This book provides a comprehensive overview of computational intelligence methods for semantic knowledge management. Contrary to popular belief, the methods for semantic management of information were created several decades ago, long before the birth of the Internet. In fact, it was back in 1945 when Vannevar Bush introduced the idea for the first protohypertext: the MEMEX (MEMory + indEX) machine. In the years that followed, Bush's idea influenced the development of early hypertext systems until, in the 1980s, Tim Berners Lee developed the idea of the World Wide Web (WWW) as it is known today. From then on, there was an exponential growth in research and industrial activities related to the semantic management of the information and its exploitation in different application domains, such as healthcare, e-learning and energy management. However, semantics methods are not yet able to address some of the problems that naturally characterize knowledge management, such as the vagueness and uncertainty of information. This book reveals how computational intelligence methodologies, due to their natural inclination to deal with imprecision and partial truth, are opening new positive scenarios for designing innovative semantic knowledge management architectures.

This book presents a comprehensive and up-to-date treatise of a range of methodological and algorithmic issues. It also discusses implementations and case studies, identifies the best design practices, and assesses data analytics business models and practices in industry, health care, administration and business.Data science and big data go hand in hand and constitute a rapidly growing area of research and have attracted the attention of industry and business alike. The area itself has opened up promising new directions of fundamental and applied research and has led to interesting applications, especially those addressing the immediate need to deal with large repositories of data and building tangible, user-centric models of relationships in data. Data is the lifeblood of today's knowledge-driven economy.Numerous data science models are oriented towards end users and along with the regular requirements for accuracy (which are present in any modeling), come the requirements for ability to process huge and varying data sets as well as robustness, interpretability, and simplicity (transparency). Computational intelligence with its underlying methodologies and tools helps address data analytics needs.The book is of interest to those researchers and practitioners involved in data science, Internet engineering, computational intelligence, management, operations research, and knowledge-based systems.

This book describes recent advances on hybrid intelligent systems using soft computing techniques for diverse areas of application, such as intelligent control and robotics, pattern recognition, time series prediction and optimization complex problems. Soft Computing (SC) consists of several intelligent computing paradigms, including fuzzy logic, neural networks and bio-inspired optimization algorithms, which can be used to produce powerful hybrid intelligent systems. The book is organized in five main parts, which contain a group of papers around a similar subject. The first part consists of papers with the main theme of type-2 fuzzy logic, which basically consists of papers that propose new models and applications for type-2 fuzzy systems. The second part contains papers with the main theme of bio-inspired optimization algorithms, which are basically papers using nature-inspired techniques to achieve optimization of complex optimization problems in diverse areas of application. The third part contains papers that deal with new models and applications of neural networks in real world problems. The fourth part contains papers with the theme of intelligent optimization methods, which basically consider the proposal of new methods of optimization to solve complex real world optimization problems. The fifth part contains papers with the theme of evolutionary methods and intelligent computing, which are papers considering soft computing methods for applications related to diverse areas, such as natural language processing, recommending systems and optimization.

In a down-to-the earth manner, the volume lucidly presents how the fundamental concepts, methodology, and algorithms of Computational Intelligence are efficiently exploited in Software Engineering and opens up a novel and promising avenue of a comprehensive analysis and advanced design of software artifacts. It shows how the paradigm and the best practices of Computational Intelligence can be creatively explored to carry out comprehensive software requirement analysis, support design, testing, and maintenance. Software Engineering is an intensive knowledge-based endeavor of inherent human-centric nature, which profoundly relies on acquiring semiformal knowledge and then processing it to produce a running system. The knowledge spans a wide variety of artifacts, from requirements, captured in the interaction with customers, to design practices, testing, and code management strategies, which rely on the knowledge of the running system. This volume consists of contributions written by widely acknowledged experts in the field who reveal how the Software Engineering benefits from the key foundations and synergistically existing technologies of Computational Intelligence being focused on knowledge representation, learning mechanisms, and population-based global optimization strategies. This book can serve as a highly useful reference material for researchers, software engineers and graduate students and senior undergraduate students in Software Engineering and its sub-disciplines, Internet engineering, Computational Intelligence, management, operations research, and knowledge-based systems.

