Dealing with non-stationarity is one of modem machine learning's greatest challenges. This book focuses on a specific non-stationary environment known as covariate shift, in which the distributions of inputs (queries) change but the conditional distribution of outputs (answers) is unchanged, and presents machine learning theory, algorithms, and applications to overcome this variety of non-stationarity.

Recent decades have seen rapid advances in automatization processes, supported by modern machines and computers. The result is significant increases in system complexity and state changes, information sources, the need for faster data handling and the integration of environmental influences. Intelligent systems, equipped with a taxonomy of data-driven system identification and machine learning algorithms, can handle these problems partially. Conventional learning algorithms in a batch off-line setting fail whenever dynamic changes of the process appear due to non-stationary environments and external influences. Learning in Non-Stationary Environments: Methods and Applications offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive review of recent developments and important methodologies in the field. The coverage focuses on dynamic learning in unsupervised problems, dynamic learning in supervised classification and dynamic learning in supervised regression problems. A later section is dedicated to applications in which dynamic learning methods serve as keystones for achieving models with high accuracy. Rather than rely on a mathematical theorem/proof style, the editors highlight numerous figures, tables, examples and applications, together with their explanations. This approach offers a useful basis for further investigation and fresh ideas and motivates and inspires newcomers to explore this promising and still emerging field of research.

Theory, algorithms, and applications of machine learning techniques to overcome "covariate shift" non-stationarity.

This is a subject that is as hot as a snake in a wagon rut, offering as it does huge potentiality in the field of computer programming. That’s why this book, which constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation, held in Whistler, Canada, in July 2007, will undoubtedly prove so popular among researchers and professionals in relevant fields. 26 revised full papers are presented, together with the abstracts of 3 invited papers and 13 research summaries.

This edited book covers recent advances of techniques, methods and tools treating the problem of learning from data streams generated by evolving non-stationary processes. The goal is to discuss and overview the advanced techniques, methods and tools that are dedicated to manage, exploit and interpret data streams in non-stationary environments. The book includes the required notions, definitions, and background to understand the problem of learning from data streams in non-stationary environments and synthesizes the state-of-the-art in the domain, discussing advanced aspects and concepts and presenting open problems and future challenges in this field. Provides multiple examples to facilitate the understanding data streams in non-stationary environments; Presents several application cases to show how the methods solve different real world problems; Discusses the links between methods to help stimulate new research and application directions.

The Wiley-Interscience Paperback Series consists of selected books that have been made more accessible to consumers in an effort to increase global appeal and general circulation. With these new unabridged softcover volumes, Wiley hopes to extend the lives of these works by making them available to future generations of statisticians, mathematicians, and scientists. "This text is unique in bringing together so many results hitherto found only in part in other texts and papers. . . . The text is fairly self-contained, inclusive of some basic mathematical results needed, and provides a rich diet of examples, applications, and exercises. The bibliographical material at the end of each chapter is excellent, not only from a historical perspective, but because it is valuable for researchers in acquiring a good perspective of the MDP research potential." —Zentralblatt fur Mathematik ". . . it is of great value to advanced-level students, researchers, and professional practitioners of this field to have now a complete volume (with more than 600 pages) devoted to this topic. . . . Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming represents an up-to-date, unified, and rigorous treatment of theoretical and computational aspects of discrete-time Markov decision processes." —Journal of the American Statistical Association

Combinatorial optimization is the process of finding the best, or optimal, so lution for problems with a discrete set of feasible solutions. Applications arise in numerous settings involving operations management and logistics, such as routing, scheduling, packing, inventory and production management, lo cation, logic, and assignment of resources. The economic impact of combi natorial optimization is profound, affecting sectors as diverse as transporta tion (airlines, trucking, rail, and shipping), forestry, manufacturing, logistics, aerospace, energy (electrical power, petroleum, and natural gas), telecommu nications, biotechnology, financial services, and agriculture. While much progress has been made in finding exact (provably optimal) so lutions to some combinatorial optimization problems, using techniques such as dynamic programming, cutting planes, and branch and cut methods, many hard combinatorial problems are still not solved exactly and require good heuristic methods. Moreover, reaching "optimal solutions" is in many cases meaningless, as in practice we are often dealing with models that are rough simplifications of reality. The aim of heuristic methods for combinatorial op timization is to quickly produce good-quality solutions, without necessarily providing any guarantee of solution quality. Metaheuristics are high level procedures that coordinate simple heuristics, such as local search, to find solu tions that are of better quality than those found by the simple heuristics alone: Modem metaheuristics include simulated annealing, genetic algorithms, tabu search, GRASP, scatter search, ant colony optimization, variable neighborhood search, and their hybrids.