This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Combinatorial Optimization, ISCO 2017, held in Marrakesh, Marocco, in April 2018.

This monograph presents a comprehensive treatment of the maximum-entropy sampling problem (MESP), which is a fascinating topic at the intersection of mathematical optimization and data science. The text situates MESP in information theory, as the algorithmic problem of calculating a sub-vector of pre-specificed size from a multivariate Gaussian random vector, so as to maximize Shannon's differential entropy. The text collects and expands on state-of-the-art algorithms for MESP, and addresses its application in the field of environmental monitoring. While MESP is a central optimization...