This volume features selected, refereed papers on various aspects of statistics, matrix theory and its applications to statistics, as well as related numerical linear algebra topics and numerical solution methods, which are relevant for problems arising in statistics and in big data. The contributions were originally presented at the 25th International Workshop on Matrices and Statistics (IWMS 2016), held in Funchal (Madeira), Portugal on June 6-9, 2016. The IWMS workshop series brings together statisticians, computer scientists, data scientists and mathematicians, helping them better understand each other's tools, and fostering new collaborations at the interface of matrix theory and statistics.

Big Data in medical science - what exactly is that? What are the potentials for healthcare management? Where is Big Data at the moment? Which risk factors need to be kept in mind? What is hype and what is real potential? This book provides an impression of the new possibilities of networked data analysis and "Big Data" - for and within medical science and healthcare management. Big Data is about the collection, storage, search, distribution, statistical analysis and visualization of large amounts of data. This is especially relevant in healthcare management, as the amount of digital information is growing exponentially. An amount of data corresponding to 12 million novels emerges during the time of a single hospital stay. These are dimensions that cannot be dealt with without IT technologies. What can we do with the data that are available today? What will be possible in the next few years? Do we want everything that is possible? Who protects the data from wrong usage? More importantly, who protects the data from NOT being used? Big Data is the "resource of the 21st century" and might change the world of medical science more than we understand, realize and want at the moment. The core competence of Big Data will be the complete and correct collection, evaluation and interpretation of data. This also makes it possible to estimate the frame conditions and possibilities of the automation of daily (medical) routine. Can Big Data in medical science help to better understand fundamental problems of health and illness, and draw consequences accordingly? Big Data also means the overcoming of sector borders in healthcare management. The specialty of Big Data analysis will be the new quality of the outcomes of the combination of data that were not related before. That is why the editor of the book gives a voice to 30 experts, working in a variety of fields, such as in hospitals, in health insurance or as medical practitioners. The authors show potentials, risks, concrete practical examples, future scenarios, and come up with possible answers for the field of information technology and data privacy.

This book discusses the challenges facing current research in knowledge discovery and data mining posed by the huge volumes of complex data now gathered in various real-world applications (e.g., business process monitoring, cybersecurity, medicine, language processing, and remote sensing). The book consists of 14 chapters covering the latest research by the authors and the research centers they represent. It illustrates techniques and algorithms that have recently been developed to preserve the richness of the data and allow us to efficiently and effectively identify the complex information it contains. Presenting the latest developments in complex pattern mining, this book is a valuable reference resource for data science researchers and professionals in academia and industry.

What is text mining, and how can it be used? What relevance do these methods have to everyday work in information science and the digital humanities? How does one develop competences in text mining? Working with Text provides a series of cross-disciplinary perspectives on text mining and its applications. As text mining raises legal and ethical issues, the legal background of text mining and the responsibilities of the engineer are discussed in this book. Chapters provide an introduction to the use of the popular GATE text mining package with data drawn from social media, the use of text mining to support semantic search, the development of an authority system to support content tagging, and recent techniques in automatic language evaluation. Focused studies describe text mining on historical texts, automated indexing using constrained vocabularies, and the use of natural language processing to explore the climate science literature. Interviews are included that offer a glimpse into the real-life experience of working within commercial and academic text mining.

Recent advances in high-throughput technologies have resulted in a deluge of biological information. Yet the storage, analysis, and interpretation of such multifaceted data require effective and efficient computational tools.

This unique text/reference 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 book reviews both established and cutting-edge research, following a clear structure reflecting the major phases of a pattern recognition system: classification, feature selection, and clustering. The text provides a careful balance of theory, algorithms, and applications, with a particular emphasis given to applications in computational biology and bioinformatics.

Topics and features: reviews the development of scalable pattern recognition algorithms for computational biology and bioinformatics; 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.

This important work will be of great use to graduate students and researchers in the fields of computer science, electrical and biomedical engineering. Researchers and practitioners involved in pattern recognition, machine learning, computational biology and bioinformatics, data mining, and soft computing will also find the book invaluable.