This edited volume deals with the theoretical and methodological aspects, as well as various evolutionary algorithm applications to many real world problems originating from science, technology, business and commerce. It comprises 15 chapters including an introductory chapter which covers the fundamental definitions and outlines some important research challenges. Chapters were selected on the basis of fundamental ideas/concepts rather than the thoroughness of techniques deployed.

This book shows how the various paradigms of computational intelligence, employed either singly or in combination, can produce an effective structure for obtaining often vital information from ECG signals. The text is self-contained, addressing concepts, methodology, algorithms, and case studies and applications, providing the reader with the necessary background augmented with step-by-step explanation of the more advanced concepts. It is structured in three parts: Part I covers the fundamental ideas of computational intelligence together with the relevant principles of data acquisition, morphology and use in diagnosis; Part II deals with techniques and models of computational intelligence that are suitable for signal processing; and, Part III details ECG system-diagnostic interpretation and knowledge acquisition architectures. Illustrative material includes: brief numerical experiments; and, detailed schemes, exercises and more advanced problems.

The recent pursuits emerging in the realm of big data processing, interpretation, collection and organization have emerged in numerous sectors including business, industry and government organizations. Data sets such as customer transactions for a mega-retailer, weathermonitoring, intelligence gathering, quickly outpace the capacities of traditional techniques and tools of data analysis. The 3V (volume, variability and velocity) challenges led to the emergence of new techniques and tools in data visualization, acquisition, and serialization. Soft Computing being regarded as a plethora of technologies of fuzzy sets (or Granular Computing), neurocomputing and evolutionary optimization brings forward a number of unique features that might be instrumental to the development of concepts and algorithms to deal with big data.

This carefully edited volume provides the reader with an updated, in-depth material on the emerging principles, conceptual underpinnings, algorithms and practice of Computational Intelligence in the realization of concepts and implementation of big data architectures, analysis, and interpretation as well as data analytics. The book is aimed at a broad audience of researchers and practitioners including those active in various disciplines in which big data, their analysis and optimization are of genuine relevance. One focal point is the systematic exposure of the concepts, design methodology, and detailed algorithms. In general, the volume adheres to the top-down strategy starting with the concepts and motivation and then proceeding with the detailed design that materializes in specific algorithms and representative applications. The material is self-contained and provides the reader with all necessary prerequisites and augments some parts with a step-by-step explanation of more advanced concepts supported by a significant amount of illustrative numeric material and some application scenarios to motivate the reader and make some abstract concepts more tangible."

This volume is a compilation of the best papers presented at the First International Symposium on Fuzzy and Rough Sets (ISFUROS 2006) held in Santa Clara, Cuba. They contain valuable contributions both in the theoretical field and in several application domains such as intelligent control, data analysis, decision making and machine learning, just to name a few. Together, they capture the huge potential of the aforementioned methodologies.

Granular Computing is concerned with constructing and processing carried out at the level of information granules. Using information granules, we comprehend the world and interact with it, no matter which intelligent endeavor this may involve. The landscape of granular computing is immensely rich and involves set theory (interval mathematics), fuzzy sets, rough sets, random sets linked together in a highly synergetic environment. This volume is a first comprehensive treatment of this emerging paradigm and embraces its fundamentals, underlying methodological framework, and a sound algorithmic environment. The panoply of applications covered includes system identification, telecommunications, linguistics and music processing. Written by experts in the field, this volume will appeal to all developing intelligent systems, either working at the methodological level or interested in detailed system realization.

Rem tene, verba sequentur (Gaius J. Victor, Rome VI century b.c.)

