Data Mining is the science and technology of exploring large and complex bodies of data in order to discover useful patterns. It is extremely important because it enables modeling and knowledge extraction from abundant data availability. This book introduces soft computing methods extending the envelope of problems that data mining can solve efficiently. It presents practical soft-computing approaches in data mining and includes various real-world case studies with detailed results.

Over the past three decades or so, research on machine learning and data mining has led to a wide variety of algorithms that learn general functions from experience. As machine learning is maturing, it has begun to make the successful transition from academic research to various practical applications. Generic techniques such as decision trees and artificial neural networks, for example, are now being used in various commercial and industrial applications. Learning to Learn is an exciting new research direction within machine learning. Similar to traditional machine-learning algorithms, the methods described in Learning to Learn induce general functions from experience. However, the book investigates algorithms that can change the way they generalize, i.e., practice the task of learning itself, and improve on it. To illustrate the utility of learning to learn, it is worthwhile comparing machine learning with human learning. Humans encounter a continual stream of learning tasks. They do not just learn concepts or motor skills, they also learn bias, i.e., they learn how to generalize. As a result, humans are often able to generalize correctly from extremely few examples - often just a single example suffices to teach us a new thing. A deeper understanding of computer programs that improve their ability to learn can have a large practical impact on the field of machine learning and beyond. In recent years, the field has made significant progress towards a theory of learning to learn along with practical new algorithms, some of which led to impressive results in real-world applications. Learning to Learn provides a survey of some of the most exciting new research approaches, written by leading researchers in the field. Its objective is to investigate the utility and feasibility of computer programs that can learn how to learn, both from a practical and a theoretical point of view.

This book sheds light on processes associated with the construction of cognitive maps, that is to say, with the construction of internal representations of very large spatial entities such as towns, cities, neighborhoods, landscapes, metropolitan areas, environments and the like. Because of their size, such entities can never be seen in their entirety, and consequently one constructs their internal representation by means of visual, as well as non-visual, modes of sensation and information - text, auditory, haptic and olfactory means for example - or by inference. Intersensory coordination and information transfer thus play a crucial role in the construction of cognitive maps. Because it involves a multiplicity of sensational and informational modes, the issue of cognitive maps does not fall into any single traditional cognitive field, but rather into, and often in between, several of them. Thus, although one is dealing here with processes associated with almost every aspect of our daily life, the subject has received relatively marginal scientific attention. The book is directed to researchers and students of cognitive mapping and environmental cognition. In particular it focuses on the cognitive processes by which one form of information, say haptic, is being transformed into another, say a visual image, and by which multiple forms of information participate in constructing cognitive maps.

Machine Conversationsis a collection of some of the best research available in the practical arts of machine conversation. The book describes various attempts to create practical and flexible machine conversation - ways of talking to computers in an unrestricted version of English or some other language. While this book employs and advances the theory of dialogue and its linguistic underpinnings, the emphasis is on practice, both in university research laboratories and in company research and development. Since the focus is on the task and on the performance, this book provides some of the first-rate work taking place in industry, quite apart from the academic tradition. It also reveals striking and relevant facts about the tone of machine conversations and closely evaluates what users require. Machine Conversations is an excellent reference for researchers interested in computational linguistics, cognitive science, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, human computer interfaces and machine learning.

Genetic Algorithms: Principles and Perspectives: A Guide to GA Theory is a survey of some important theoretical contributions, many of which have been proposed and developed in the Foundations of Genetic Algorithms series of workshops. However, this theoretical work is still rather fragmented, and the authors believe that it is the right time to provide the field with a systematic presentation of the current state of theory in the form of a set of theoretical perspectives. The authors do this in the interest of providing students and researchers with a balanced foundational survey of some recent research on GAs. The scope of the book includes chapter-length discussions of Basic Principles, Schema Theory, "No Free Lunch," GAs and Markov Processes, Dynamical Systems Model, Statistical Mechanics Approximations, Predicting GA Performance, Landscapes and Test Problems.

