Activity recognition has emerged as a challenging and high-impact research field, as over the past years smaller and more powerful sensors have been introduced in wide-spread consumer devices. Validation of techniques and algorithms requires large-scale human activity corpuses and improved methods to recognize activities and the contexts in which they occur. This book deals with the challenges of designing valid and reproducible experiments, running large-scale dataset collection campaigns, designing activity and context recognition methods that are robust and adaptive, and evaluating activity recognition systems in the real world with real users.

This book focuses on applications of social network analysis in predictive policing. Data science is used to identify potential criminal activity by analyzing the relationships between offenders to fully understand criminal collaboration patterns. Co-offending networks-networks of offenders who have committed crimes together-have long been recognized by law enforcement and intelligence agencies as a major factor in the design of crime prevention and intervention strategies. Despite the importance of co-offending network analysis for public safety, computational methods for analyzing large-scale criminal networks are rather premature. This book extensively and systematically studies co-offending network analysis as effective tool for predictive policing. The formal representation of criminological concepts presented here allow computer scientists to think about algorithmic and computational solutions to problems long discussed in the criminology literature. For each of the studied problems, we start with well-founded concepts and theories in criminology, then propose a computational method and finally provide a thorough experimental evaluation, along with a discussion of the results. In this way, the reader will be able to study the complete process of solving real-world multidisciplinary problems.

Within this context, big data analytics (BDA) can be an important tool given that many analytic techniques within the big data world have been created specifically to deal with complexity and rapidly changing conditions. The important task for public sector organizations is to liberate analytics from narrow scientific silos and expand it across internally to reap maximum benefit across their portfolios of programs. This book highlights contextual factors important to better situating the use of BDA within government organizations and demonstrates the wide range of applications of different BDA techniques. It emphasizes the importance of leadership and organizational practices that can improve performance. It explains that BDA initiatives should not be bolted on but should be integrated into the organization's performance management processes. Equally important, the book includes chapters that demonstrate the diversity of factors that need to be managed to launch and sustain BDA initiatives in public sector organizations.

This book offers a selection of the best papers presented at the 13th International Symposium on Location Based Services (LBS 2016), which was held in Vienna (Austria) from November 14 to 16, 2016. It provides an overview of recent research in the field, including the latest advances in outdoor/indoor positioning, smart environment, spatial modeling, personalization and context awareness, cartographic communication, novel user interfaces, crowd sourcing, social media, big data analysis, usability and privacy.

"Bayesian Networks and Influence Diagrams: A Guide to Construction and Analysis, Second Edition, "provides a comprehensive guide for practitioners who wish to understand, construct, and analyze intelligent systems for decision support based on probabilistic networks. This new edition contains six new sections, in addition to fully-updated examples, tables, figures, and a revised appendix. Intended primarily for practitioners, this book does not require sophisticated mathematical skills or deep understanding of the underlying theory and methods nor does it discuss alternative technologies for reasoning under uncertainty. The theory and methods presented are illustrated through more than 140 examples, and exercises are included for the reader to check his or her level of understanding. The techniques and methods presented for knowledge elicitation, model construction and verification, modeling techniques and tricks, learning models from data, and analyses of models have all been developed and refined on the basis of numerous courses that the authors have held for practitioners worldwide. "

Exploratory data analysis, also known as data mining or knowledge discovery from databases, is typically based on the optimisation of a specific function of a dataset. Such optimisation is often performed with gradient descent or variations thereof. In this book, we first lay the groundwork by reviewing some standard clustering algorithms and projection algorithms before presenting various non-standard criteria for clustering. The family of algorithms developed are shown to perform better than the standard clustering algorithms on a variety of datasets.

We then consider extensions of the basic mappings which maintain some topology of the original data space. Finally we show how reinforcement learning can be used as a clustering mechanism before turning to projection methods.

We show that several varieties of reinforcement learning may also be used to define optimal projections for example for principal component analysis, exploratory projection pursuit and canonical correlation analysis. The new method of cross entropy adaptation is then introduced and used as a means of optimising projections. Finally an artificial immune system is used to create optimal projections and combinations of these three methods are shown to outperform the individual methods of optimisation.

Sustainable development is based on the idea that societies should advance without compromising their future development requirements. This book explores how the application of data analytics and digital technologies can ensure that development changes are executed on the basis of factual data and information. It addresses how innovations that rely on digital technologies can support sustainable development across all sectors and all social, economic, and environmental aspects and help us achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The book also highlights techniques, processes, models, tools, and practices used to achieve sustainable development through data analysis. The various topics covered in this book are critically evaluated, not only theoretically, but also from an application perspective. It will be of interest to researchers and students, especially those in the fields of applied data analytics, business intelligence and knowledge management.

