Theories and practices to assess critical information in a complex adaptive system Organized for readers to follow along easily, The Fitness of Information: Quantitative Assessments of Critical Evidence provides a structured outline of the key challenges in assessing crucial information in a complex adaptive system. Illustrating a variety of computational and explanatory challenges, the book demonstrates principles and practical implications of exploring and assessing the fitness of information in an extensible framework of adaptive landscapes. The book’s first three chapters introduce fundamental principles and practical examples in connection to the nature of aesthetics, mental models, and the subjectivity of evidence. In particular, the underlying question is how these issues can be addressed quantitatively, not only computationally but also explanatorily. The next chapter illustrates how one can reduce the level of complexity in understanding the structure and dynamics of scientific knowledge through the design and use of the CiteSpace system for visualizing and analyzing emerging trends in scientific literature. The following two chapters explain the concepts of structural variation and the fitness of information in a framework that builds on the idea of fitness landscape originally introduced to study population evolution. The final chapter presents a dual-map overlay technique and demonstrates how it supports a variety of analytic tasks for a new type of portfolio analysis. The Fitness of Information: Quantitative Assessments of Critical Evidence also features: In-depth case studies and examples that characterize far-reaching concepts, illustrate underlying principles, and demonstrate profound challenges and complexities at various levels of analytic reasoning Wide-ranging topics that underline the common theme, from the subjectivity of evidence in criminal trials to detecting early signs of critical transitions and mechanisms behind radical patents An extensible and unifying framework for visual analytics by transforming analytic reasoning tasks to the assessment of critical evidence The Fitness of Information: Quantitative Assessments of Critical Evidence is a suitable reference for researchers, analysts, and practitioners who are interested in analyzing evidence and making decisions with incomplete, uncertain, and even conflicting information. The book is also an excellent textbook for upper-undergraduate and graduate-level courses on visual analytics, information visualization, and business analytics and decision support systems.

One of the main challenges facing contemporary society is to understand how people can make decisions together. Understanding Collective Decision Making builds on evolutionary theories and presents an analytical tool to analyse and visualise collective decision making. By combining theoretical research with real world case studies, the authors provide a coherent and conclusive solution to the often fragmented and dispersed literature on the subject.

Terminology, conceptual overview, biogeography, modeling.

This book constitutes selected and revised papers from the 22nd International Conference on Mathematical Modeling and Supercomputer Technologies, MMST 2022, held in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, in November 2022. The 20 full papers and 5 short papers presented in the volume were thoroughly reviewed and selected from the 48 submissions. They are organized in topical secions on ​computational methods for mathematical models analysis; computation in optimization and optimal control; supercomputer simulation.

Modern Applications of Graph Theory discusses many cutting-edge applications of graph theory, such as traffic networks, navigable networks and optimal routing for emergency response, placement of electric vehicle charging stations, and graph-theoretic methods in molecular epidemiology. Due to the rapid growth of research in this field, the focus of the book is on the up-to-date development of these applications and the mathematical methods used to tackle them. Ideal for researchers, engineers, transport planners and emergency response specialists who are interested in graph theory applications, Modern Applications of Graph Theory can also be used as teaching material. In addition to up-to-date descriptions of the applications, it includes extensive exercises and their solutions, mimicking practical, real-life situations. Furthermore, there is an introductory chapter, which provides an overview of basic applications and algorithms of graph theory. The book includes over 120 illustrations and tables.

The origin of species has fascinated both biologists and the general public since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Significant progress in understanding the process was achieved in the "modern synthesis," when Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, and others reconciled Mendelian genetics with Darwin's natural selection. Although evolutionary biologists have developed significant new theory and data about speciation in the years since the modern synthesis, this book represents the first systematic attempt to summarize and generalize what mathematical models tell us about the dynamics of speciation. Fitness Landscapes and the Origin of Species presents both an overview of the forty years of previous theoretical research and the author's new results. Sergey Gavrilets uses a unified framework based on the notion of fitness landscapes introduced by Sewall Wright in 1932, generalizing this notion to explore the consequences of the huge dimensionality of fitness landscapes that correspond to biological systems. In contrast to previous theoretical work, which was based largely on numerical simulations, Gavrilets develops simple mathematical models that allow for analytical investigation and clear interpretation in biological terms. Covering controversial topics, including sympatric speciation and the effects of sexual conflict on speciation, this book builds for the first time a general, quantitative theory for the origin of species.

The number of species found at a given point on the planet varies by orders of magnitude, yet large-scale gradients in biodiversity appear to follow some very general patterns. Little mechanistic theory has been formulated to explain the emergence of observed gradients of biodiversity both on land and in the oceans. Based on a comprehensive empirical synthesis of global patterns of species diversity and their drivers, A Theory of Global Biodiversity develops and applies a new theory that can predict such patterns from few underlying processes. The authors show that global patterns of biodiversity fall into four consistent categories, according to where species live: on land or in coastal, pelagic, and deep ocean habitats. The fact that most species groups, from bacteria to whales, appear to follow similar biogeographic patterns of richness within these habitats points toward some underlying structuring principles. Based on empirical analyses of environmental correlates across these habitats, the authors combine aspects of neutral, metabolic, and niche theory into one unifying framework. Applying it to model terrestrial and marine realms, the authors demonstrate that a relatively simple theory that incorporates temperature and community size as driving variables is able to explain divergent patterns of species richness at a global scale. Integrating ecological and evolutionary perspectives, A Theory of Global Biodiversity yields surprising insights into the fundamental mechanisms that shape the distribution of life on our planet.