern mining. It considers the analysis of different algorithms for mining different type of patterns and relationships between patterns, such as frequent patterns, infrequent patterns, patterns defined in a continuous domain, or even positive and negative patterns. A completely new problem in the pattern mining field, mining of exceptional relationships between patterns, is discussed. In this problem the goal is to identify patterns which distribution is exceptionally different from the distribution in the complete set of data records. Finally, the book deals with the subgroup discovery task, a method to identify a subgroup of interesting patterns that is related to a dependent variable or target attribute. This subgroup of patterns satisfies two essential conditions: interpretability and interestingness.

This open access book offers a comprehensive and thorough introduction to almost all aspects of metalearning and automated machine learning (AutoML), covering the basic concepts and architecture, evaluation, datasets, hyperparameter optimization, ensembles and workflows, and also how this knowledge can be used to select, combine, compose, adapt and configure both algorithms and models to yield faster and better solutions to data mining and data science problems. It can thus help developers to develop systems that can improve themselves through experience. As one of the fastest-growing areas of research in machine learning, metalearning studies principled methods to obtain efficient models and solutions by adapting machine learning and data mining processes. This adaptation usually exploits information from past experience on other tasks and the adaptive processes can involve machine learning approaches. As a related area to metalearning and a hot topic currently, AutoML is concerned with automating the machine learning processes. Metalearning and AutoML can help AI learn to control the application of different learning methods and acquire new solutions faster without unnecessary interventions from the user. This book is a substantial update of the first edition published in 2009. It includes 18 chapters, more than twice as much as the previous version. This enabled the authors to cover the most relevant topics in more depth and incorporate the overview of recent research in the respective area. The book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in the areas of machine learning, data mining, data science and artificial intelligence.

In recent years, extensive research has been conducted by eminent mathematicians and engineers whose results and proposed problems are presented in this new volume. It is addressed to graduate students, research mathematicians, physicists, and engineers. Individual contributions are devoted to topics of approximation theory, functional equations and inequalities, fixed point theory, numerical analysis, theory of wavelets, convex analysis, topology, operator theory, differential operators, fractional integral operators, integro-differential equations, ternary algebras, super and hyper relators, variational analysis, discrete mathematics, cryptography, and a variety of applications in interdisciplinary topics. Several of these domains have a strong connection with both theories and problems of linear and nonlinear optimization. The combination of results from various domains provides the reader with a solid, state-of-the-art interdisciplinary reference to theory and problems. Some of the works provide guidelines for further research and proposals for new directions and open problems with relevant discussions.

"R and Data Mining "introduces researchers, post-graduate students, and analysts to data mining using R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The book provides practical methods for using R in applications from academia to industry to extract knowledge from vast amounts of data. Readers will find this book a valuable guide to the use of R in tasks such as classification and prediction, clustering, outlier detection, association rules, sequence analysis, text mining, social network analysis, sentiment analysis, and more.

Data mining techniques are growing in popularity in a broad range of areas, from banking to insurance, retail, telecom, medicine, research, and government. This book focuses on the modeling phase of the data mining process, also addressing data exploration and model evaluation.

With three in-depth case studies, a quick reference guide, bibliography, and links to a wealth of online resources, "R and Data Mining" is a valuable, practical guide to a powerful method of analysis.
Presents an introduction into using R for data mining applications, covering most popular data mining techniquesProvides code examples and data so that readers can easily learn the techniquesFeatures case studies in real-world applicationsto help readers apply the techniques in their work"

Data Stewardship for Open Science: Implementing FAIR Principles has been written with the intention of making scientists, funders, and innovators in all disciplines and stages of their professional activities broadly aware of the need, complexity, and challenges associated with open science, modern science communication, and data stewardship. The FAIR principles are used as a guide throughout the text, and this book should leave experimentalists consciously incompetent about data stewardship and motivated to respect data stewards as representatives of a new profession, while possibly motivating others to consider a career in the field. The ebook, avalable for no additional cost when you buy the paperback, will be updated every 6 months on average (providing that significant updates are needed or avaialble). Readers will have the opportunity to contribute material towards these updates, and to develop their own data management plans, via the free Data Stewardship Wizard.