Focused on the mathematical foundations of social media analysis, Graph-Based Social Media Analysis provides a comprehensive introduction to the use of graph analysis in the study of social and digital media. It addresses an important scientific and technological challenge, namely the confluence of graph analysis and network theory with linear algebra, digital media, machine learning, big data analysis, and signal processing. Supplying an overview of graph-based social media analysis, the book provides readers with a clear understanding of social media structure. It uses graph theory, particularly the algebraic description and analysis of graphs, in social media studies. The book emphasizes the big data aspects of social and digital media. It presents various approaches to storing vast amounts of data online and retrieving that data in real-time. It demystifies complex social media phenomena, such as information diffusion, marketing and recommendation systems in social media, and evolving systems. It also covers emerging trends, such as big data analysis and social media evolution. Describing how to conduct proper analysis of the social and digital media markets, the book provides insights into processing, storing, and visualizing big social media data and social graphs. It includes coverage of graphs in social and digital media, graph and hyper-graph fundamentals, mathematical foundations coming from linear algebra, algebraic graph analysis, graph clustering, community detection, graph matching, web search based on ranking, label propagation and diffusion in social media, graph-based pattern recognition and machine learning, graph-based pattern classification and dimensionality reduction, and much more. This book is an ideal reference for scientists and engineers working in social media and digital media production and distribution. It is also suitable for use as a textbook in undergraduate or graduate courses on digital media, social media, or social networks.

The growth of machines and users of the Internet has led to the proliferation of all sorts of data concerning individuals, institutions, companies, governments, universities, and all kinds of known objects and events happening everywhere in daily life. Scientific knowledge is not an exception to the data boom. The phenomenon of data growth in science pushes forth as the number of scientific papers published doubles every 9-15 years, and the need for methods and tools to understand what is reported in scientific literature becomes evident. As the number of academicians and innovators swells, so do the number of publications of all types, yielding outlets of documents and depots of authors and institutions that need to be found in Bibliometric databases. These databases are dug into and treated to hand over metrics of research performance by means of Scientometrics that analyze the toil of individuals, institutions, journals, countries, and even regions of the world. The objective of this book is to assist students, professors, university managers, government, industry, and stakeholders in general, understand which are the main Bibliometric databases, what are the key research indicators, and who are the main players in university rankings and the methodologies and approaches that they employ in producing ranking tables. The book is divided into two sections. The first looks at Scientometric databases, including Scopus and Google Scholar as well as institutional repositories. The second section examines the application of Scientometrics to world-class universities and the role that Scientometrics can play in competition among them. It looks at university rankings and the methodologies used to create these rankings. Individual chapters examine specific rankings that include: QS World University Scimago Institutions Webometrics U-Multirank U.S. News & World Report The book concludes with a discussion of university performance in the age of research analytics.

In order to make informed decisions, there are three important elements: intuition, trust, and analytics. Intuition is based on experiential learning and recent research has shown that those who rely on their "gut feelings" may do better than those who don't. Analytics, however, are important in a data-driven environment to also inform decision making. The third element, trust, is critical for knowledge sharing to take place. These three elements-intuition, analytics, and trust-make a perfect combination for decision making. This book gathers leading researchers who explore the role of these three elements in the process of decision-making.

This edited collection discusses the emerging topics in statistical modeling for biomedical research. Leading experts in the frontiers of biostatistics and biomedical research discuss the statistical procedures, useful methods, and their novel applications in biostatistics research. Interdisciplinary in scope, the volume as a whole reflects the latest advances in statistical modeling in biomedical research, identifies impactful new directions, and seeks to drive the field forward. It also fosters the interaction of scholars in the arena, offering great opportunities to stimulate further collaborations. This book will appeal to industry data scientists and statisticians, researchers, and graduate students in biostatistics and biomedical science. It covers topics in: Next generation sequence data analysis Deep learning, precision medicine, and their applications Large scale data analysis and its applications Biomedical research and modeling Survival analysis with complex data structure and its applications.

The Art and Science of Analyzing Software Data provides valuable information on analysis techniques often used to derive insight from software data. This book shares best practices in the field generated by leading data scientists, collected from their experience training software engineering students and practitioners to master data science. The book covers topics such as the analysis of security data, code reviews, app stores, log files, and user telemetry, among others. It covers a wide variety of techniques such as co-change analysis, text analysis, topic analysis, and concept analysis, as well as advanced topics such as release planning and generation of source code comments. It includes stories from the trenches from expert data scientists illustrating how to apply data analysis in industry and open source, present results to stakeholders, and drive decisions.

