This book is a comprehensive guide to qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) using R. Using Boolean algebra to implement principles of comparison used by scholars engaged in the qualitative study of macro social phenomena, QCA acts as a bridge between the quantitative and the qualitative traditions. The QCA package for R, created by the author, facilitates QCA within a graphical user interface. This book provides the most current information on the latest version of the QCA package, which ...

Social science theory often builds on sets and their relations. Correlation-based methods of scientific enquiry, however, use linear algebra and are unsuited to analyzing set relations. The development of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) by Charles Ragin has given social scientists a formal tool for identifying set-theoretic connections based on Boolean algebra. As a result, interest in this method has markedly risen among social scientists in recent years. This book offers the first...

Class-tested and coherent, this textbook teaches classical and web information retrieval, including web search and the related areas of text classification and text clustering from basic concepts. It gives an up-to-date treatment of all aspects of the design and implementation of systems for gathering, indexing, and searching documents; methods for evaluating systems; and an introduction to the use of machine learning methods on text collections. All the important ideas are explained using...

This book presents the features and advantages offered by complex networks in the machine learning domain. In the first part, an overview on complex networks and network-based machine learning is presented, offering necessary background material. In the second part, we describe in details some specific techniques based on complex networks for supervised, non-supervised, and semi-supervised learning. Particularly, a stochastic particle competition technique for both non-supervised and semi-...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed and revised selected papers from the 9th International Workshop on Agents and Data Mining Interaction, ADMI 2013, held in Saint Paul, MN, USA in May 2013. The 10 papers presented in this volume were carefully selected for inclusion in the book and are organized in topical sections named agent mining and data mining.

Two large international conferences on Advances in Engineering Sciences were held in Hong Kong, March 12-14, 2014, under the International MultiConference of Engineers and Computer Scientists (IMECS 2014), and in London, UK, 2-4 July, 2014, under the World Congress on Engineering 2014 (WCE 2014) respectively. This volume contains 37 revised and extended research articles written by prominent researchers participating in the conferences. Topics covered include engineering mathematics, compu...

Most subfields of computer science have an interface layer via which applications communicate with the infrastructure, and this is key to their success (e.g., the Internet in networking, the relational model in databases, etc.). So far this interface layer has been missing in AI. First-order logic and probabilistic graphical models each have some of the necessary features, but a viable interface layer requires combining both. Markov logic is a powerful new language that accomplishes this b...

While a sharp debate is emerging about whether conventional biometric technology offers society any significant advantages over other forms of identification, and whether it constitutes a threat to privacy, technology is rapidly progressing. Politicians and the public are still discussing fingerprinting and iris scan, while scientists and engineers are already testing futuristic solutions. Second generation biometrics - which include multimodal biometrics, behavioural biometrics, dynamic f...

"Mobile Speech and Advanced Natural Language Solutions" presents the discussion of the most recent advances in intelligent human-computer interaction, including fascinating new study findings on talk-in-interaction, which is the province of conversation analysis, a subfield in sociology/sociolinguistics, a new and emerging area in natural language understanding. Editors Amy Neustein and Judith A. Markowitz have recruited a talented group of contributors to introduce the next generation nat...

Presenting a comprehensive resource for the mastery of network analysis in R, the goal of Network Analysis with R is to introduce modern network analysis techniques in R to social, physical, and health scientists. The mathematical foundations of network analysis are emphasized in an accessible way and readers are guided through the basic steps of network studies: network conceptualization, data collection and management, network description, visualization, and building and testing statisti...

This text integrates different mobility data handling processes, from database management to multi-dimensional analysis and mining, into a unified presentation driven by the spectrum of requirements raised by real-world applications. It presents a step-by-step methodology to understand and exploit mobility data: collecting and cleansing data, storage in Moving Object Database (MOD) engines, indexing, processing, analyzing and mining mobility data. Emerging issues, such as semantic and priv...

This volume contains two types of papers—a selection of contributions from the “Second International Conference in Network Analysis” held in Nizhny Novgorod on May 7–9, 2012, and papers submitted to an "open call for papers" reflecting the activities of LATNA at the Higher School for Economics.This volume contains many new results in modeling and powerful algorithmic solutions applied to problems in• vehicle routing• single machine scheduling• modern financial...