This book addresses the topic of exploiting enterprise-linked data with a particular focus on knowledge construction and accessibility within enterprises. It identifies the gaps between the requirements of enterprise knowledge consumption and "standard" data consuming technologies by analysing real-world use cases, and proposes the enterprise knowledge graph to fill such gaps. It provides concrete guidelines for effectively deploying linked-data graphs within and across business organizations. It is divided into three parts, focusing on the key technologies for constructing, understanding and employing knowledge graphs. Part 1 introduces basic background information and technologies, and presents a simple architecture to elucidate the main phases and tasks required during the lifecycle of knowledge graphs. Part 2 focuses on technical aspects; it starts with state-of-the art knowledge-graph construction approaches, and then discusses exploration and exploitation techniques as well as advanced question-answering topics concerning knowledge graphs. Lastly, Part 3 demonstrates examples of successful knowledge graph applications in the media industry, healthcare and cultural heritage, and offers conclusions and future visions.

This book aims to identify promising future developmental opportunities and applications for Tech Mining. Specifically, the enclosed contributions will pursue three converging themes: The increasing availability of electronic text data resources relating to Science, Technology and Innovation (ST&I). The multiple methods that are able to treat this data effectively and incorporate means to tap into human expertise and interests. Translating those analyses to provide useful intelligence on likely future developments of particular emerging S&T targets. Tech Mining can be defined as text analyses of ST&I information resources to generate Competitive Technical Intelligence (CTI). It combines bibliometrics and advanced text analytic, drawing on specialized knowledge pertaining to ST&I. Tech Mining may also be viewed as a special form of "Big Data" analytics because it searches on a target emerging technology (or key organization) of interest in global databases. One then downloads, typically, thousands of field-structured text records (usually abstracts), and analyses those for useful CTI. Forecasting Innovation Pathways (FIP) is a methodology drawing on Tech Mining plus additional steps to elicit stakeholder and expert knowledge to link recent ST&I activity to likely future development. A decade ago, we demeaned Management of Technology (MOT) as somewhat self-satisfied and ignorant. Most technology managers relied overwhelmingly on casual human judgment, largely oblivious of the potential of empirical analyses to inform R&D management and science policy. CTI, Tech Mining, and FIP are changing that. The accumulation of Tech Mining research over the past decade offers a rich resource of means to get at emerging technology developments and organizational networks to date. Efforts to bridge from those recent histories of development to project likely FIP, however, prove considerably harder. One focus of this volume is to extend the repertoire of information resources; that will enrich FIP. Featuring cases of novel approaches and applications of Tech Mining and FIP, this volume will present frontier advances in ST&I text analytics that will be of interest to students, researchers, practitioners, scholars and policy makers in the fields of R&D planning, technology management, science policy and innovation strategy.

Advances in hardware technology have increased the capability to store and record personal data about consumers and individuals. This has caused concerns that personal data may be used for a variety of intrusive or malicious purposes. Privacy Preserving Data Mining: Models and Algorithms proposes a number of techniques to perform the data mining tasks in a privacy-preserving way. These techniques generally fall into the following categories: data modification techniques, cryptographic methods and protocols for data sharing, statistical techniques for disclosure and inference control, query auditing methods, randomization and perturbation-based techniques. This edited volume contains surveys by distinguished researchers in the privacy field. Each survey includes the key research content as well as future research directions of a particular topic in privacy. Privacy Preserving Data Mining: Models and Algorithms is designed for researchers, professors, and advanced-level students in computer science. This book is also suitable for practitioners in industry.

This book presents statistical processes for health care delivery and covers new ideas, methods and technologies used to improve health care organizations. It gathers the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Health Care Systems Engineering (HCSE 2017), which took place in Florence, Italy from May 29 to 31, 2017. The Conference provided a timely opportunity to address operations research and operations management issues in health care delivery systems. Scientists and practitioners discussed new ideas, methods and technologies for improving the operations of health care systems, developed in close collaborations with clinicians. The topics cover a broad spectrum of concrete problems that pose challenges for researchers and practitioners alike: hospital drug logistics, operating theatre management, home care services, modeling, simulation, process mining and data mining in patient care and health care organizations.

Intelligent Computing for Interactive System Design provides a comprehensive resource on what has become the dominant paradigm in designing novel interaction methods, involving gestures, speech, text, touch and brain-controlled interaction, embedded in innovative and emerging human-computer interfaces. These interfaces support ubiquitous interaction with applications and services running on smartphones, wearables, in-vehicle systems, virtual and augmented reality, robotic systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), and many other domains that are now highly competitive, both in commercial and in research contexts. This book presents the crucial theoretical foundations needed by any student, researcher, or practitioner working on novel interface design, with chapters on statistical methods, digital signal processing (DSP), and machine learning (ML). These foundations are followed by chapters that discuss case studies on smart cities, brain-computer interfaces, probabilistic mobile text entry, secure gestures, personal context from mobile phones, adaptive touch interfaces, and automotive user interfaces. The case studies chapters also highlight an in-depth look at the practical application of DSP and ML methods used for processing of touch, gesture, biometric, or embedded sensor inputs. A common theme throughout the case studies is ubiquitous support for humans in their daily professional or personal activities. In addition, the book provides walk-through examples of different DSP and ML techniques and their use in interactive systems. Common terms are defined, and information on practical resources is provided (e.g., software tools, data resources) for hands-on project work to develop and evaluate multimodal and multi-sensor systems. In a series of in-chapter commentary boxes, an expert on the legal and ethical issues explores the emergent deep concerns of the professional community, on how DSP and ML should be adopted and used in socially appropriate ways, to most effectively advance human performance during ubiquitous interaction with omnipresent computers. This carefully edited collection is written by international experts and pioneers in the fields of DSP and ML. It provides a textbook for students and a reference and technology roadmap for developers and professionals working on interaction design on emerging platforms.

