This book is a collection of papers presented during the 8th World Conference on Soft Computing in February 2022. The papers cover multiple areas important for soft computing. Some papers are dedicated to fundamental aspects of soft computing, i.e., fuzzy mathematics, type-2 fuzzy sets, evolutionary-based optimization, aggregation, and neural networks. Others emphasize the application of soft computing methods to data analysis, image processing, decision-making, classification, series prediction, economics, control, and modeling.

This book shows how to provide uncertainty-related theoretical justification for empirical dependencies, on the examples from numerous application areas. Such justifications are needed, since without them, practitioners may be reluctant to use these dependencies: purely empirical formulas often turn out to hold only in some cases. Examples of new theoretical explanations range from fundamental physics (quark confinement, galaxy superclusters, etc.) and geophysics (earthquake analysis) to transportation and electrical engineering to computer science (image processing, quantum computing) and pedagogy (equity, effect of repetitions). The book is useful to students and specialists in the corresponding areas. Most of the examples use common general techniques, so the book is also useful to practitioners and researchers in other application areas who look for ways to provide theoretical justifications for their areas' empirical dependencies.

This book lists current and potential biomedical uses of computational intelligence methods. These methods are used in diagnostics and treatment of such diseases as cancer, cardiac diseases, pneumonia, stroke, and COVID-19. Many biomedical problems are difficult; so, often, the current methods are not sufficient, new methods need to be developed. To confidently apply the new methods to critical life-and-death medical situations, it is important to first test these methods on less critical applications. The book describes several such promising new methods that have been tested on problems from agriculture, computer networks, economics and business, pavement engineering, politics, quantum computing, robotics, etc. This book helps practitioners and researchers to learn more about computational intelligence methods and their biomedical applications-and to further develop this important research direction.

This book describes how to use expert knowledge-which is often formulated by using imprecise (fuzzy) words from a natural language. In the 1960s, Zadeh designed special "fuzzy" techniques for such use. In the 1980s, fuzzy techniques started controlling trains, elevators, video cameras, rice cookers, car transmissions, etc. Now, combining fuzzy with neural, genetic, and other intelligent methods leads to new state-of-the-art results: in aerospace industry (from drones to space flights), in mobile robotics, in finances (predicting the value of crypto-currencies), and even in law enforcement (detecting counterfeit banknotes, detecting online child predators and in creating explainable AI systems). The book describes these (and other) applications-as well as foundations and logistics of fuzzy techniques. This book can be recommended to specialists-both in fuzzy and in various application areas-who will learn latest techniques and their applications, and to students interested in innovative ideas.

This book focuses on an overview of the AI techniques, their foundations, their applications, and remaining challenges and open problems. Many artificial intelligence (AI) techniques do not explain their recommendations. Providing natural-language explanations for numerical AI recommendations is one of the main challenges of modern AI. To provide such explanations, a natural idea is to use techniques specifically designed to relate numerical recommendations and natural-language descriptions, namely fuzzy techniques. This book is of interest to practitioners who want to use fuzzy techniques to make AI applications explainable, to researchers who may want to extend the ideas from these papers to new application areas, and to graduate students who are interested in the state-of-the-art of fuzzy techniques and of explainable AI-in short, to anyone who is interested in problems involving fuzziness and AI in general.

This book deals with the effect of public and semi-public companies on economy. In traditional economic models, several private companies - interested in maximizing their profit - interact (e.g., compete) with each other. Such models help to avoid wild oscillation in production and prices (typical for uncontrolled competition), and to come up with a stable equilibrium solution. The problems become very complex if we take into account the presence of public and semi-public companies - that are interested in public good as well as in the profit. The book contains theoretical results and numerical techniques for computing resulting equilibria. As a case study, it considers the problem of selecting optimal tolls for the public roads - tolls that best balance the public good and the need to recover the cost of building the roads. It is recommended to specialists in economics as well as to students interested in learning the corresponding economic models.

