Information is precious. It reduces our uncertainty in making decisions. Knowledge about the outcome of an uncertain event gives the possessor an advantage. It changes the course of lives, nations, and history itself. Information is the food of Maxwell's demon. His power comes from know- ing which particles are hot and which particles are cold. His existence was paradoxical to classical physics and only the realization that information too was a source of power led to his taming. Information has recently become a commodity, traded and sold like or- ange juice or hog bellies. Colleges give...

Any task that involves decision-making can benefit from soft computing techniques which allow premature decisions to be deferred. The processing and analysis of images is no exception to this rule. In the classical image analysis paradigm, the first step is nearly always some sort of segmentation process in which the image is divided into (hopefully, meaningful) parts. It was pointed out nearly 30 years ago by Prewitt (1] that the decisions involved in image segmentation could be postponed by regarding the image parts as fuzzy, rather than crisp, subsets of the image. It was also realized...

The Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network has gained in popularity over recent years because of its rapid training and its desirable properties in classification and functional approximation applications. RBF network research has focused on enhanced training algorithms and variations on the basic architecture to improve the performance of the network. In addition, the RBF network is proving to be a valuable tool in a diverse range of application areas, for example, robotics, biomedical engineering, and the financial sector. The two volumes provide a comprehensive survey of the latest...

There are many good AI books. Usually they consecrate at most one or two chapters to the imprecision knowledge processing. To our knowledge this is among the few books to be entirely dedicated to the treatment of knowledge imperfection when bui- ing intelligent systems. We consider that an entire book should be focused on this important aspect of knowledge processing. The expected audience for this book - cludes undergraduate students in computer science, IT&C, mathematics, business, medicine, etc., graduates, specialists and researchers in these fields. The subjects treated in the book...

This volume explores consensus reaching processes occurring in both human groups and intelligent agents. The text provides a modern definition of consensus that calls for some soft computational tools and techniques.

Clustering has been around for many decades and located itself in a uniquepositionasafundamentalconceptualandalgorithmiclandmark of data analysis. Almost since the very inception of fuzzy sets, the role and potential of these information granules in revealing and describing structureindatawasfullyacknowledgedandappreciated.Asamatter of fact, with the rapid growth of volumes of digital information, the role of clustering becomes even more visible and critical. Furthermore given the anticipated human centricity of the majority of artifacts of digitaleraandacontinuousbuildupofmountainsofdata,...

A main topic in welfare economics is the rational behaviour of a consumer when, faced with various prices and incomes, he has to make a choice. The theory of consumption establishes the framework in which the rationality of consumers is de?ned and the principle on which it is based. By 109], "the rationality of a consumer may be described by postulating that a consumer has a de?nite preference over all conceivable commodity bundles and that he chooses those commodity bundles that are optimal with respect to his preference subject to budgetary constraints." Samuelson's theory of revealed...

Recently many researchers are working on cluster analysis as a main tool for exploratory data analysis and data mining. A notable feature is that specialists in di?erent ?elds of sciences are considering the tool of data clustering to be useful. A major reason is that clustering algorithms and software are ?exible in thesensethatdi?erentmathematicalframeworksareemployedinthealgorithms and a user can select a suitable method according to his application. Moreover clusteringalgorithmshavedi?erentoutputsrangingfromtheolddendrogramsof agglomerativeclustering to more recent self-organizingmaps....

The most powerful computers in the world are not only used for scientific research, defence, and business, but also in game playing. Computer games are a multi-billion dollar industry. Recent advances in computational intelligence paradigms have generated tremendous interest among researchers in the theory and implementation of games. Game theory is a branch of operational research dealing with decision theory in a competitive situation. Game theory involves the mathematical calculations and heuristics to optimize the efficient lines of play. This book presents a sample of the most recent...

We describe in this book, new methods for analysis and design of hybrid intelligent systems using soft computing techniques. Soft Computing (SC) consists of several computing paradigms, including fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms, which can be used to produce powerful hybrid intelligent systems for solving problems in pattern recognition, time series prediction, intelligent control, robotics and automation. Hybrid int- ligent systems that combine several SC techniques are needed due to the complexity and high dimensionality of real-world problems. Hybrid int- ligent systems...