This book provides a perspective on the application of machine learning-based methods in knowledge discovery from natural languages texts. By analysing various data sets, conclusions which are not normally evident, emerge and can be used for various purposes and applications. The book provides explanations of principles of time-proven machine learning algorithms applied in text mining together with step-by-step demonstrations of how to reveal the semantic contents in real-world datasets using the popular R-language with its implemented machine learning algorithms. The book is not only aimed at IT specialists, but is meant for a wider audience that needs to process big sets of text documents and has basic knowledge of the subject, e.g. e-mail service providers, online shoppers, librarians, etc. The book starts with an introduction to text-based natural language data processing and its goals and problems. It focuses on machine learning, presenting various algorithms with their use and possibilities, and reviews the positives and negatives. Beginning with the initial data pre-processing, a reader can follow the steps provided in the R-language including the subsuming of various available plug-ins into the resulting software tool. A big advantage is that R also contains many libraries implementing machine learning algorithms, so a reader can concentrate on the principal target without the need to implement the details of the algorithms her- or himself. To make sense of the results, the book also provides explanations of the algorithms, which supports the final evaluation and interpretation of the results. The examples are demonstrated using realworld data from commonly accessible Internet sources.

Intelligent Computing for Interactive System Design provides a comprehensive resource on what has become the dominant paradigm in designing novel interaction methods, involving gestures, speech, text, touch and brain-controlled interaction, embedded in innovative and emerging human-computer interfaces. These interfaces support ubiquitous interaction with applications and services running on smartphones, wearables, in-vehicle systems, virtual and augmented reality, robotic systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), and many other domains that are now highly competitive, both in commercial and in research contexts. This book presents the crucial theoretical foundations needed by any student, researcher, or practitioner working on novel interface design, with chapters on statistical methods, digital signal processing (DSP), and machine learning (ML). These foundations are followed by chapters that discuss case studies on smart cities, brain-computer interfaces, probabilistic mobile text entry, secure gestures, personal context from mobile phones, adaptive touch interfaces, and automotive user interfaces. The case studies chapters also highlight an in-depth look at the practical application of DSP and ML methods used for processing of touch, gesture, biometric, or embedded sensor inputs. A common theme throughout the case studies is ubiquitous support for humans in their daily professional or personal activities. In addition, the book provides walk-through examples of different DSP and ML techniques and their use in interactive systems. Common terms are defined, and information on practical resources is provided (e.g., software tools, data resources) for hands-on project work to develop and evaluate multimodal and multi-sensor systems. In a series of in-chapter commentary boxes, an expert on the legal and ethical issues explores the emergent deep concerns of the professional community, on how DSP and ML should be adopted and used in socially appropriate ways, to most effectively advance human performance during ubiquitous interaction with omnipresent computers. This carefully edited collection is written by international experts and pioneers in the fields of DSP and ML. It provides a textbook for students and a reference and technology roadmap for developers and professionals working on interaction design on emerging platforms.

This open access book brings together a set of original studies that use cutting-edge computational methods to investigate conflict at various geographic scales and degrees of intensity and violence. Methodologically, this book covers a variety of computational approaches from text mining and machine learning to agent-based modelling and social network analysis. Empirical cases range from migration policy framing in North America and street protests in Iran to violence against civilians in Congo and food riots world-wide. Supplementary materials in the book include a comprehensive list of the datasets on conflict and dissent, as well as resources to online repositories where the annotated code and data of individual chapters can be found and where (agent-based) models can be re-produced and altered. These materials are a valuable resource for those wishing to retrace and learn from the analyses described in this volume and adapt and apply them to their own research interests. By bringing together novel research through an international team of scholars from a range of disciplines, Computational Conflict Research pioneers and maps this emerging field. The book will appeal to students, scholars, and anyone interested in the prospects of using computational social sciences to advance our understanding of conflict dynamics.