Deep Learning on Edge Computing Devices: Design Challenges of Algorithm and Architecture focuses on hardware architecture and embedded deep learning, including neural networks. The title helps researchers maximize the performance of Edge-deep learning models for mobile computing and other applications by presenting neural network algorithms and hardware design optimization approaches for Edge-deep learning. Applications are introduced in each section, and a comprehensive example, smart surveillance cameras, is presented at the end of the book, integrating innovation in both algorithm and hardware architecture. Structured into three parts, the book covers core concepts, theories and algorithms and architecture optimization. This book provides a solution for researchers looking to maximize the performance of deep learning models on Edge-computing devices through algorithm-hardware co-design.

This book collects selected papers by authors for CODATA 2006, which are relevant to the acquisition of knowledge and the assessment of risk and opportunity that comes from combining data from a number of different disciplines.

Advances in computing, communications, and control have bridged the physical components of reality and cyberspace leading to the smart internet of things (IoT). The notion of IoT has extraordinary significance for the future of several industrial domains. Hence, it is expected that the complexity in the design of IoT applications will continue to increase due to the integration of several cyber components with physical and industrial systems. As a result, several smart protocols and algorithms are needed to communicate and exchange data between IoT devices. Smart Devices, Applications, and Protocols for the IoT is a collection of innovative research that explores new methods and techniques for achieving reliable and efficient communication in recent applications including machine learning, network optimization, adaptive methods, and smart algorithms and protocols. While highlighting topics including artificial intelligence, sensor networks, and mobile network architectures, this book is ideally designed for IT specialists and consultants, software engineers, technology developers, academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on up-to-date technologies in smart communications, protocols, and algorithms in IoT.

This book presents innovative work in Climate Informatics, a new field that reflects the application of data mining methods to climate science, and shows where this new and fast growing field is headed. Given its interdisciplinary nature, Climate Informatics offers insights, tools and methods that are increasingly needed in order to understand the climate system, an aspect which in turn has become crucial because of the threat of climate change. There has been a veritable explosion in the amount of data produced by satellites, environmental sensors and climate models that monitor, measure and forecast the earth system. In order to meaningfully pursue knowledge discovery on the basis of such voluminous and diverse datasets, it is necessary to apply machine learning methods, and Climate Informatics lies at the intersection of machine learning and climate science. This book grew out of the fourth workshop on Climate Informatics held in Boulder, Colorado in Sep. 2014.

Autonomous agents or multiagent systems are computational systems in which several computational agents interact or work together to perform some set of tasks. These systems may involve computational agents having common goals or distinct goals. Real-Time Search for Learning Autonomous Agents focuses on extending real-time search algorithms for autonomous agents and for a multiagent world. Although real-time search provides an attractive framework for resource-bounded problem solving, the behavior of the problem solver is not rational enough for autonomous agents. The problem solver always keeps the record of its moves and the problem solver cannot utilize and improve previous experiments. Other problems are that although the algorithms interleave planning and execution, they cannot be directly applied to a multiagent world. The problem solver cannot adapt to the dynamically changing goals and the problem solver cannot cooperatively solve problems with other problem solvers. This book deals with all these issues. Real-Time Search for Learning Autonomous Agents serves as an excellent resource for researchers and engineers interested in both practical references and some theoretical basis for agent/multiagent systems. The book can also be used as a text for advanced courses on the subject.

Recent Advances in Robot Learning contains seven papers on robot learning written by leading researchers in the field. As the selection of papers illustrates, the field of robot learning is both active and diverse. A variety of machine learning methods, ranging from inductive logic programming to reinforcement learning, is being applied to many subproblems in robot perception and control, often with objectives as diverse as parameter calibration and concept formulation. While no unified robot learning framework has yet emerged to cover the variety of problems and approaches described in these papers and other publications, a clear set of shared issues underlies many robot learning problems. Machine learning, when applied to robotics, is situated: it is embedded into a real-world system that tightly integrates perception, decision making and execution. Since robot learning involves decision making, there is an inherent active learning issue. Robotic domains are usually complex, yet the expense of using actual robotic hardware often prohibits the collection of large amounts of training data. Most robotic systems are real-time systems. Decisions must be made within critical or practical time constraints. These characteristics present challenges and constraints to the learning system. Since these characteristics are shared by other important real-world application domains, robotics is a highly attractive area for research on machine learning. On the other hand, machine learning is also highly attractive to robotics. There is a great variety of open problems in robotics that defy a static, hand-coded solution. Recent Advances in Robot Learning is an edited volume of peer-reviewed original research comprising seven invited contributions by leading researchers. This research work has also been published as a special issue of Machine Learning (Volume 23, Numbers 2 and 3).