The ultimate goal of this book is to bring the fundamental issues of information granularity, inference tools and problem solving procedures into a coherent, unified, and fully operational framework. The objective is to offer the reader a comprehensive, self-contained, and uniform exposure to the subject.The strategy is to isolate some fundamental bricks of Computational Intelligence in terms of key problems and methods, and discuss their implementation and underlying rationale within a well structured and rigorous conceptual framework as well as carefully related to various application facets. The main assumption is that a deep understanding of the key problems will allow the reader to compose into a meaningful mosaic the puzzle pieces represented by the immense varieties of approaches present in the literature and in the computational practice. All in all, the main approach advocated in the monograph consists of a sequence of steps offering solid conceptual fundamentals, presenting a carefully selected collection of design methodologies, discussing a wealth of development guidelines, and exemplifying them with a pertinent, accurately selected illustrative material.

The book presents a comprehensive and up-to-date review of fuzzy pattern recognition. It carefully discusses a range of methodological and algorithmic issues, as well as implementations and case studies, and identifies the best design practices, assesses business models and practices of pattern recognition in real-world applications in industry, health care, administration, and business. Since the inception of fuzzy sets, fuzzy pattern recognition with its methodology, algorithms, and applications, has offered new insights into the principles and practice of pattern classification. Computational intelligence (CI) establishes a comprehensive framework aimed at fostering the paradigm of pattern recognition. The collection of contributions included in this book offers a representative overview of the advances in the area, with timely, in-depth and comprehensive material on the conceptually appealing and practically sound methodology and practices of CI-based pattern recognition.

This book is about Granular Computing (GC) - an emerging conceptual and of information processing. As the name suggests, GC concerns computing paradigm processing of complex information entities - information granules. In essence, information granules arise in the process of abstraction of data and derivation of knowledge from information. Information granules are everywhere. We commonly use granules of time (seconds, months, years). We granulate images; millions of pixels manipulated individually by computers appear to us as granules representing physical objects. In natural language, we operate on the basis of word-granules that become crucial entities used to realize interaction and communication between humans. Intuitively, we sense that information granules are at the heart of all our perceptual activities. In the past, several formal frameworks and tools, geared for processing specific information granules, have been proposed. Interval analysis, rough sets, fuzzy sets have all played important role in knowledge representation and processing. Subsequently, information granulation and information granules arose in numerous application domains. Well-known ideas of rule-based systems dwell inherently on information granules. Qualitative modeling, being one of the leading threads of AI, operates on a level of information granules. Multi-tier architectures and hierarchical systems (such as those encountered in control engineering), planning and scheduling systems all exploit information granularity. We also utilize information granules when it comes to functionality granulation, reusability of information and efficient ways of developing underlying information infrastructures.

Temporal and spatiotemporal data form an inherent fabric of the society as we are faced with streams of data coming from numerous sensors, data feeds, recordings associated with numerous areas of application embracing physical and human-generated phenomena (environmental data, financial markets, Internet activities, etc.). A quest for a thorough analysis, interpretation, modeling and prediction of time series comes with an ongoing challenge for developing models that are both accurate and user-friendly (interpretable). The volume is aimed to exploit the conceptual and algorithmic framework of Computational Intelligence (CI) to form a cohesive and comprehensive environment for building models of time series. The contributions covered in the volume are fully reflective of the wealth of the CI technologies by bringing together ideas, algorithms, and numeric studies, which convincingly demonstrate their relevance, maturity and visible usefulness. It reflects upon the truly remarkable diversity of methodological and algorithmic approaches and case studies. This volume is aimed at a broad audience of researchers and practitioners engaged in various branches of operations research, management, social sciences, engineering, and economics. Owing to the nature of the material being covered and a way it has been arranged, it establishes a comprehensive and timely picture of the ongoing pursuits in the area and fosters further developments.

