This handbook offers a comprehensive treatise on Grammatical Evolution (GE), a grammar-based Evolutionary Algorithm that employs a function to map binary strings into higher-level structures such as programs. GE's simplicity and modular nature make it a very flexible tool. Since its introduction almost twenty years ago, researchers have applied it to a vast range of problem domains, including financial modelling, parallel programming and genetics. Similarly, much work has been conducted to...

Contemporary and challenging, this thought-provoking book outlines a number of the key dilemmas in animal welfare for today's, and tomorrow's, world. The issues discussed range from the welfare of hunted animals, to debates around intensive farming versus sustainability, and the effects of climate and environmental change. The book explores the effects of fences on wild animals and human impacts on carrion animals; the impacts of tourism on animal welfare; philosophical questions about spe...

This contributed volume, written by leading international researchers, reviews the latest developments of genetic programming (GP) and its key applications in solving current real world problems, such as energy conversion and management, financial analysis, engineering modeling and design, and software engineering, to name a few. Inspired by natural evolution, the use of GP has expanded significantly in the last decade in almost every area of science and engineering. Exploring applications...

Automatic Re-engineering of Software Using Genetic Programming describes the application of Genetic Programming to a real world application area - software re-engineering in general and automatic parallelization specifically. Unlike most uses of Genetic Programming, this book evolves sequences of provable transformations rather than actual programs. It demonstrates that the benefits of this approach are twofold: first, the time required for evaluating a population is drastically r...

A thorough examination of the characteristics` belonging to a high-performing school, this book is written by the Chairman of the Specialist Schools Trust and the education advisor to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair. It draws on numerous case studies of successful schools, as well as showing how previously failing schools have been turned around. Looking at such areas as leadership, staffing, target-setting, discipline and order, curriculum innovation and individual learning, the book offer...

A comprehensive introduction to new approaches in artificial intelligence and robotics that are inspired by self-organizing biological processes and structures.New approaches to artificial intelligence spring from the idea that intelligence emerges as much from cells, bodies, and societies as it does from evolution, development, and learning. Traditionally, artificial intelligence has been concerned with reproducing the abilities of human brains; newer approaches t...

The positive reciprocal pairwise comparison matrix (PCM) is one of the key components which is used to quantify the qualitative and/or intangible attributes into measurable quantities. This book examines six understudied issues of PCM, i.e. consistency test, inconsistent data identification and adjustment, data collection, missing or uncertain data estimation, and sensitivity analysis of rank reversal. The maximum eigenvalue threshold method is proposed as the new consistency index for the...

In recent years, ELM has emerged as a revolutionary technique of computational intelligence, and has attracted considerable attentions. An extreme learning machine (ELM) is a single layer feed-forward neural network alike learning system, whose connections from the input layer to the hidden layer are randomly generated, while the connections from the hidden layer to the output layer are learned through linear learning methods. The outstanding merits of extreme learning machine (ELM) are it...

What are the models used in phylogenetic analysis and what exactly is involved in Bayesian evolutionary analysis using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods? How can you choose and apply these models, which parameterisations and priors make sense, and how can you diagnose Bayesian MCMC when things go wrong? These are just a few of the questions answered in this comprehensive overview of Bayesian approaches to phylogenetics. This practical guide: • Addresses the theoretical aspects of the...

Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) for Pesticide Regulatory Purposes stems from the experience of the EC funded project DEMETRA. This project combined institutes involved in the regulatory process of pesticides, industries of the sector and scientists to develop and offer original software for the prediction of ecotoxicity of pesticides. Then to be used within the dossier preparation for pesticide registration. The basis of this book is more than three-years of research ac...

With an emphasis on applications of computational models for solving modern challenging problems in biomedical and life sciences, this book aims to bring collections of articles from biologists, medical/biomedical and health science researchers together with computational scientists to focus on problems at the frontier of biomedical and life sciences. The goals of this book are to build interactions of scientists across several disciplines and to help industrial users apply advanced comput...

Applied Time Series Analysis and Innovative Computing contains the applied time series analysis and innovative computing paradigms, with frontier application studies for the time series problems based on the recent works at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford, the University of Hong Kong, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The monograph was drafted when the author was a post-doctoral fellow in Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, H...