Intelligent systems of the natural kind are adaptive and robust: they learn over time and degrade gracefully under stress. If artificial systems are to display a similar level of sophistication, an organizing framework and operating principles are required to manage the resulting complexity of design and behavior. This book presents a general framework for adaptive systems. The utility of the comprehensive framework is demonstrated by tailoring it to particular models of computational learning, ranging from neural networks to declarative logic. The key to robustness lies in distributed decision making. An exemplar of this strategy is the neural network in both its biological and synthetic forms. In a neural network, the knowledge is encoded in the collection of cells and their linkages, rather than in any single component. Distributed decision making is even more apparent in the case of independent agents. For a population of autonomous agents, their proper coordination may well be more instrumental for attaining their objectives than are their individual capabilities. This book probes the problems and opportunities arising from autonomous agents acting individually and collectively. Following the general framework for learning systems and its application to neural networks, the coordination of independent agents through game theory is explored. Finally, the utility of game theory for artificial agents is revealed through a case study in robotic coordination. Given the universality of the subjects -- learning behavior and coordinative strategies in uncertain environments -- this book will be of interest to students and researchers in various disciplines, ranging from all areas of engineering to the computing disciplines; from the life sciences to the physical sciences; and from the management arts to social studies.

The Logic Programming Tutor (LPT) assumes no prior knowledge or experience of Prolog. The book is designed as a teaching tool to be used in conjunction with a computer program of the same name which is offered free of charge on disk. The LPT is essentially a user friendly front-end that can accept either Prolog or an English-like notation, and translate between one and the other. There is a built-in editor which can display sections from one of several scripts' written by an instructor; these guide the student in learning Prolog by experimentation. The book is divided into two parts. Part I describes in detail how the Tutor works, and finishes with a complete listing of the source code. Because the Tutor's editor and the script handler are independent of the programming language it accepts, it will be of interest not only to teachers of Prolog, but also to those teaching other logic-based languages built on it -- for example, frame-based or object-oriented languages. Part II contains the scripts and supplementary exercises used with the LPT at Oxford University. Each script is accompanied by notes to the teacher, giving answers to exercises, and indicating problems and misconceptions that students have experienced.

The healthcare industry is predominantly moving towards affordable, accessible, and quality health care. All organizations are striving to build communication compatibility among the wide range of devices that have operated independently. Recent developments in electronic devices have boosted the research in the medical imaging field. It incorporates several medical imaging techniques and achieves an important goal for health improvement all over the world. Despite the significant advances in high-resolution medical instruments, physicians cannot always obtain the full amount of information directly from the equipment outputs, and a large amount of data cannot be easily exploited without a computer. Machine Learning and AI Techniques in Interactive Medical Image Analysis discusses how clinical efficiency can be improved by investigating the different types of intelligent techniques and systems to get more reliable and accurate diagnostic conclusions. This book further introduces segmentation techniques to locate suspicious areas in medical images and increase the segmentation accuracy. Covering topics such as computer-aided detection, intelligent techniques, and machine learning, this premier reference source is a dynamic resource for IT specialists, computer scientists, diagnosticians, imaging specialists, medical professionals, hospital administrators, medical students, medical technicians, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

This application-oriented monograph focuses on a novel and complex type of control systems. Written on an engineering level, including fundamentals, advanced methods and applications, the book applies techniques originating from new methods such as artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, neural networks etc.