Decision trees have become one of the most powerful and popular approaches in knowledge discovery and data mining; it is the science of exploring large and complex bodies of data in order to discover useful patterns. Decision tree learning continues to evolve over time. Existing methods are constantly being improved and new methods introduced.This 2nd Edition is dedicated entirely to the field of decision trees in data mining; to cover all aspects of this important technique, as well as improved or new methods and techniques developed after the publication of our first edition. In this new edition, all chapters have been revised and new topics brought in. New topics include Cost-Sensitive Active Learning, Learning with Uncertain and Imbalanced Data, Using Decision Trees beyond Classification Tasks, Privacy Preserving Decision Tree Learning, Lessons Learned from Comparative Studies, and Learning Decision Trees for Big Data. A walk-through guide to existing open-source data mining software is also included in this edition.This book invites readers to explore the many benefits in data mining that decision trees offer:

The book proposes new technologies and discusses future solutions for design infrastructure for ICT. The book contains high quality submissions presented at Second International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Sustainable Development (ICT4SD - 2016) held at Goa, India during 1 - 2 July, 2016. The conference stimulates the cutting-edge research discussions among many academic pioneering researchers, scientists, industrial engineers, and students from all around the world. The topics covered in this book also focus on innovative issues at international level by bringing together the experts from different countries.

Biologists are stepping up their efforts in understanding the biological processes that underlie disease pathways in the clinical contexts. This has resulted in a flood of biological and clinical data from genomic and protein sequences, DNA microarrays, protein interactions, biomedical images, to disease pathways and electronic health records. To exploit these data for discovering new knowledge that can be translated into clinical applications, there are fundamental data analysis difficulties that have to be overcome. Practical issues such as handling noisy and incomplete data, processing compute-intensive tasks, and integrating various data sources, are new challenges faced by biologists in the post-genome era. This book will cover the fundamentals of state-of-the-art data mining techniques which have been designed to handle such challenging data analysis problems, and demonstrate with real applications how biologists and clinical scientists can employ data mining to enable them to make meaningful observations and discoveries from a wide array of heterogeneous data from molecular biology to pharmaceutical and clinical domains.

Originating from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and many other networking sites, the social media shared by users and the associated metadata are collectively known as user generated content (UGC). To analyze UGC and glean insight about user behavior, robust techniques are needed to tackle the huge amount of real-time, multimedia, and multilingual data. Researchers must also know how to assess the social aspects of UGC, such as user relations and influential users. Mining User Generated Content is the first focused effort to compile state-of-the-art research and address future directions of UGC. It explains how to collect, index, and analyze UGC to uncover social trends and user habits. Divided into four parts, the book focuses on the mining and applications of UGC. The first part presents an introduction to this new and exciting topic. Covering the mining of UGC of different medium types, the second part discusses the social annotation of UGC, social network graph construction and community mining, mining of UGC to assist in music retrieval, and the popular but difficult topic of UGC sentiment analysis. The third part describes the mining and searching of various types of UGC, including knowledge extraction, search techniques for UGC content, and a specific study on the analysis and annotation of Japanese blogs. The fourth part on applications explores the use of UGC to support question-answering, information summarization, and recommendations.

Learn How to Properly Use the Latest Analytics Approaches in Your Organization Computational Business Analytics presents tools and techniques for descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics applicable across multiple domains. Through many examples and challenging case studies from a variety of fields, practitioners easily see the connections to their own problems and can then formulate their own solution strategies. The book first covers core descriptive and inferential statistics for analytics. The author then enhances numerical statistical techniques with symbolic artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques for richer predictive and prescriptive analytics. With a special emphasis on methods that handle time and textual data, the text: Enriches principal component and factor analyses with subspace methods, such as latent semantic analyses Combines regression analyses with probabilistic graphical modeling, such as Bayesian networks Extends autoregression and survival analysis techniques with the Kalman filter, hidden Markov models, and dynamic Bayesian networks Embeds decision trees within influence diagrams Augments nearest-neighbor and k-means clustering techniques with support vector machines and neural networks These approaches are not replacements of traditional statistics-based analytics; rather, in most cases, a generalized technique can be reduced to the underlying traditional base technique under very restrictive conditions. The book shows how these enriched techniques offer efficient solutions in areas, including customer segmentation, churn prediction, credit risk assessment, fraud detection, and advertising campaigns.