Optimization techniques have been widely adopted to implement various data mining algorithms. In addition to well-known Support Vector Machines (SVMs) (which are based on quadratic programming), different versions of Multiple Criteria Programming (MCP) have been extensively used in data separations. Since optimization based data mining methods differ from statistics, decision tree induction, and neural networks, their theoretical inspiration has attracted many researchers who are interested in algorithm development of data mining.

"Optimization based Data Mining: Theory and Applications," mainly focuses on MCP and SVM especially their recent theoretical progress and real-life applications in various fields. These include finance, web services, bio-informatics and petroleum engineering, which has triggered the interest of practitioners who look for new methods to improve the results of data mining for knowledge discovery.

Most of the material in this book is directly from the research and application activities that the authors' research group has conducted over the last ten years. Aimed at practitioners and graduates who have a fundamental knowledge in data mining, it demonstrates the basic concepts and foundations on how to use optimization techniques to deal with data mining problems.

This book is a collection of chapters written by experts on various aspects of big data. The book aims to explain what big data is and how it is stored and used. The book starts from the fundamentals and builds up from there. It is intended to serve as a review of the state-of-the-practice in the field of big data handling. The traditional framework of relational databases can no longer provide appropriate solutions for handling big data and making it available and useful to users scattered around the globe. The study of big data covers a wide range of issues including management of heterogeneous data, big data frameworks, change management, finding patterns in data usage and evolution, data as a service, service-generated data, service management, privacy and security. All of these aspects are touched upon in this book. It also discusses big data applications in different domains. The book will prove useful to students, researchers, and practicing database and networking engineers.

The investigation of healthcare databases can be used to examine physician decisions and develop evidence-based treatment guidelines that optimize patient outcomes. Clinical Data Mining for Physician Decision Making and Investigating Health Outcomes: Methods for Prediction and Analysis demonstrates how concern for detail in datasets and the use of data mining techniques can extract important and meaningful knowledge from healthcare databases. Basic information on processing data with step-by-step instructions is provided, allowing readers to use their own data and follow the instructions to find meaningful results.

This book provides comprehensive coverage of the field of outlier analysis from a computer science point of view. It integrates methods from data mining, machine learning, and statistics within the computational framework and therefore appeals to multiple communities. The chapters of this book can be organized into three categories: Basic algorithms: Chapters 1 through 7 discuss the fundamental algorithms for outlier analysis, including probabilistic and statistical methods, linear methods, proximity-based methods, high-dimensional (subspace) methods, ensemble methods, and supervised methods. Domain-specific methods: Chapters 8 through 12 discuss outlier detection algorithms for various domains of data, such as text, categorical data, time-series data, discrete sequence data, spatial data, and network data. Applications: Chapter 13 is devoted to various applications of outlier analysis. Some guidance is also provided for the practitioner. The second edition of this book is more detailed and is written to appeal to both researchers and practitioners. Significant new material has been added on topics such as kernel methods, one-class support-vector machines, matrix factorization, neural networks, outlier ensembles, time-series methods, and subspace methods. It is written as a textbook and can be used for classroom teaching.

This book highlights an innovative approach for extracting terminological cores from subject domain-bounded collections of professional texts. The approach is based on exploiting the phenomenon of terminological saturation. The book presents the formal framework for the method of detecting and measuring terminological saturation as a successive approximation process. It further offers the suite of the algorithms that implement the method in the software and comprehensively evaluates all the aspects of the method and possible input configurations in the experiments on synthetic and real collections of texts in several subject domains. The book demonstrates the use of the developed method and software pipeline in industrial and academic use cases. It also outlines the potential benefits of the method for the adoption in industry.

Lying at the intersection of education, art, and cultural heritage, visualization is a powerful tool for representing and interpreting complex information.

This unique text/reference reviews the evolution of the field of visualization, providing innovative examples of applied knowledge visualization from disciplines as varied as law, business management, the arts and humanities. With coverage of theoretical and practical aspects of visualization from ancient Sumerian tablets through to twenty-first century legal contracts, this work underscores the important role that the process of visualization plays in extracting, organizing, and crystallizing the concepts found in complex data.

