Real life problems are known to be messy, dynamic and multi-objective, and involve high levels of uncertainty and constraints. Because traditional problem-solving methods are no longer capable of handling this level of complexity, heuristic search methods have attracted increasing attention in recent years for solving such problems. Inspired by nature, biology, statistical mechanics, physics and neuroscience, heuristics techniques are used to solve many problems where traditional methods have failed. Data Mining: A Heuristic Approach will be a repository for the applications of these techniques in the area of data mining.

Employ heuristic adjustments for truly accurate analysis Heuristics in Analytics presents an approach to analysis that accounts for the randomness of business and the competitive marketplace, creating a model that more accurately reflects the scenario at hand. With an emphasis on the importance of proper analytical tools, the book describes the analytical process from exploratory analysis through model developments, to deployments and possible outcomes. Beginning with an introduction to heuristic concepts, readers will find heuristics applied to statistics and probability, mathematics, stochastic, and artificial intelligence models, ending with the knowledge applications that solve business problems. Case studies illustrate the everyday application and implication of the techniques presented, while the heuristic approach is integrated into analytical modeling, graph analysis, text analytics, and more. Robust analytics has become crucial in the corporate environment, and randomness plays an enormous role in business and the competitive marketplace. Failing to account for randomness can steer a model in an entirely wrong direction, negatively affecting the final outcome and potentially devastating the bottom line. Heuristics in Analytics describes how the heuristic characteristics of analysis can be overcome with problem design, math and statistics, helping readers to: Realize just how random the world is, and how unplanned events can affect analysis Integrate heuristic and analytical approaches to modeling and problem solving Discover how graph analysis is applied in real-world scenarios around the globe Apply analytical knowledge to customer behavior, insolvency prevention, fraud detection, and more Understand how text analytics can be applied to increase the business knowledge Every single factor, no matter how large or how small, must be taken into account when modeling a scenario or event—even the unknowns. The presence or absence of even a single detail can dramatically alter eventual outcomes. From raw data to final report, Heuristics in Analytics contains the information analysts need to improve accuracy, and ultimately, predictive, and descriptive power.

Heuristics are strategies using readily accessible, loosely applicable information to control problem solving. Algorithms, for example, are a type of heuristic. By contrast, Metaheuristics are methods used to design Heuristics and may coordinate the usage of several Heuristics toward the formulation of a single method. GRASP (Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures) is an example of a Metaheuristic. To the layman, heuristics may be thought of as ‘rules of thumb’ but despite its imprecision, heuristics is a very rich field that refers to experience-based techniques for problem-solving, learning, and discovery. Any given solution/heuristic is not guaranteed to be optimal but heuristic methodologies are used to speed up the process of finding satisfactory solutions where optimal solutions are impractical. The introduction to this Handbook provides an overview of the history of Heuristics along with main issues regarding the methodologies covered. This is followed by Chapters containing various examples of local searches, search strategies and Metaheuristics, leading to an analyses of Heuristics and search algorithms. The reference concludes with numerous illustrations of the highly applicable nature and implementation of Heuristics in our daily life. Each chapter of this work includes an abstract/introduction with a short description of the methodology. Key words are also necessary as part of top-matter to each chapter to enable maximum search engine optimization. Next, chapters will include discussion of the adaptation of this methodology to solve a difficult optimization problem, and experiments on a set of representative problems.

This book outlines the core theory and practice of data mining and knowledge discovery (DM & KD) examining theoretical foundations for various methods, and presenting an array of examples, many drawn from real-life applications. Most theoretical developments are accompanied by extensive empirical analysis, offering a deep insight into both theoretical and practical aspects of the subject. The book presents the combined research experiences of 40 expert contributors of world renown.

Portals present unique strategic challenges in the academic environment. Their conceptualization and design requires the input of campus constituents who seldom interact and whose interests are often opposite. The implementation of a portal requires a coordination of applications and databases controlled by different campus units at a level that may never before have been attempted at the institution. Building a portal is as much about constructing intra-campus bridges as it is about user interfaces and content. Designing Portals: Opportunities and Challenges discusses the current status of portals in higher education by providing insight into the role portals play in an institution's business and educational strategy, by taking the reader through the processes of conceptualization, design, and implementation of the portals (in different stages of development) at major universities and by offering insight from three producers of portal software systems in use at institutions of higher learning and elsewhere.

The censorship and surveillance of individuals, societies, and countries have been a long-debated ethical and moral issue. In consequence, it is vital to explore this controversial topic from all angles. Censorship, Surveillance, and Privacy: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a vital reference source on the social, moral, religious, and political aspects of censorship and surveillance. It also explores the techniques of technologically supported censorship and surveillance. Highlighting a range of topics such as political censorship, propaganda, and information privacy, this multi-volume book is geared towards government officials, leaders, professionals, policymakers, media specialists, academicians, and researchers interested in the various facets of censorship and surveillance.

Privacy and security risks arising from the application of different data mining techniques to large institutional data repositories have been solely investigated by a new research domain, the so-called privacy preserving data mining. Association rule hiding is a new technique in data mining, which studies the problem of hiding sensitive association rules from within the data. Association Rule Hiding for Data Mining addresses the problem of "hiding" sensitive association rules, and introduces a number of heuristic solutions. Exact solutions of increased time complexity that have been proposed recently are presented, as well as a number of computationally efficient (parallel) approaches that alleviate time complexity problems, along with a thorough discussion regarding closely related problems (inverse frequent item set mining, data reconstruction approaches, etc.). Unsolved problems, future directions and specific examples are provided throughout this book to help the reader study, assimilate and appreciate the important aspects of this challenging problem. Association Rule Hiding for Data Mining is designed for researchers, professors and advanced-level students in computer science studying privacy preserving data mining, association rule mining, and data mining. This book is also suitable for practitioners working in this industry.