Powerful, Flexible Tools for a Data-Driven WorldAs the data deluge continues in today's world, the need to master data mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics has never been greater. These techniques and tools provide unprecedented insights into data, enabling better decision making and forecasting, and ultimately the solution of increasingly complex problems. Learn from the Creators of the RapidMiner Software Written by leaders in the data mining community, including the developers of the RapidMiner software, RapidMiner: Data Mining Use Cases and Business Analytics Applications provides an in-depth introduction to the application of data mining and business analytics techniques and tools in scientific research, medicine, industry, commerce, and diverse other sectors. It presents the most powerful and flexible open source software solutions: RapidMiner and RapidAnalytics. The software and their extensions can be freely downloaded at www.RapidMiner.com. Understand Each Stage of the Data Mining ProcessThe book and software tools cover all relevant steps of the data mining process, from data loading, transformation, integration, aggregation, and visualization to automated feature selection, automated parameter and process optimization, and integration with other tools, such as R packages or your IT infrastructure via web services. The book and software also extensively discuss the analysis of unstructured data, including text and image mining. Easily Implement Analytics Approaches Using RapidMiner and RapidAnalytics Each chapter describes an application, how to approach it with data mining methods, and how to implement it with RapidMiner and RapidAnalytics. These application-oriented chapters give you not only the necessary analytics to solve problems and tasks, but also reproducible, step-by-step descriptions of using RapidMiner and RapidAnalytics. The case studies serve as blueprints for your own data mining applications, enabling you to effectively solve similar problems.

This book presents Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), which aims at producing explainable models that enable human users to understand and appropriately trust the obtained results. The authors discuss the challenges involved in making machine learning-based AI explainable. Firstly, that the explanations must be adapted to different stakeholders (end-users, policy makers, industries, utilities etc.) with different levels of technical knowledge (managers, engineers, technicians, etc.) in different application domains. Secondly, that it is important to develop an evaluation framework and standards in order to measure the effectiveness of the provided explanations at the human and the technical levels. This book gathers research contributions aiming at the development and/or the use of XAI techniques in order to address the aforementioned challenges in different applications such as healthcare, finance, cybersecurity, and document summarization. It allows highlighting the benefits and requirements of using explainable models in different application domains in order to provide guidance to readers to select the most adapted models to their specified problem and conditions. Includes recent developments of the use of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in order to address the challenges of digital transition and cyber-physical systems; Provides a textual scientific description of the use of XAI in order to address the challenges of digital transition and cyber-physical systems; Presents examples and case studies in order to increase transparency and understanding of the methodological concepts.

This book analyzes techniques that use the direct and inverse fuzzy transform for image processing and data analysis. The book is divided into two parts, the first of which describes methods and techniques that use the bi-dimensional fuzzy transform method in image analysis. In turn, the second describes approaches that use the multidimensional fuzzy transform method in data analysis. An F-transform in one variable is defined as an operator which transforms a continuous function f on the real interval [a,b] in an n-dimensional vector by using n-assigned fuzzy sets A1, ... , An which constitute a fuzzy partition of [a,b]. Then, an inverse F-transform is defined in order to convert the n-dimensional vector output in a continuous function that equals f up to an arbitrary quantity . We may limit this concept to the finite case by defining the discrete F-transform of a function f in one variable, even if it is not known a priori. A simple extension of this concept to functions in two variables allows it to be used for the coding/decoding and processing of images. Moreover, an extended version with multidimensional functions can be used to address a host of topics in data analysis, including the analysis of large and very large datasets. Over the past decade, many researchers have proposed applications of fuzzy transform techniques for various image processing topics, such as image coding/decoding, image reduction, image segmentation, image watermarking and image fusion; and for such data analysis problems as regression analysis, classification, association rule extraction, time series analysis, forecasting, and spatial data analysis. The robustness, ease of use, and low computational complexity of fuzzy transforms make them a powerful fuzzy approximation tool suitable for many computer science applications. This book presents methods and techniques based on the use of fuzzy transforms in various applications of image processing and data analysis, including image segmentation, image tamper detection, forecasting, and classification, highlighting the benefits they offer compared with traditional methods. Emphasis is placed on applications of fuzzy transforms to innovative problems, such as massive data mining, and image and video security in social networks based on the application of advanced fragile watermarking systems. This book is aimed at researchers, students, computer scientists and IT developers to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to apply and implement fuzzy transforms-based techniques in image and data analysis applications.