Topics and features: contains contributions from an international selection of preeminent authorities; presents a thorough introduction to the discipline of knowledge visualization, its current state of affairs and possible future developments; examines how tables have been used for information visualization in historical textual documents; discusses the application of visualization techniques for knowledge transfer in business relationships, and for the linguistic exploration and analysis of sensory descriptions; investigates the use of visualization to understand orchestral music scores, the optical theory behind Renaissance art, and to assist in the reconstruction of an historic church; describes immersive 360 degree stereographic visualization, knowledge-embedded embodied interaction, and a novel methodology for the analysis of architectural forms.

This interdisciplinary collection of the state of the art in knowledge visualization will be of considerable interest to researchers from a broad spectrum of backgrounds in both industry and academia.

There is often a large number of association rules discovered in data mining practice, making it difficult for users to identify those that are of particular interest to them. Therefore, it is important to remove insignificant rules and prune redundancy as well as summarize, visualize, and post-mine the discovered rules. Post-Mining of Association Rules: Techniques for Effective Knowledge Extraction provides a systematic collection on post-mining, summarization and presentation of association rules, and new forms of association rules. This book presents researchers, practitioners, and academicians with tools to extract useful and actionable knowledge after discovering a large number of association rules.

This book addresses the problems that are encountered, and solutions that have been proposed, when we aim to identify people and to reconstruct populations under conditions where information is scarce, ambiguous, fuzzy and sometimes erroneous. The process from handwritten registers to a reconstructed digitized population consists of three major phases, reflected in the three main sections of this book. The first phase involves transcribing and digitizing the data while structuring the information in a meaningful and efficient way. In the second phase, records that refer to the same person or group of persons are identified by a process of linkage. In the third and final phase, the information on an individual is combined into a reconstruction of their life course. The studies and examples in this book originate from a range of countries, each with its own cultural and administrative characteristics, and from medieval charters through historical censuses and vital registration, to the modern issue of privacy preservation. Despite the diverse places and times addressed, they all share the study of fundamental issues when it comes to model reasoning for population reconstruction and the possibilities and limitations of information technology to support this process. It is thus not a single discipline that is involved in such an endeavor. Historians, social scientists, and linguists represent the humanities through their knowledge of the complexity of the past, the limitations of sources, and the possible interpretations of information. The availability of big data from digitized archives and the need for complex analyses to identify individuals calls for the involvement of computer scientists. With contributions from all these fields, often in direct cooperation, this book is at the heart of the digital humanities, and will hopefully offer a source of inspiration for future investigations.

Data science and machine learning-two of the world's hottest fields-are attracting talent from a wide variety of technical, business, and liberal arts disciplines. Python, the world's #1 programming language, is also the most popular language for data science and machine learning. This is the first guide specifically designed to help millions of people with widely diverse backgrounds learn Python so they can use it for data science and machine learning. Leading data science instructor and practitioner Kennedy Behrman first walks through the process of learning to code for the first time with Python and Jupyter notebook, then introduces key libraries every Python data science programmer needs to master. Once you've learned these foundations, Behrman introduces intermediate and applied Python techniques for real-world problem-solving. Throughout, Foundational Python for Data Science presents hands-on exercises, learning assessments, case studies, and more-all created with Colab (Jupyter compatible) notebooks, so you can execute all coding examples interactively without installing or configuring any software.

This book contains the proceedings as well as invited papers for the first annual conference of the UNESCO Unitwin Complex System Digital Campus (CSDC), which is an international initiative gathering 120 Universities on four continents, and structured in ten E-Departments. First Complex Systems Digital Campus World E-Conference 2015 features chapters from the latest research results on theoretical questions of complex systems and their experimental domains. The content contained bridges the gap between the individual and the collective within complex systems science and new integrative sciences on topics such as: genes to organisms to ecosystems, atoms to materials to products, and digital media to the Internet. The conference breaks new ground through a dedicated video-conferencing system - a concept at the heart of the international UNESCO UniTwin, embracing scientists from low-income and distant countries. This book promotes an integrated system of research, education, and training. It also aims at contributing to global development by taking into account its social, economic, and cultural dimensions. First Complex Systems Digital Campus World E-Conference 2015 will appeal to students and researchers working in the fields of complex systems, statistical physics, computational intelligence, and biological physics.

"Reliable Knowledge Discovery" focuses on theory, methods, and techniques for RKDD, a new sub-field of KDD. It studies the theory and methods to assure the reliability and trustworthiness of discovered knowledge and to maintain the stability and consistency of knowledge discovery processes. RKDD has a broad spectrum of applications, especially in critical domains like medicine, finance, and military.