- Offers a comprehensive technological path from basic theories to categorization of existing algorithms - Covers state-of-the-art Auto Encoder, Generative Networks, Synthetic data, Self-Driving cars and cognitive AI-based decision makings. - Includes practical evaluations with python on GAN and using synthetic data - Provides an overview of the trends, and applications to provide you with ML landscape

Explore the multidisciplinary nature of complex networks through machine learning techniques Statistical and Machine Learning Approaches for Network Analysis provides an accessible framework for structurally analyzing graphs by bringing together known and novel approaches on graph classes and graph measures for classification. By providing different approaches based on experimental data, the book uniquely sets itself apart from the current literature by exploring the application of machine learning techniques to various types of complex networks. Comprised of chapters written by internationally renowned researchers in the field of interdisciplinary network theory, the book presents current and classical methods to analyze networks statistically. Methods from machine learning, data mining, and information theory are strongly emphasized throughout. Real data sets are used to showcase the discussed methods and topics, which include: * A survey of computational approaches to reconstruct and partition biological networks * An introduction to complex networks measures, statistical properties, and models * Modeling for evolving biological networks * The structure of an evolving random bipartite graph * Density-based enumeration in structured data * Hyponym extraction employing a weighted graph kernel Statistical and Machine Learning Approaches for Network Analysis is an excellent supplemental text for graduate-level, cross-disciplinary courses in applied discrete mathematics, bioinformatics, pattern recognition, and computer science. The book is also a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners in the fields of applied discrete mathematics, machine learning, data mining, and biostatistics.

"Machine Learning and Data Mining for Computer Security" provides an overview of the current state of research in machine learning and data mining as it applies to problems in computer security. This book has a strong focus on information processing and combines and extends results from computer security.

The first part of the book surveys the data sources, the learning and mining methods, evaluation methodologies, and past work relevant for computer security. The second part of the book consists of articles written by the top researchers working in this area. These articles deals with topics of host-based intrusion detection through the analysis of audit trails, of command sequences and of system calls as well as network intrusion detection through the analysis of TCP packets and the detection of malicious executables.

This book fills the great need for a book that collects and frames work on developing and applying methods from machine learning and data mining to problems in computer security.

Computers that program themselves' has long been an aim of computer scientists. Recently genetic programming (GP) has started to show its promise by automatically evolving programs. Indeed in a small number of problems GP has evolved programs whose performance is similar to or even slightly better than that of programs written by people. The main thrust of GP has been to automatically create functions. While these can be of great use they contain no memory and relatively little work has addressed automatic creation of program code including stored data. This issue is the main focus of Genetic Programming, and Data Structures: Genetic Programming + Data Structures = Automatic Programming!. This book is motivated by the observation from software engineering that data abstraction (e.g., via abstract data types) is essential in programs created by human programmers. This book shows that abstract data types can be similarly beneficial to the automatic production of programs using GP. Genetic Programming and Data Structures: Genetic Programming + Data Structures = Automatic Programming! shows how abstract data types (stacks, queues and lists) can be evolved using genetic programming, demonstrates how GP can evolve general programs which solve the nested brackets problem, recognises a Dyck context free language, and implements a simple four function calculator. In these cases, an appropriate data structure is beneficial compared to simple indexed memory. This book also includes a survey of GP, with a critical review of experiments with evolving memory, and reports investigations of real world electrical network maintenance scheduling problems that demonstrate that Genetic Algorithms can findlow cost viable solutions to such problems. Genetic Programming and Data Structures: Genetic Programming + Data Structures = Automatic Programming! should be of direct interest to computer scientists doing research on genetic programming, genetic algorithms, data structures, and artificial intelligence. In addition, this book will be of interest to practitioners working in all of these areas and to those interested in automatic programming.