This volume is devoted to interactive and iterative processes of decision-making- I2 Fuzzy Decision Making, in brief. Decision-making is inherently interactive. Fuzzy sets help realize human-machine communication in an efficient way by facilitating a two-way interaction in a friendly and transparent manner. Human-centric interaction is of paramount relevance as a leading guiding design principle of decision support systems. The volume provides the reader with an updated and in-depth material on the conceptually appealing and practically sound methodology and practice of I2 Fuzzy Decision Making. The book engages a wealth of methods of fuzzy sets and Granular Computing, brings new concepts, architectures and practice of fuzzy decision-making providing the reader with various application studies. The book is aimed at a broad audience of researchers and practitioners in numerous disciplines in which decision-making processes play a pivotal role and serve as a vehicle to produce solutions to existing problems. Those involved in operations research, management, various branches of engineering, social sciences, logistics, and economics will benefit from the exposure to the subject matter. The book may serve as a useful and timely reference material for graduate students and senior undergraduate students in courses on decision-making, Computational Intelligence, operations research, pattern recognition, risk management, and knowledge-based systems.

Data Mining Methods for Knowledge Discovery provides an introduction to the data mining methods that are frequently used in the process of knowledge discovery. This book first elaborates on the fundamentals of each of the data mining methods: rough sets, Bayesian analysis, fuzzy sets, genetic algorithms, machine learning, neural networks, and preprocessing techniques. The book then goes on to thoroughly discuss these methods in the setting of the overall process of knowledge discovery. Numerous illustrative examples and experimental findings are also included. Each chapter comes with an extensive bibliography. Data Mining Methods for Knowledge Discovery is intended for senior undergraduate and graduate students, as well as a broad audience of professionals in computer and information sciences, medical informatics, and business information systems.

This book describes in a detailed fashion the application of hybrid intelligent systems using soft computing techniques for intelligent control and mobile robotics. Soft Computing (SC) consists of several intelligent computing paradigms, including fuzzy logic, neural networks, and bio-inspired optimization algorithms, which can be used to produce powerful hybrid intelligent systems. The prudent combination of SC techniques can produce powerful hybrid intelligent systems that are capable of solving real-world problems. This is illustrated in this book with a wide range of applications, with particular emphasis in intelligent control and mobile robotics. The book is organized in five main parts, which contain a group of papers around a similar subject. The first part consists of papers with the main theme of theory and algorithms, which are basically papers that propose new models and concepts, which can be the basis for achieving intelligent control and mobile robotics. The second part contains papers with the main theme of intelligent control, which are basically papers using bio-inspired techniques, like evolutionary algorithms and neural networks, for achieving intelligent control of non-linear plants. The third part contains papers with the theme of optimization of fuzzy controllers, which basically consider the application of bio-inspired optimization methods to automate the de-sign process of optimal type-1 and type-2 fuzzy controllers. The fourth part contains papers that deal with the application of SC techniques in times series prediction and intelligent agents. The fifth part contains papers with the theme of computer vision and robotics, which are papers considering soft computing methods for applications related to vision and robotics.

This edited volume provides the reader with a fully updated, in-depth treatise on the emerging principles, conceptual underpinnings, algorithms and practice of Computational Intelligence in the realization of concepts and implementation of models of sentiment analysis and ontology -oriented engineering. The volume involves studies devoted to key issues of sentiment analysis, sentiment models, and ontology engineering. The book is structured into three main parts. The first part offers a comprehensive and prudently structured exposure to the fundamentals of sentiment analysis and natural language processing. The second part consists of studies devoted to the concepts, methodologies, and algorithmic developments elaborating on fuzzy linguistic aggregation to emotion analysis, carrying out interpretability of computational sentiment models, emotion classification, sentiment-oriented information retrieval, a methodology of adaptive dynamics in knowledge acquisition. The third part includes a plethora of applications showing how sentiment analysis and ontologies becomes successfully applied to investment strategies, customer experience management, disaster relief, monitoring in social media, customer review rating prediction, and ontology learning. This book is aimed at a broad audience of researchers and practitioners. Readers involved in intelligent systems, data analysis, Internet engineering, Computational Intelligence, and knowledge-based systems will benefit from the exposure to the subject matter. The book may also serve as a highly useful reference material for graduate students and senior undergraduate students.

