Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

From a literature review to a conceptual framework for sustainable supply chain management

Recent advances in graphene based polymer composites

We explore in this chapter questions of existence and uniqueness for solutions to stochastic differential equations and offer a study of their properties. This endeavor is really a study of diffusion processes. Loosely speaking, the term diffusion is attributed to a Markov process which has continuous sample paths and can be characterized in terms of its infinitesimal generator.

Stochastic Differential Equations

Multiscale principal-component analysis (MSPCA) combines the ability of PCA to decorrelate the variables by extracting a linear relationship with that of wavelet analysis to extract deterministic features and approximately decorrelate autocorrelated measurements. MSPCA computes the PCA of wavelet coefficients at each scale and then combines the results at relevant scales. Due to its multiscale nature, MSPCA is appropriate for the modeling of data containing contributions from events whose behavior changes over time and frequency. Process monitoring by MSPCA involves combining only those scales where significant events are detected, and is equivalent to adaptively filtering the scores and residuals, and adjusting the detection limits for easiest detection of deterministic changes in the measurements. Approximate decorrelation of wavelet coefficients also makes MSPCA effective for monitoring autocorrelated measurements without matrix augmentation or time-series modeling. In addition to improving the ability to detect deterministic changes, monitoring by MSPCA also simultaneously extracts those features that represent abnormal operation. The superior performance of MSPCA for process monitoring is illustrated by several examples.

Multiscale PCA with application to multivariate statistical process monitoring

Promise and problems of emergy analysis

Particle filtering and moving horizon estimation

New technologies, either renewables-based or not, are confronted with both economic and technical constraints. Their development takes advantage of considering the basic laws of economics and thermodynamics. With respect to the latter, the exergy concept pops up. Although its fundamentals, that is, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, were already established in the 1800s, it is only in the last years that the exergy concept has gained a more widespread interest in process analysis, typically employed to identify inefficiencies. However, exergy analysis today is implemented far beyond technical analysis; it is also employed in environmental, (thermo)economic, and even sustainability analysis of industrial systems. Because natural ecosystems are also subjected to the basic laws of thermodynamics, it is another subject of exergy analysis. After an introduction on the concept itself, this review focuses on the potential and limitations of the exergy concept in (1) ecosystem analysis, utilized to describe maximu...

Exergy: Its Potential and Limitations in Environmental Science and Technology

A Wave-Net is an artificial neural network with one hidden layer of nodes, whose basis functions are drawn from a family of orthonormal wavelets. The good localization characteristics of the basis functions, both in the input and frequency domains, allow hierarchical, multiresolution learning of input-output maps from experimental data. Furthermore, Wave-Nets allow explicit estimation for global and local prediction error-bounds, and thus lend themselves to a rigorous and explicit design of the network. This article presents the mathematical framework for the development of Wave-Nets and discusses the various aspects of their practical implementation. Computational complexity arguments prove that the training and adaptation efficiency of Wave-Nets is at least an order of magnitude better than other networks. In addition, it presents two examples on the application of Wave-Nets; (a) the prediction of a chaotic time-series, representing population dynamics, and (b) the classification of experimental data for process fault diagnosis.

Bhavik R. Bakshi

Papers

Multiscale PCA with application to multivariate statistical process monitoring

Promise and problems of emergy analysis

Particle filtering and moving horizon estimation

Exergy: Its Potential and Limitations in Environmental Science and Technology

Wave‐net: a multiresolution, hierarchical neural network with localized learning