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have grown into a mature field of research in optimization, and have proven to be effective and robust problem solvers for a broad range of static real-world optimization problems. Yet, since they are based on the principles of natural evolution, and since natural evolution is a dynamic process in a changing environment, EAs are also well suited to dynamic optimization problems. Evolutionary Optimization in Dynamic Environments is the first comprehensive work on the application of EAs to dynamic optimization problems. It provides an extensive survey on research in the area and shows how EAs can be successfully used to continuously and efficiently adapt a solution to a changing environment, find a good trade-off between solution quality and adaptation cost, find robust solutions whose quality is insensitive to changes in the environment, find flexible solutions which are not only good but that can be easily adapted when necessary. All four aspects are treated in this book, providing a holistic view on the challenges and opportunities when applying EAs to dynamic optimization problems. The comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of the subject, together with details of latest original research, makes Evolutionary Optimization in Dynamic Environments an invaluable resource for researchers and professionals who are dealing with dynamic and stochastic optimization problems, and who are interested in applying local search heuristics, such as evolutionary algorithms.

Anticipatory Learning Classifier Systems describes the state of the art of anticipatory learning classifier systems-adaptive rule learning systems that autonomously build anticipatory environmental models. An anticipatory model specifies all possible action-effects in an environment with respect to given situations. It can be used to simulate anticipatory adaptive behavior.

Anticipatory Learning Classifier Systems highlights how anticipations influence cognitive systems and illustrates the use of anticipations for (1) faster reactivity, (2) adaptive behavior beyond reinforcement learning, (3) attentional mechanisms, (4) simulation of other agents and (5) the implementation of a motivational module. The book focuses on a particular evolutionary model learning mechanism, a combination of a directed specializing mechanism and a genetic generalizing mechanism. Experiments show that anticipatory adaptive behavior can be simulated by exploiting the evolving anticipatory model for even faster model learning, planning applications, and adaptive behavior beyond reinforcement learning.

Anticipatory Learning Classifier Systems gives a detailed algorithmic description as well as a program documentation of a C++ implementation of the system. It is an excellent reference for researchers interested in adaptive behavior and machine learning from a cognitive science perspective as well as those who are interested in combining evolutionary learning mechanisms for learning and optimization tasks.

This book presents recent developments in multivariate and robust statistical methods. Featuring contributions by leading experts in the field it covers various topics, including multivariate and high-dimensional methods, time series, graphical models, robust estimation, supervised learning and normal extremes. It will appeal to statistics and data science researchers, PhD students and practitioners who are interested in modern multivariate and robust statistics. The book is dedicated to David E. Tyler on the occasion of his pending retirement and also includes a review contribution on the popular Tyler’s shape matrix.

Medical and Healthcare Robotics: New Paradigms and Recent Advances provides an overview and exclusive insights into current trends, the most recent innovations, and concerns in medical robotics. The book covers the major areas of medical robotics, including rehabilitation devices, artificial organs, assistive technologies, service robotics, and robotic devices for surgery, exploration, diagnosis, therapy, and training. It highlights the limitations and the importance of robotics and artificial intelligence for medical and healthcare applications. The book is a timely and comprehensive reference guide for undergraduate-level students, graduate students, and researchers in the fields of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, mechatronics, control systems engineering, and biomedical engineering. It can be useful for master’s programs, leading consultants, and industrial companies. The book can be of high interest for physicians and physiotherapists and all technical people in the medical and biomedical fields.

This book presents frontier research on the use of computational methods to model complex interactions in economics and finance. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and simulations offer effective means of analyzing and learning from large as well as new types of data. These computational tools have permeated various subfields of economics, finance, and also across different schools of economic thought. Through 16 chapters written by pioneers in economics, finance, computer science, psychology, complexity and statistics/econometrics, the book introduces their original research and presents the findings they have yielded. Theoretical and empirical studies featured in this book draw on a variety of approaches such as agent-based modeling, numerical simulations, computable economics, as well as employing tools from artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. The use of computational approaches to perform counterfactual thought experiments are also introduced, which help transcend the limits posed by traditional mathematical and statistical tools. The book also includes discussions on methodology, epistemology, history and issues concerning prediction, validation, and inference, all of which have become pertinent with the increasing use of computational approaches in economic analysis.