In the first approximation, decision making is nothing else but an optimization problem: We want to select the best alternative. This description, however, is not fully accurate: it implicitly assumes that we know the exact consequences of each decision, and that, once we have selected a decision, no constraints prevent us from implementing it. In reality, we usually know the consequences with some uncertainty, and there are also numerous constraints that needs to be taken into account. The presence of uncertainty and constraints makes decision making challenging. To resolve these challenges, we need to go beyond simple optimization, we also need to get a good understanding of how the corresponding systems and objects operate, a good understanding of why we observe what we observe – this will help us better predict what will be the consequences of different decisions. All these problems – in relation to different application areas – are the main focus of this book.

This book is a collection of papers presented during the 8th World Conference on Soft Computing in February 2022. The papers cover multiple areas important for soft computing. Some papers are dedicated to fundamental aspects of soft computing, i.e., fuzzy mathematics, type-2 fuzzy sets, evolutionary-based optimization, aggregation, and neural networks. Others emphasize the application of soft computing methods to data analysis, image processing, decision-making, classification, series prediction, economics, control, and modeling.

This book describes state-of-the-art economic ideas and how these ideas can be (and are) used to make economic decision (in particular, to optimally allocate assets) and to gauge the results of different economic decisions (in particular, by using optimal transport methods). Special emphasis is paid to machine learning techniques (including deep learning) and to different aspects of quantum econometrics—when quantum physics and quantum computing models are techniques are applied to study economic phenomena. Applications range from more traditional economic areas to more non-traditional topics such as economic aspects of tourism, cryptocurrencies, telecommunication infrastructure, and pandemic. This book helps student to learn new techniques, practitioners to become better knowledgeable of the state-of-the-art econometric techniques, and researchers to further develop these important research directions 

This book lists current and potential biomedical uses of computational intelligence methods. These methods are used in diagnostics and treatment of such diseases as cancer, cardiac diseases, pneumonia, stroke, and COVID-19. Many biomedical problems are difficult; so, often, the current methods are not sufficient, new methods need to be developed. To confidently apply the new methods to critical life-and-death medical situations, it is important to first test these methods on less critical applications. The book describes several such promising new methods that have been tested on problems from agriculture, computer networks, economics and business, pavement engineering, politics, quantum computing, robotics, etc. This book helps practitioners and researchers to learn more about computational intelligence methods and their biomedical applications-and to further develop this important research direction.

This book shows how to provide uncertainty-related theoretical justification for empirical dependencies, on the examples from numerous application areas. Such justifications are needed, since without them, practitioners may be reluctant to use these dependencies: purely empirical formulas often turn out to hold only in some cases. Examples of new theoretical explanations range from fundamental physics (quark confinement, galaxy superclusters, etc.) and geophysics (earthquake analysis) to transportation and electrical engineering to computer science (image processing, quantum computing) and pedagogy (equity, effect of repetitions). The book is useful to students and specialists in the corresponding areas. Most of the examples use common general techniques, so the book is also useful to practitioners and researchers in other application areas who look for ways to provide theoretical justifications for their areas' empirical dependencies.

This book constitutes the full research papers and short monographs developed on the base of the refereed proceedings of the International Conference: Information and Communication Technologies for Research and Industry (ICIT 2020). The book brings accepted research papers which present mathematical modelling, innovative approaches and methods of solving problems in the sphere of control engineering and decision making for the various fields of studies: industry and research, energy efficiency and sustainability, ontology-based data simulation, theory and use of digital signal processing, cognitive systems, robotics, cybernetics, automation control theory, image and sound processing, image recognition, technologies, and computer vision. The book contains also several analytical reviews on using smart city technologies in Russia. The central audience of the book are researchers, industrial practitioners and students from the following areas: Adaptive Systems, Human-Robot Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, Smart City and Internet of Things, Information Systems, Mathematical Modelling, and the Information Sciences.

This book gathers authoritative contributions in the field of Soft Computing. Based on selected papers presented at the 7th World Conference on Soft Computing, which was held on May 29-31, 2018, in Baku, Azerbaijan, it describes new theoretical advances, as well as cutting-edge methods and applications. New theories and algorithms in fuzzy logic, cognitive modeling, graph theory and metaheuristics are discussed, and applications in data mining, social networks, control and robotics, geoscience, biomedicine and industrial management are described. This book offers a timely, broad snapshot of recent developments, including thought-provoking trends and challenges that are yielding new research directions in the diverse areas of Soft Computing.

