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Showing 1 - 9 of 9 matches in All Departments
This monograph offers a systematic quantitative approach to the analysis, evaluation, and design of electoral systems. Today, electoral reform is of concern to newborn democracies as well as many old ones. The authors use mathematical models and automatic procedures, when possible, to solve some of the problems that arise in the comparison of existing systems as well as in the construction of new ones. One distinctive feature of the book is the emphasis on single- and multiple-criteria optimization methods. This powerful tool kit will help political researchers evaluate and choose an appropriate electoral system. A general formal model is included as well as a coding system to describe, identify, and classify electoral systems. Evaluation criteria and the corresponding performance indicators are discussed. A treatment of electoral formulas as algorithms to minimize actual cost functions or disproportionality indexes is also included. Neutral automatic procedures for political districting are presented, and the process of electoral reform is analyzed from historical and political points of view.
Finite functions (in particular, Boolean functions) play a fundamental role in computer science and discrete mathematics. This book describes representations of Boolean functions that have small size for many important functions and which allow efficient work with the represented functions. The representation size of important and selected functions is estimated, upper and lower bound techniques are studied, efficient algorithms for operations on these representations are presented, and the limits of those techniques are considered. This book is the first comprehensive description of theory and applications. Research areas like complexity theory, efficient algorithms, data structures, and discrete mathematics will benefit from the theory described in this book. The results described within have applications in verification, computer-aided design, model checking, and discrete mathematics. This is the only book to investigate the representation size of Boolean functions and efficient algorithms on these representations.
Combinatorial data analysis (CDA) refers to a wide class of methods for the study of relevant data sets in which the arrangement of a collection of objects is absolutely central. The focus of this monograph is on the identification of arrangements, which are then further restricted to where the combinatorial search is carried out by a recursive optimization process based on the general principles of dynamic programming (DP). The authors provide a comprehensive and self-contained review delineating a very general DP paradigm or schema that can serve two functions. First, the paradigm can be applied in various special forms to encompass all previously proposed applications suggested in the classification literature. Second, the paradigm can lead directly to many more novel uses. An appendix is included as a user's manual for a collection of programs available as freeware. The incorporation of a wide variety of CDA tasks under one common optimization framework based on DP is one of the book's strongest points. The authors include verifiably optimal solutions to nontrivially sized problems over the array of data analysis tasks discussed.
Many fundamental combinatorial problems, arising in such diverse fields as artificial intelligence, logic, graph theory, and linear algebra, can be formulated as Boolean constraint satisfaction problems (CSP). This book is devoted to the study of the complexity of such problems. The authors' goal is to develop a framework for classifying the complexity of Boolean CSP in a uniform way. In doing so, they bring out common themes underlying many concepts and results in both algorithms and complexity theory. The results and techniques presented here show that Boolean CSP provide an excellent framework for discovering and formally validating "global" inferences about the nature of computation. This book presents a novel and compact form of a compendium that classifies an infinite number of problems by using a rule-based approach. This enables practitioners to determine whether or not a given problem is known to be computationally intractable. It also provides a complete classification of all problems that arise in restricted versions of central complexity classes such as NP, NPO, NC, PSPACE, and #P.
Finally there is a book that presents real applications of graph theory in a unified format. This book is the only source for an extended, concentrated focus on the theory and techniques common to various types of intersection graphs. It is a concise treatment of the aspects of intersection graphs that interconnect many standard concepts and form the foundation of a surprising array of applications to biology, computing, psychology, matrices, and statistics. The authors emphasize the underlying tools and techniques and demonstrate how this approach constitutes a definite theory within graph theory. Some of the applications are not widely known or available in the graph theoretic literature and are presented here for the first time. The book also includes a detailed literature guide for many specialized and related areas, a current bibliography, and more than 100 exercises.
This concise, readable book provides a sampling of the very large, active, and expanding field of artificial neural network theory. It considers select areas of discrete mathematics linking combinatorics and the theory of the simplest types of artificial neural networks. Neural networks have emerged as a key technology in many fields of application, and an understanding of the theories concerning what such systems can and cannot do is essential. The author discusses interesting connections between special types of Boolean functions and the simplest types of neural networks. Some classical results are presented with accessible proofs, together with some more recent perspectives, such as those obtained by considering decision lists. In addition, probabilistic models of neural network learning are discussed. Graph theory, some partially ordered set theory, computational complexity, and discrete probability are among the mathematical topics involved. Pointers to further reading and an extensive bibliography make this book a good starting point for research in discrete mathematics and neural networks.
In the field of combinatorial optimization problems, the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is one of the most challenging. Defined more than 40 years ago, the problem involves designing the optimal set of routes for fleets of vehicles for the purpose of serving a given set of customers. Interest in VRP is motivated by its practical relevance as well as its considerable difficulty. The Vehicle Routing Problem covers both exact and heuristic methods developed for the VRP and some of its main variants, emphasizing the practical issues common to VRP. The book is composed of three parts containing contributions from well-known experts. The first part covers basic VRP, known more commonly as capacitated VRP. The second part covers three main variants of VRP: with time windows, backhauls, and pickup and delivery. The third part covers issues arising in real-world VRP applications and includes both case studies and references to software packages.
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