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...

The Handbook of Simulation Optimization presents an overview of the state of the art of simulation optimization, providing a survey of the most well-established approaches for optimizing stochastic simulation models and a sampling of recent research advances in theory and methodology. Leading contributors cover such topics as discrete optimization via simulation, ranking and selection, efficient simulation budget allocation, random search methods, response surface methodology, sto...

The field's leading text, now completely updated.Modeling dynamical systems — theory, methodology, and applications.Lennart Ljung's System Identification: Theory for the User is a complete, coherent description of the theory, methodology, and practice of System Identification. This completely revised Second Edition introduces subspace methods, methods that utilize frequency domain data, and general non-linear black box methods, including neural networks and neuro-f...

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...

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...

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 unique text/reference describes in detail the latest advances in unsupervised process monitoring and fault diagnosis with machine learning methods. Abundant case studies throughout the text demonstrate the efficacy of each method in real-world settings. The broad coverage examines such cutting-edge topics as the use of information theory to enhance unsupervised learning in tree-based methods, the extension of kernel methods to multiple kernel learning for feature extraction from data,...

In an attempt to introduce application scientists and graduate students to the exciting topic of positive definite kernels and radial basis functions, this book presents modern theoretical results on kernel-based approximation methods and demonstrates their implementation in various settings. The authors explore the historical context of this fascinating topic and explain recent advances as strategies to address long-standing problems. Examples are drawn from fields as diverse as function ...

This book presents advances in matrix and tensor data processing in the domain of signal, image and information processing. The theoretical mathematical approaches are discusses in the context of potential applications in sensor and cognitive systems engineering.The topics and application include Information Geometry, Differential Geometry of structured Matrix, Positive Definite Matrix, Covariance Matrix, Sensors (Electromagnetic Fields, Acoustic sensors) and Applications in Cogniti...

This is the first comprehensive introduction to Support Vector Machines (SVMs), a generation learning system based on recent advances in statistical learning theory. SVMs deliver state-of-the-art performance in real-world applications such as text categorisation, hand-written character recognition, image classification, biosequences analysis, etc., and are now established as one of the standard tools for machine learning and data mining. Students will find the book both stimulating and acc...

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...

Linear models, normally presented in a highly theoretical and mathematical style, are brought down to earth in this comprehensive textbook. Linear Models examines the subject from a mean model perspective, defining simple and easy-to-learn rules for building mean models, regression models, mean vectors, covariance matrices and sums of squares matrices for balanced and unbalanced data sets. The author includes both applied and theoretical discussions of the multivariate normal distribution,...