This book presents both methodological papers on and examples of applying behavioral predictive models to specific economic problems, with a focus on how to take into account people's behavior when making economic predictions. This is an important issue, since traditional economic models assumed that people make wise economic decisions based on a detailed rational analysis of all the relevant aspects. However, in reality - as Nobel Prize-winning research has shown - people have a limited ability to process information and, as a result, their decisions are not always optimal. Discussing the need for prediction-oriented statistical techniques, since many statistical methods currently used in economics focus more on model fitting and do not always lead to good predictions, the book is a valuable resource for researchers and students interested in the latest results and challenges and for practitioners wanting to learn how to use state-of-the-art techniques.

This book presents innovative intelligent techniques, with an emphasis on their biomedical applications. Although many medical doctors are willing to share their knowledge - e.g. by incorporating it in computer-based advisory systems that can benefit other doctors - this knowledge is often expressed using imprecise (fuzzy) words from natural language such as "small," which are difficult for computers to process. Accordingly, we need fuzzy techniques to handle such words. It is also desirable to extract general recommendations from the records of medical doctors' decisions - by using machine learning techniques such as neural networks. The book describes state-of-the-art fuzzy, neural, and other techniques, especially those that are now being used, or potentially could be used, in biomedical applications. Accordingly, it will benefit all researchers and students interested in the latest developments, as well as practitioners who want to learn about new techniques.

Mainly focusing on processing uncertainty, this book presents state-of-the-art techniques and demonstrates their use in applications to econometrics and other areas. Processing uncertainty is essential, considering that computers - which help us understand real-life processes and make better decisions based on that understanding - get their information from measurements or from expert estimates, neither of which is ever 100% accurate. Measurement uncertainty is usually described using probabilistic techniques, while uncertainty in expert estimates is often described using fuzzy techniques. Therefore, it is important to master both techniques for processing data. This book is highly recommended for researchers and students interested in the latest results and challenges in uncertainty, as well as practitioners who want to learn how to use the corresponding state-of-the-art techniques.

This book presents extended versions of selected papers from the annual International Workshops on Constraint Programming and Decision Making from 2016 to 2018. The papers address all stages of decision-making under constraints: (1) precisely formulating the problem of multi-criteria decision-making; (2) determining when the corresponding decision problem is algorithmically solvable; (3) finding the corresponding algorithms and making these algorithms as efficient as possible; and (4) taking into account interval, probabilistic, and fuzzy uncertainty inherent in the corresponding decision-making problems. In many application areas, it is necessary to make effective decisions under constraints, and there are several area-specific techniques for such decision problems. However, because they are area-specific, it is not easy to apply these techniques in other application areas. As such, the annual International Workshops on Constraint Programming and Decision Making focus on cross-fertilization between different areas, attracting researchers and practitioners from around the globe. The book includes numerous papers describing applications, in particular, applications to engineering, such as control of unmanned aerial vehicles, and vehicle protection against improvised explosion devices.

This book discusses heuristic methods - methods lacking a solid theoretical justification - which are ubiquitous in numerous application areas, and explains techniques that can make heuristic methods more reliable. Focusing on algebraic techniques, i.e., those that use only a few specific features of a situation, it describes various state-of-the-art applications, ranging from fuzzy methods for dealing with imprecision to general optimization methods and quantum-based methods for analyzing economic phenomena. The book also includes recent results from leading researchers, which could (and hopefully will) provide the basis for future applications. As such, it is a valuable resource for mathematicians interested in potential applications of their algebraic results and ideas, as well as for application specialists wanting to discover how algebraic techniques can help in their domains.

This book constitutes the full research papers and short monographs developed on the base of the refereed proceedings of the International Conference: Information and Communication Technologies for Research and Industry (ICIT 2020). The book brings accepted research papers which present mathematical modelling, innovative approaches and methods of solving problems in the sphere of control engineering and decision making for the various fields of studies: industry and research, energy efficiency and sustainability, ontology-based data simulation, theory and use of digital signal processing, cognitive systems, robotics, cybernetics, automation control theory, image and sound processing, image recognition, technologies, and computer vision. The book contains also several analytical reviews on using smart city technologies in Russia. The central audience of the book are researchers, industrial practitioners and students from the following areas: Adaptive Systems, Human-Robot Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, Smart City and Internet of Things, Information Systems, Mathematical Modelling, and the Information Sciences.

