From household appliances to applications in robotics, engineered systems involving complex dynamics can only be as effective as the algorithms that control them. While Dynamic Programming (DP) has provided researchers with a way to optimally solve decision and control problems involving complex dynamic systems, its practical value was limited by algorithms that lacked the capacity to scale up to realistic problems.However, in recent years, dramatic developments in Reinforcement Le...

The Stanford Geostatistical Modeling Software (SGeMS) is an open-source computer package for solving problems involving spatially related variables. It provides geostatistics practitioners with a user-friendly interface, an interactive 3-D visualization, and a wide selection of algorithms. This practical book provides a step-by-step guide to using SGeMS algorithms. It explains the underlying theory, demonstrates their implementation, discusses their potential limitations, and helps the use...

This book considers classical and current theory and practice, of supervised, unsupervised and semi-supervised pattern recognition, to build a complete background for professionals and students of engineering. The authors, leading experts in the field of pattern recognition, have provided an up-to-date, self-contained volume encapsulating this wide spectrum of information. The very latest methods are incorporated in this edition: semi-supervised learning, combining clustering algorithms, a...

Providing a broad but in-depth introduction to neural network and machine learning in a statistical framework, this book provides a single, comprehensive resource for study and further research. All the major popular neural network models and statistical learning approaches are covered with examples and exercises in every chapter to develop a practical working understanding of the content.Each of the twenty-five chapters includes state-of-the-art descriptions and important research...

This book presents basic ideas of machine learning in a way that is easy to understand, by providing hands-on practical advice, using simple examples, and motivating students with discussions of interesting applications. The main topics include Bayesian classifiers, nearest-neighbor classifiers, linear and polynomial classifiers, decision trees, neural networks, and support vector machines. Later chapters show how to combine these simple tools by way of “boosting,” how to exploit them in m...

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-...

Each passing year bears witness to the development of ever more powerful computers, increasingly fast and cheap storage media, and even higher bandwidth data connections. This makes it easy to believe that we can now – at least in principle – solve any problem we are faced with so long as we only have enough data. Yet this is not the case. Although large databases allow us to retrieve many different single pieces of information and to compute simple aggregations, general patterns and regul...

The purpose of this book is to present the main methods of static and dynamic optimization. It has been written within the framework of the European Union project – ERRIC (Empowering Romanian Research on Intelligent Information Technologies), funded by the EU’s FP7 Research Potential program and developed in cooperation between French and Romanian teaching researchers.Through the principles of various proposed algorithms (with additional references) this book allows the interested ...

Group method of data handling (GMDH) is a typical inductive modeling method built on the principles of self-organization. Since its introduction, inductive modelling has been developed to support complex systems in prediction, clusterization, system identification, as well as data mining and knowledge extraction technologies in social science, science, engineering, and medicine.This is the first book to explore GMDH using MATLAB (matrix laboratory) language. Readers will learn how to imple...

In recent years, control systems have become more sophisticated in order to meet increased performance and safety requirements for modern technological systems. Engineers are becoming more aware that conventional feedback control design for a complex system may result in unsatisfactory performance, or even instability, in the event of malfunctions in actuators, sensors or other system components. In order to circumvent such weaknesses, new approaches to control system design have emerged w...

Core Concepts in Data Analysis: Summarization, Correlation and Visualizationprovides in-depth descriptions of those data analysis approaches that either summarize data (principal component analysis and clustering, including hierarchical and network clustering) or correlate different aspects of data (decision trees, linear rules, neuron networks, and Bayes rule).Boris Mirkin takes an unconventional approach and introduces the concept of multivariate data summarization as a ...

Markov decision process (MDP) models are widely used for modeling sequential decision-making problems that arise in engineering, economics, computer science, and the social sciences. Many real-world problems modeled by MDPs have huge state and/or action spaces, giving an opening to the curse of dimensionality and so making practical solution of the resulting models intractable. In other cases, the system of interest is too complex to allow explicit specification of some of the MDP model pa...