"Reliable Knowledge Discovery" also presents methods and techniques for designing robust knowledge-discovery processes. Approaches to assessing the reliability of the discovered knowledge are introduced. Particular attention is paid to methods for reliable feature selection, reliable graph discovery, reliable classification, and stream mining. Estimating the data trustworthiness is covered in this volume as well. Case studies are provided in many chapters.

"Reliable Knowledge Discovery" is designed for researchers and advanced-level students focused on computer science and electrical engineering as a secondary text or reference. Professionals working in this related field and KDD application developers will also find this book useful.

This book approaches big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and business intelligence through the lens of Data Science. We have grown accustomed to seeing these terms mentioned time and time again in the mainstream media. However, our understanding of what they actually mean often remains limited. This book provides a general overview of the terms and approaches used broadly in data science, and provides detailed information on the underlying theories, models, and application scenarios. Divided into three main parts, it addresses what data science is; how and where it is used; and how it can be implemented using modern open source software. The book offers an essential guide to modern data science for all students, practitioners, developers and managers seeking a deeper understanding of how various aspects of data science work, and of how they can be employed to gain a competitive advantage.

BIG DATA ANALYTICS FOR INTERNET OF THINGS Discover the latest developments in IoT Big Data with a new resource from established and emerging leaders in the field Big Data Analytics for Internet of Things delivers a comprehensive overview of all aspects of big data analytics in Internet of Things (IoT) systems. The book includes discussions of the enabling technologies of IoT data analytics, types of IoT data analytics, challenges in IoT data analytics, demand for IoT data analytics, computing platforms, analytical tools, privacy, and security. The distinguished editors have included resources that address key techniques in the analysis of IoT data. The book demonstrates how to select the appropriate techniques to unearth valuable insights from IoT data and offers novel designs for IoT systems. With an abiding focus on practical strategies with concrete applications for data analysts and IoT professionals, Big Data Analytics for Internet of Things also offers readers: A thorough introduction to the Internet of Things, including IoT architectures, enabling technologies, and applications An exploration of the intersection between the Internet of Things and Big Data, including IoT as a source of Big Data, the unique characteristics of IoT data, etc. A discussion of the IoT data analytics, including the data analytical requirements of IoT data and the types of IoT analytics, including predictive, descriptive, and prescriptive analytics A treatment of machine learning techniques for IoT data analytics Perfect for professionals, industry practitioners, and researchers engaged in big data analytics related to IoT systems, Big Data Analytics for Internet of Things will also earn a place in the libraries of IoT designers and manufacturers interested in facilitating the efficient implementation of data analytics strategies.

Easy-to-follow step-by-step concepts and methods. Every chapter is introduced in a very gentle and intuitive way so students can understand the WHYs, WHAT-IFs, WHAT-IS-THIS-FORs, HOWs, etc by themselves. Practical programming exercises in Python for each chapter. Includes theory and practice for every chapter, summaries, practical coding exercises for target problems, QA, and a companion website with the sample code and data.

Easy-to-follow step-by-step concepts and methods. Every chapter is introduced in a very gentle and intuitive way so students can understand the WHYs, WHAT-IFs, WHAT-IS-THIS-FORs, HOWs, etc by themselves. Practical programming exercises in Python for each chapter. Includes theory and practice for every chapter, summaries, practical coding exercises for target problems, QA, and a companion website with the sample code and data.

The book presents some of the most efficient statistical and deterministic methods for information processing and applications in order to extract targeted information and find hidden patterns. The techniques presented range from Bayesian approaches and their variations such as sequential Monte Carlo methods, Markov Chain Monte Carlo filters, Rao Blackwellization, to the biologically inspired paradigm of Neural Networks and decomposition techniques such as Empirical Mode Decomposition, Independent Component Analysis and Singular Spectrum Analysis. The book is directed to the research students, professors, researchers and practitioners interested in exploring the advanced techniques in intelligent signal processing and data mining paradigms.

The concept of digital risk, which has become ubiquitous in the media, sustains a number of myths and beliefs about the digital world. This book explores the opposite view of these ideologies by focusing on digital risks as perceived by actors in their respective contexts. Perceptions and Analysis of Digital Risks identifies the different types of risks that concern actors and actually impact their daily lives, within education or various socio-professional environments. It provides an analysis of the strategies used by the latter to deal with these risks as they conduct their activities; thus making it possible to characterize the digital cultures and, more broadly, the informational cultures at work. This book offers many avenues for action in terms of educating the younger generations, training teachers and leaders, and mediating risks.