This book is intended for specialists in systems engineering interested in new, general techniques and for students and practitioners interested in using these techniques for solving specific practical problems. For many real-world, complex systems, it is possible to create easy-to-compute explicit analytical models instead of time-consuming computer simulations. Usually, however, analytical models are designed on a case-by-case basis, and there is a scarcity of general techniques for designing such easy-to-compute models. This book fills this gap by providing general recommendations for using analytical techniques in all stages of system design, implementation, testing, and monitoring. It also illustrates these recommendations using applications in various domains, such as more traditional engineering systems, biological systems (e.g., systems for cattle management), and medical and social-related systems (e.g., recommender systems).

This book presents both methodological papers on and examples of applying behavioral predictive models to specific economic problems, with a focus on how to take into account people's behavior when making economic predictions. This is an important issue, since traditional economic models assumed that people make wise economic decisions based on a detailed rational analysis of all the relevant aspects. However, in reality - as Nobel Prize-winning research has shown - people have a limited ability to process information and, as a result, their decisions are not always optimal. Discussing the need for prediction-oriented statistical techniques, since many statistical methods currently used in economics focus more on model fitting and do not always lead to good predictions, the book is a valuable resource for researchers and students interested in the latest results and challenges and for practitioners wanting to learn how to use state-of-the-art techniques.

This book gathers authoritative contributions in the field of Soft Computing. Based on selected papers presented at the 7th World Conference on Soft Computing, which was held on May 29-31, 2018, in Baku, Azerbaijan, it describes new theoretical advances, as well as cutting-edge methods and applications. New theories and algorithms in fuzzy logic, cognitive modeling, graph theory and metaheuristics are discussed, and applications in data mining, social networks, control and robotics, geoscience, biomedicine and industrial management are described. This book offers a timely, broad snapshot of recent developments, including thought-provoking trends and challenges that are yielding new research directions in the diverse areas of Soft Computing.

This book presents innovative intelligent techniques, with an emphasis on their biomedical applications. Although many medical doctors are willing to share their knowledge - e.g. by incorporating it in computer-based advisory systems that can benefit other doctors - this knowledge is often expressed using imprecise (fuzzy) words from natural language such as "small," which are difficult for computers to process. Accordingly, we need fuzzy techniques to handle such words. It is also desirable to extract general recommendations from the records of medical doctors' decisions - by using machine learning techniques such as neural networks. The book describes state-of-the-art fuzzy, neural, and other techniques, especially those that are now being used, or potentially could be used, in biomedical applications. Accordingly, it will benefit all researchers and students interested in the latest developments, as well as practitioners who want to learn about new techniques.

Mainly focusing on processing uncertainty, this book presents state-of-the-art techniques and demonstrates their use in applications to econometrics and other areas. Processing uncertainty is essential, considering that computers - which help us understand real-life processes and make better decisions based on that understanding - get their information from measurements or from expert estimates, neither of which is ever 100% accurate. Measurement uncertainty is usually described using probabilistic techniques, while uncertainty in expert estimates is often described using fuzzy techniques. Therefore, it is important to master both techniques for processing data. This book is highly recommended for researchers and students interested in the latest results and challenges in uncertainty, as well as practitioners who want to learn how to use the corresponding state-of-the-art techniques.

This book offers an overview of state-of-the-art econometric techniques, with a special emphasis on financial econometrics. There is a major need for such techniques, since the traditional way of designing mathematical models - based on researchers' insights - can no longer keep pace with the ever-increasing data flow. To catch up, many application areas have begun relying on data science, i.e., on techniques for extracting models from data, such as data mining, machine learning, and innovative statistics. In terms of capitalizing on data science, many application areas are way ahead of economics. To close this gap, the book provides examples of how data science techniques can be used in economics. Corresponding techniques range from almost traditional statistics to promising novel ideas such as quantum econometrics. Given its scope, the book will appeal to students and researchers interested in state-of-the-art developments, and to practitioners interested in using data science techniques.