Expert Bytes: Computer Expertise in Forensic Documents - Players, Needs, Resources and Pitfalls -introduces computer scientists and forensic document examiners to the computer expertise of forensic documents and assists them with the design of research projects in this interdisciplinary field. This is not a textbook on how to perform the actual forensic document expertise or program expertise software, but a project design guide, an anthropological inquiry, and a technology, market, and policies review. After reading this book you will have deepened your knowledge on: What computational expertise of forensic documents is What has been done in the field so far and what the future looks like What the expertise is worth, what its public image is, and how to improve both Who is doing what in the field, where, and for how much How the expertise software functions The primary target readers are computer scientists and forensic document examiners, at the student and professional level. Paleographers, historians of science and technology, and scientific policy makers can also profit from the book. Concise and practical, featuring an attractive and functional layout design, the book is supplemented with graphical data representations, statistics, resource lists, and extensive references to facilitate further study.

New technologies have enabled us to collect massive amounts of data in many fields. However, our pace of discovering useful information and knowledge from these data falls far behind our pace of collecting the data. Data Mining: Theories, Algorithms, and Examples introduces and explains a comprehensive set of data mining algorithms from various data mining fields. The book reviews theoretical rationales and procedural details of data mining algorithms, including those commonly found in the literature and those presenting considerable difficulty, using small data examples to explain and walk through the algorithms. The book covers a wide range of data mining algorithms, including those commonly found in data mining literature and those not fully covered in most of existing literature due to their considerable difficulty. The book presents a list of software packages that support the data mining algorithms, applications of the data mining algorithms with references, and exercises, along with the solutions manual and PowerPoint slides of lectures. The author takes a practical approach to data mining algorithms so that the data patterns produced can be fully interpreted. This approach enables students to understand theoretical and operational aspects of data mining algorithms and to manually execute the algorithms for a thorough understanding of the data patterns produced by them.

Leverage the full power of Bayesian analysis for competitive advantage Bayesian methods can solve problems you can't reliably handle any other way. Building on your existing Excel analytics skills and experience, Microsoft Excel MVP Conrad Carlberg helps you make the most of Excel's Bayesian capabilities and move toward R to do even more. Step by step, with real-world examples, Carlberg shows you how to use Bayesian analytics to solve a wide array of real problems. Carlberg clarifies terminology that often bewilders analysts, and offers sample R code to take advantage of the rethinking package in R and its gateway to Stan. As you incorporate these Bayesian approaches into your analytical toolbox, you'll build a powerful competitive advantage for your organization-and yourself. Explore key ideas and strategies that underlie Bayesian analysis Distinguish prior, likelihood, and posterior distributions, and compare algorithms for driving sampling inputs Use grid approximation to solve simple univariate problems, and understand its limits as parameters increase Perform complex simulations and regressions with quadratic approximation and Richard McElreath's quap function Manage text values as if they were numeric Learn today's gold-standard Bayesian sampling technique: Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) Use MCMC to optimize execution speed in high-complexity problems Discover when frequentist methods fail and Bayesian methods are essential-and when to use both in tandem

As urban congestion continues to be an ever increasing problem, routing in these settings has become an important area of operations research. This monograph provides cutting-edge research, utilizing the recent advances in technology, to quantify the value of dynamic, time-dependent information for advanced vehicle routing in city logistics. The methodology of traffic data collection is enhanced by GPS based data collection, resulting in a comprehensive number of travel time records. Data Mining is also applied to derive dynamic information models as required by time-dependent optimization. Finally, well-known approaches of vehicle routing are adapted in order to handle dynamic information models. This book interweaves the usually distinct areas of traffic data collection, information retrieval and time-dependent optimization by an integrated methodological approach, which refers to synergies of Data Mining and Operations Research techniques by example of city logistics applications. These procedures will help improve the reliability of logistics services in congested urban areas.