Visual Analytics and Interactive Technologies: Data, Text and Web Mining Applications is a comprehensive reference on concepts, algorithms, theories, applications, software, and visualization of data mining, text mining, Web mining and computing/supercomputing. This publication provides a coherent set of related works on the state-of-the-art of the theory and applications of mining, making it a useful resource for researchers, practitioners, professionals and intellectuals in technical and non-technical fields.

This book comprises a set of articles that specify the methodology of text mining, describe the creation of lexical resources in the framework of text mining and use text mining for various tasks in natural language processing (NLP). The analysis of large amounts of textual data is a prerequisite to build lexical resources such as dictionaries and ontologies and also has direct applications in automated text processing in fields such as history, healthcare and mobile applications, just to name a few. This volume gives an update in terms of the recent gains in text mining methods and reflects the most recent achievements with respect to the automatic build-up of large lexical resources. It addresses researchers that already perform text mining, and those who want to enrich their battery of methods. Selected articles can be used to support graduate-level teaching. The book is suitable for all readers that completed undergraduate studies of computational linguistics, quantitative linguistics, computer science and computational humanities. It assumes basic knowledge of computer science and corpus processing as well as of statistics.

High-Performance Computing for Big Data: Methodologies and Applications explores emerging high-performance architectures for data-intensive applications, novel efficient analytical strategies to boost data processing, and cutting-edge applications in diverse fields, such as machine learning, life science, neural networks, and neuromorphic engineering. The book is organized into two main sections. The first section covers Big Data architectures, including cloud computing systems, and heterogeneous accelerators. It also covers emerging 3D IC design principles for memory architectures and devices. The second section of the book illustrates emerging and practical applications of Big Data across several domains, including bioinformatics, deep learning, and neuromorphic engineering. Features Covers a wide range of Big Data architectures, including distributed systems like Hadoop/Spark Includes accelerator-based approaches for big data applications such as GPU-based acceleration techniques, and hardware acceleration such as FPGA/CGRA/ASICs Presents emerging memory architectures and devices such as NVM, STT- RAM, 3D IC design principles Describes advanced algorithms for different big data application domains Illustrates novel analytics techniques for Big Data applications, scheduling, mapping, and partitioning methodologies Featuring contributions from leading experts, this book presents state-of-the-art research on the methodologies and applications of high-performance computing for big data applications. About the Editor Dr. Chao Wang is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Science and Technology of China. He is the Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Design Automations for Electronics Systems (TODAES), Applied Soft Computing, Microprocessors and Microsystems, IET Computers & Digital Techniques, and International Journal of Electronics. Dr. Chao Wang was the recipient of Youth Innovation Promotion Association, CAS, ACM China Rising Star Honorable Mention (2016), and best IP nomination of DATE 2015. He is now on the CCF Technical Committee on Computer Architecture, CCF Task Force on Formal Methods. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, Senior Member of CCF, and a Senior Member of ACM.

This book records the new research findings and development in the field of industrial engineering and engineering management, and it will serve as the guidebook for the potential development in future. It gathers the accepted papers from the 25th International conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management held at Anhui University of Technology in Maanshan during August 24-25, 2019. The aim of this conference was to provide a high-level international forum for experts, scholars and entrepreneurs at home and abroad to present the recent advances, new techniques and application, to promote discussion and interaction among academics, researchers and professionals to promote the developments and applications of the related theories and technologies in universities and enterprises, and to establish business or research relations to find global partners for future collaboration in the field of Industrial Engineering. It addresses diverse themes in smart manufacturing, artificial intelligence, ergonomics, simulation and modeling, quality and reliability, logistics engineering, data mining and other related fields. This timely book summarizes and promotes the latest achievements in the field of industrial engineering and related fields over the past year, proposing prospects and vision for the further development.

This book provides step-by-step explanations of successful implementations and practical applications of machine learning. The book's GitHub page contains software codes to assist readers in adapting materials and methods for their own use. A wide variety of applications are discussed, including wireless mesh network and power systems optimization; computer vision; image and facial recognition; protein prediction; data mining; and data discovery. Numerous state-of-the-art machine learning techniques are employed (with detailed explanations), including biologically-inspired optimization (genetic and other evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence); Viola Jones face detection; Gaussian mixture modeling; support vector machines; deep convolutional neural networks with performance enhancement techniques (including network design, learning rate optimization, data augmentation, transfer learning); spiking neural networks and timing dependent plasticity; frequent itemset mining; binary classification; and dynamic programming. This book provides valuable information on effective, cutting-edge techniques, and approaches for students, researchers, practitioners, and teachers in the field of machine learning.