As of today, Evolutionary Computing and Fuzzy Set Computing are two mature, wen -developed, and higbly advanced technologies of information processing. Bach of them has its own clearly defined research agenda, specific goals to be achieved, and a wen setUed algorithmic environment. Concisely speaking, Evolutionary Computing (EC) is aimed at a coherent population -oriented methodology of structural and parametric optimization of a diversity of systems. In addition to this broad spectrum of such optimization applications, this paradigm otTers an important ability to cope with realistic goals and design objectives reflected in the form of relevant fitness functions. The GA search (which is often regarded as a dominant domain among other techniques of EC such as evolutionary strategies, genetic programming or evolutionary programming) delivers a great deal of efficiency helping navigate through large search spaces. The main thrust of fuzzy sets is in representing and managing nonnumeric (linguistic) information. The key notion (whose conceptual as weH as algorithmic importance has started to increase in the recent years) is that of information granularity. It somewhat concurs with the principle of incompatibility coined by L. A. Zadeh. Fuzzy sets form a vehic1e helpful in expressing a granular character of information to be captured. Once quantified via fuzzy sets or fuzzy relations, the domain knowledge could be used efficiently very often reducing a heavy computation burden when analyzing and optimizing complex systems.

The book provides a timely coverage of the paradigm of knowledge distillation—an efficient way of model compression. Knowledge distillation is positioned in a general setting of transfer learning, which effectively learns a lightweight student model from a large teacher model. The book covers a variety of training schemes, teacher–student architectures, and distillation algorithms. The book covers a wealth of topics including recent developments in vision and language learning, relational architectures, multi-task learning, and representative applications to image processing, computer vision, edge intelligence, and autonomous systems. The book is of relevance to a broad audience including researchers and practitioners active in the area of machine learning and pursuing fundamental and applied research in the area of advanced learning paradigms.

Soft Numerical Computing in Uncertain Dynamic Systems is intended for system specialists interested in dynamic systems that operate at different time scales. The book discusses several types of errors and their propagation, covering numerical methods-including convergence and consistence properties and characteristics-and proving of related theorems within the setting of soft computing. Several types of uncertainty representation like interval, fuzzy, type 2 fuzzy, granular, and combined uncertain sets are discussed in detail. The book can be used by engineering students in control and finite element fields, as well as all engineering, applied mathematics, economics, and computer science students. One of the important topics in applied science is dynamic systems and their applications. The authors develop these models and deliver solutions with the aid of numerical methods. Since they are inherently uncertain, soft computations are of high relevance here. This is the reason behind investigating soft numerical computing in dynamic systems. If these systems are involved with complex-uncertain data, they will be more practical and important. Real-life problems work with this type of data and most of them cannot be solved exactly and easily-sometimes they are impossible to solve. Clearly, all the numerical methods need to consider error of approximation. Other important applied topics involving uncertain dynamic systems include image processing and pattern recognition, which can benefit from uncertain dynamic systems as well. In fact, the main objective is to determine the coefficients of a matrix that acts as the frame in the image. One of the effective methods exhibiting high accuracy is to use finite differences to fill the cells of the matrix.

Information granules are fundamental conceptual entities facilitating perception of complex phenomena and contributing to the enhancement of human centricity in intelligent systems. The formal frameworks of information granules and information granulation comprise fuzzy sets, interval analysis, probability, rough sets, and shadowed sets, to name only a few representatives. Among current developments of Granular Computing, interesting options concern information granules of higher order and of higher type. The higher order information granularity is concerned with an effective formation of information granules over the space being originally constructed by information granules of lower order. This construct is directly associated with the concept of hierarchy of systems composed of successive processing layers characterized by the increasing levels of abstraction. This idea of layered, hierarchical realization of models of complex systems has gained a significant level of visibility in fuzzy modeling with the well-established concept of hierarchical fuzzy models where one strives to achieve a sound tradeoff between accuracy and a level of detail captured by the model and its level of interpretability. Higher type information granules emerge when the information granules themselves cannot be fully characterized in a purely numerical fashion but instead it becomes convenient to exploit their realization in the form of other types of information granules such as type-2 fuzzy sets, interval-valued fuzzy sets, or probabilistic fuzzy sets. Higher order and higher type of information granules constitute the focus of the studies on Granular Computing presented in this study. The book elaborates on sound methodologies of Granular Computing, algorithmic pursuits and an array of diverse applications and case studies in environmental studies, option price forecasting, and power engineering.