This open access book explores cutting-edge solutions and best practices for big data and data-driven AI applications for the data-driven economy. It provides the reader with a basis for understanding how technical issues can be overcome to offer real-world solutions to major industrial areas. The book starts with an introductory chapter that provides an overview of the book by positioning the following chapters in terms of their contributions to technology frameworks which are key elements of the Big Data Value Public-Private Partnership and the upcoming Partnership on AI, Data and Robotics. The remainder of the book is then arranged in two parts. The first part "Technologies and Methods" contains horizontal contributions of technologies and methods that enable data value chains to be applied in any sector. The second part "Processes and Applications" details experience reports and lessons from using big data and data-driven approaches in processes and applications. Its chapters are co-authored with industry experts and cover domains including health, law, finance, retail, manufacturing, mobility, and smart cities. Contributions emanate from the Big Data Value Public-Private Partnership and the Big Data Value Association, which have acted as the European data community's nucleus to bring together businesses with leading researchers to harness the value of data to benefit society, business, science, and industry. The book is of interest to two primary audiences, first, undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers in various fields, including big data, data science, data engineering, and machine learning and AI. Second, practitioners and industry experts engaged in data-driven systems, software design and deployment projects who are interested in employing these advanced methods to address real-world problems.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Intelligence (BI) and Big Data analytics (BDA) are business related tasks and processes, which are supported by standardized software solutions. The book explains that this requires business-oriented thinking and acting from IT specialists and data scientists. It is a good idea to let students experience this directly from the business perspective, for example as executives of a virtual company in a role-playing game. The second edition of the book has been completely revised, restructured and supplemented with actual topics such as blockchains in supply chains and the correlation between Big Data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The structure of the book is based on the gradual implementation and integration of the respective information systems from the business and management perspectives. Part I contains chapters with detailed descriptions of the topics supplemented by online tests and exercises. Part II introduces role play and the online gaming and simulation environment. Supplementary teaching material, presentations, templates, and video clips are available online in the gaming area. The gaming and business simulation Kdibisglobal.com, newly created for this book, now includes a beer division, a bottled water division, a soft drink division and a manufacturing division for barcode cash register scanner with their specific business processes and supply chains.

Going beyond performing simple analyses, researchers involved in the highly dynamic field of computational intelligent data analysis design algorithms that solve increasingly complex data problems in changing environments, including economic, environmental, and social data. Computational Intelligent Data Analysis for Sustainable Development presents novel methodologies for automatically processing these types of data to support rational decision making for sustainable development. Through numerous case studies and applications, it illustrates important data analysis methods, including mathematical optimization, machine learning, signal processing, and temporal and spatial analysis, for quantifying and describing sustainable development problems. With a focus on integrated sustainability analysis, the book presents a large-scale quadratic programming algorithm to expand high-resolution input-output tables from the national scale to the multinational scale to measure the carbon footprint of the entire trade supply chain. It also quantifies the error or dispersion between different reclassification and aggregation schemas, revealing that aggregation errors have a high concentration over specific regions and sectors. The book summarizes the latest contributions of the data analysis community to climate change research. A profuse amount of climate data of various types is available, providing a rich and fertile playground for future data mining and machine learning research. The book also pays special attention to several critical challenges in the science of climate extremes that are not handled by the current generation of climate models. It discusses potential conceptual and methodological directions to build a close integration between physical understanding, or physics-based modeling, and data-driven insights. The book then covers the conservation of species and ecologically valuable land. A case study on the Pennsylvania Dirt and Gravel Roads Program demonstrates that multiple-objective linear programming is a more versatile and efficient approach than the widely used benefit targeting selection process. Moving on to renewable energy and the need for smart grids, the book explores how the ongoing transformation to a sustainable energy system of renewable sources leads to a paradigm shift from demand-driven generation to generation-driven demand. It shows how to maximize renewable energy as electricity by building a supergrid or mixing renewable sources with demand management and storage. It also presents intelligent data analysis for real-time detection of disruptive events from power system frequency data collected using an existing Internet-based frequency monitoring network as well as evaluates a set of computationally intelligent techniques for long-term wind resource assessment. In addition, the book gives an example of how temporal and spatial data analysis tools are used to gather knowledge about behavioral data and address important social problems such as criminal offenses. It also applies constraint logic programming to a planning problem: the environmental and social impact assessment of the regional energy plan of the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. Sustainable development problems, such as global warming, resource shortages, global species loss, and pollution, push researchers to create powerful data analysis approaches that analysts can then use to gain insight into these issues to support rational decision making. This volume shows both the data analysis and sustainable development communities how to use intelligent data analysis tools to address practical problems and encourages researchers to develop better methods.