An accessible and up-to-date treatment featuring the connection between neural networks and statistics

A Statistical Approach to Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition presents a statistical treatment of the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), which is the most widely used of the neural network models. This book aims to answer questions that arise when statisticians are first confronted with this type of model, such as:

How robust is the model to outliers?

Could the model be made more robust?

Which points will have a high leverage?

What are good starting values for...

With the advent of computers, very large datasets have become routine. Standard statistical methods don't have the power or flexibility to analyse these efficiently, and extract the required knowledge. An alternative approach is to summarize a large dataset in such a way that the resulting summary dataset is of a manageable size and yet retains as much of the knowledge in the original dataset as possible. One consequence of this is that the data may no longer be formatted as single values, but be represented by lists, intervals, distributions, etc. The summarized data have their own internal...

The BUGS (Bayesian inference Using Gibbs Sampling) project is concerned with free, flexible software for the Bayesian analysis of complex statistical models using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. This book presents a clear, accessible introduction to the use of WinBUGS programming techniques.

A hands-on introduction to computational statistics from a Bayesian point of view

Providing a solid grounding in statistics while uniquely covering the topics from a Bayesian perspective, Understanding Computational Bayesian Statistics successfully guides readers through this new, cutting-edge approach. With its hands-on treatment of the topic, the book shows how samples can be drawn from the posterior distribution when the formula giving its shape is all that is known, and how Bayesian inferences can be based on these samples from the posterior. These ideas are...

Graphical models are of increasing importance in applied statistics, and in particular in data mining. Providing a self-contained introduction and overview to learning relational, probabilistic, and possibilistic networks from data, this second edition of Graphical Models is thoroughly updated to include the latest research in this burgeoning field, including a new chapter on visualization. The text provides graduate students, and researchers with all the necessary background material, including modelling under uncertainty, decomposition of distributions, graphical representation of...

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are now an indispensable tool in scientific computing. This book discusses recent developments of MCMC methods with an emphasis on those making use of past sample information during simulations. The application examples are drawn from diverse fields such as bioinformatics, machine learning, social science, combinatorial optimization, and computational physics.

Key Features:

• Expanded coverage of the stochastic approximation Monte Carlo and dynamic weighting algorithms that are essentially immune to local trap problems.
• A...

This book focuses on computational methods for large-scale statistical inverse problems and provides an introduction to statistical Bayesian and frequentist methodologies. Recent research advances for approximation methods are discussed, along with Kalman filtering methods and optimization-based approaches to solving inverse problems. The aim is to cross-fertilize the perspectives of researchers in the areas of data assimilation, statistics, large-scale optimization, applied and computational mathematics, high performance computing, and cutting-edge applications.

The solution to...

Data mining is the process of automatically searching large volumes of data for models and patterns using computational techniques from statistics, machine learning and information theory; it is the ideal tool for such an extraction of knowledge. Data mining is usually associated with a business or an organization's need to identify trends and profiles, allowing, for example, retailers to discover patterns on which to base marketing objectives.

This book looks at both classical and recent techniques of data mining, such as clustering, discriminant analysis, logistic regression, generalized...

Symbolic data analysis is a relatively new field that provides a range of methods for analyzing complex datasets. Standard statistical methods do not have the power or flexibility to make sense of very large datasets, and symbolic data analysis techniques have been developed in order to extract knowledge from such a data.

Classification Methodology for Symbolic Data:

• Provides new classification methodologies for histogram valued data reaching across many fields in data science.
• Demonstrates how to manage a large complex dataset into manageable datasets ready...

This text focuses on graph mining and classification techniques and introduces novel graph classes appropriate for countless applications across many disciplines. It explores the relationship of novel graph classes among each other.