The fields of similarity and preference are still broadening due to the exploration of new fields of application. This is caused by the strong impact of vagueness, imprecision, uncertainty and dominance on human and agent information, communication, planning, decision, action, and control as well as by the technical progress of the information technology itself. The topics treated in this book are of interest to computer scientists, statisticians, operations researchers, experts in AI, cognitive psychologists and economists.

Planning of actions based on decision theory is a hot topic for many disciplines. Seemingly unlimited computing power, networking, integration and collaboration have meanwhile attracted the attention of fields like Machine Learning, Operations Research, Management Science and Computer Science. Software agents of e-commerce, mediators of Information Retrieval Systems and Database based Information Systems are typical new application areas. Until now, planning methods were successfully applied in production, logistics, marketing, finance, management, and used in robots, software agents etc. It...

This volume contains papers read at the 7th International Workshop entitled "Intelligent Agents: Decision-Support and Planning," Udine, Italy, Sep 30th - Oct 2nd, 2004. All papers were reviewed after they were presented, and revised for final publication. As its preceding ones, this workshop took place under the auspices of the International School for the Synthesis of Expert Knowledge (ISSEK) and was held in the picturesque Palazzo del Torso of the Centre International des Sciences Mecaniques (CISM), Udine, see picture below. CISM location " Palazzo del Torso " The workshop was jointly...

This work is a collection of front-end research papers on data fusion and perceptions. Authors are leading European experts of Artificial Intelligence, Mathematical Statistics and/or Machine Learning. Area overlaps with "Intelligent Data Analysis," which aims to unscramble latent structures in collected data: Statistical Learning, Model Selection, Information Fusion, Soccer Robots, Fuzzy Quantifiers, Emotions and Artifacts.

The book aims to merge Computational Intelligence with Data Mining, which are both hot topics of current research and industrial development, Computational Intelligence, incorporates techniques like data fusion, uncertain reasoning, heuristic search, learning, and soft computing. Data Mining focuses on unscrambling unknown patterns or structures in very large data sets. Under the headline "Discovering Structures in Large Databases" the book starts with a unified view on 'Data Mining and Statistics - A System Point of View'. Two special techniques follow: 'Subgroup Mining', and 'Data Mining...