The objective of this edited volume is to offer a general view at the recent conceptual developments of Soft Computing (SC) regarded as a general methodology supporting the design of hybrid systems along with their diversified applications to modeling, simulation and control of non-linear dynamical systems. As of now, SC methodologies embrace neural networks, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms and chaos theory. Each of these methodologies exhibits well delineated advantages and disadvantages. Interestingly, they have been found useful in solving a broad range of problems. However, many real-world complex problems require a prudent, carefully orchestrated integration of several of these methodologies to fully achieve the required efficiency, accuracy, and interpretability of the solutions. In this edited volume, an overview of SC methodologies, and their applications to modeling, simulation and control, will be given in an introductory paper by the Editors. Then, detailed methods for integrating the different SC methodologies in solving real-world problems will be given in the papers by the other authors in the book. The edited volume will cover a wide spectrum of applications including areas such as: robotic dynamic systems, non-linear plants, manufacturing systems, and time series prediction.

We describe in this book, new methods for evolutionary design of intelligent s- tems using soft computing and their applications in modeling, simulation and c- trol. Soft Computing (SC) consists of several intelligent computing paradigms, including fuzzy logic, neural networks, and evolutionary algorithms, which can be used to produce powerful hybrid intelligent systems. The book is organized in four main parts, which contain a group of papers around a similar subject. The first part consists of papers with the main theme of evolutionary design of fuzzy systems in intelligent control, which consists of papers that propose new methods for designing and optimizing intelligent controllers for different applications. The second part c- tains papers with the main theme of evolutionary design of intelligent systems for pattern recognition applications, which are basically papers using evolutionary al- rithms for optimizing modular neural networks with fuzzy systems for response - tegration, for achieving pattern recognition in different applications. The third part contains papers with the themes of models for learning and social simulation, which are papers that apply intelligent systems to the problems of designing learning - jects and social agents. The fourth part contains papers that deal with intelligent s- tems in robotics applications and hardware implementations. In the part of Intelligent Control there are 5 papers that describe different c- tributions on evolutionary optimization of fuzzy systems in intelligent control. The first paper, by Ricardo Martinez-Marroquin et al.

Pattern recognition in data is a well known classical problem that falls under the ambit of data analysis. As we need to handle different data, the nature of patterns, their recognition and the types of data analyses are bound to change. Since the number of data collection channels increases in the recent time and becomes more diversified, many real-world data mining tasks can easily acquire multiple databases from various sources. In these cases, data mining becomes more challenging for several essential reasons. We may encounter sensitive data originating from different sources - those cannot be amalgamated. Even if we are allowed to place different data together, we are certainly not able to analyze them when local identities of patterns are required to be retained. Thus, pattern recognition in multiple databases gives rise to a suite of new, challenging problems different from those encountered before. Association rule mining, global pattern discovery and mining patterns of select items provide different patterns discovery techniques in multiple data sources. Some interesting item-based data analyses are also covered in this book. Interesting patterns, such as exceptional patterns, icebergs and periodic patterns have been recently reported. The book presents a thorough influence analysis between items in time-stamped databases. The recent research on mining multiple related databases is covered while some previous contributions to the area are highlighted and contrasted with the most recent developments.

This book offers an essential introduction to fuzzy logic, starting with the classical notions and going through more advanced notions from the current state-of-the-art research. Each of the major topics is accompanied by examples, problems and Scilab codes. As a free open source software, Scilab offers everyone the chance to practice the concepts learned through the book. The book represents a synthesis of authors' research and experience through the lectures delivered to university students. It is primarily intended as a textbook for upper-level undergraduates and graduates in computer science, mathematics, physics and engineering. It also represents a valuable resource for practitioners and researchers alike, bringing ideas for projects in the broad field of fuzzy logic.