There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF EXPERIMENTS. By Oscar Kempthorne. New York, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1952. 631 pp. $8.50. This book by a teacher of statistics (as well as a consultant for \"experimenters\") is a comprehensive study of the philosophical background for the statistical design of experiment. It is necessary to have some facility with algebraic notation and manipulation to be able to use the volume intelligently. The problems are presented from the theoretical point of view, without such practical examples as would be helpful for those not acquainted with mathematics. The mathematical justification for the techniques is given. As a somewhat advanced treatment of the design and analysis of experiments, this volume will be interesting and helpful for many who approach statistics theoretically as well as practically. With emphasis on the \"why,\" and with description given broadly, the author relates the subject matter to the general theory of statistics and to the general problem of experimental inference. MARGARET J. ROBERTSON

The Design and Analysis of Experiments

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

Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

Statistics for Spatial Data.

User models have recently attracted much research interest in the field of artificial intelligence dialog systems. It has become evident that a flexible user-oriented dialog behavior of such systems can be realized only if the system disposes of a model of the user, containing assumptions about the user`s background knowledge as well as the user`s goals and plans in consulting the system. Research in the field of user models investigates how such assumptions can be automatically created, represented and exploited by the system in the course of an interaction with the user. This volume is the first survey pertaining to the field of user modeling. Most of the prominent international researchers in this area have contributed to this volume. Their papers are grouped into four sections: The introductory section contains a general view of the field as a whole, and a number of surveys of specific problems and techniques in user modeling. Sections two and three describe eight user modeling systems, with the focus lying on the automatic creation and exploitation of assumptions about the user respectively. The final section discusses several limits of current systems, and proposes solutions as to how some of the shortcomings might be overcome. In order to increase the quality and the coherency of the volume, each paper has been reviewed by all other contributors. Cross-references have been integrated wherever appropriate. All contributions are introduced in editorial prefaces pertaining to each section. A subject index and an extensive bibliography supplement the book.

http://www.dfki.de/wwdata/Publications/User_Models_in_Dialog_Systems.pdf

User Models in Dialog Systems

Combining statistical learning with a knowledge-based approach

The paper describes a case study in combining di erent methods for acquiring medical knowledge. Given a huge amount of noisy, high dimensional numerical time series data describing patients in intensive care, the support vector machine is used to learn when and how to change the dose of which drug. Given medical knowledge about and expertise in clinical decision making, a rst-order logic knowledge base about e ects of therapeutical interventions has been built. As a preprocessing mechanism it uses another statistical method. The integration of numerical and knowledge-based procedures eases the task of validation in two ways. On one hand, the knowledge base is validated with respect to past patients' records. On the other hand, medical interventions that are recommended by learning results are justi ed by the knowledge base.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/77148/2/1999-24.pdf

Combining Statistical Learning with a Knowledge-Based Approach - A Case Study in Intensive Care Monitoring

Today, many private households as well as broadcasting or film companies own large collections of digital music plays. These are time series that differ from, e.g., weather reports or stocks market data. The task is normally that of classification, not prediction of the next value or recognizing a shape or motif. New methods for extracting features that allow to classify audio data have been developed. However, the development of appropriate feature extraction methods is a tedious effort, particularly because every new classification task requires tailoring the feature set anew.

This paper presents a unifying framework for feature extraction from value series. Operators of this framework can be combined to feature extraction methods automatically, using a genetic programming approach. The construction of features is guided by the performance of the learning classifier which uses the features. Our approach to automatic feature extraction requires a balance between the completeness of the methods on one side and the tractability of searching for appropriate methods on the other side. In this paper, some theoretical considerations illustrate the trade-off. After the feature extraction, a second process learns a classifier from the transformed data. The practical use of the methods is shown by two types of experiments: classification of genres and classification according to user preferences.

/pdf/automatic-feature-extraction-for-classifying-audio-data-37qlbypb1s.pdf

Automatic Feature Extraction for Classifying Audio Data

The representation formalism as well as the representation language is of great importance for the success of machine learning. The representation formalism should be expressive, efficient, useful, and applicable. First-order logic needs to be restricted in order to be efficient for inductive and deductive reasoning. In the field of knowledge representation, term subsumption formalisms have been developed which are efficient and expressive. In this article, a learning algorithm, KLUSTER, is described that represents concept definitions in this formalism. KLUSTER enhances the representation language if this is necessary for the discrimination of concepts. Hence, KLUSTER is a constructive induction program. KLUSTER builds the most specific generalization and a most general discrimination in polynomial time. It embeds these concept learning problems into the overall task of learning a hierarchy of concepts.

/pdf/a-polynomial-approach-to-the-constructive-induction-of-1po2nhas0o.pdf

Katharina Morik

Papers

User Models in Dialog Systems

Combining statistical learning with a knowledge-based approach

Combining Statistical Learning with a Knowledge-Based Approach - A Case Study in Intensive Care Monitoring

Automatic Feature Extraction for Classifying Audio Data

A Polynomial Approach to the Constructive Induction of Structural Knowledge