This book provides a thorough understanding of the techniques used to retrieve multi-scale information from turbulent and complex systems, with case studies.

Multi-scale systems, involving complex interacting processes that occur over a range of temporal and spatial scales, are present in a broad range of disciplines. Several methodologies exist to retrieve this multi-scale information from a given time series; however, each method has its own limitations. This book presents the mathematical theory behind the stochastic analysis of scaling time series, including a general historical introduction to the problem of intermittency in turbulence, as well as how to implement this analysis for a range of different applications. Covering a variety of statistical methods, such as Fourier analysis and wavelet transforms, it provides readers with a thorough understanding of the techniques and when to apply them. New techniques to analyse stochastic processes, including empirical mode decomposition, are also explored. Case studies, in turbulence and ocean sciences, are used to demonstrate how these statistical methods can be applied in practice, for students and researchers.

This book focuses on a central question in the field of complex systems: Given a fluctuating (in time or space), uni- or multi-variant sequentially measured set of experimental data (even noisy data), how should one analyse non-parametrically the data, assess underlying trends, uncover characteristics of the fluctuations (including diffusion and jump contributions), and construct a stochastic evolution equation? Here, the term "non-parametrically" exemplifies that all the functions and parameters of the constructed stochastic evolution equation can be determined directly from the measured data. The book provides an overview of methods that have been developed for the analysis of fluctuating time series and of spatially disordered structures. Thanks to its feasibility and simplicity, it has been successfully applied to fluctuating time series and spatially disordered structures of complex systems studied in scientific fields such as physics, astrophysics, meteorology, earth science, engineering, finance, medicine and the neurosciences, and has led to a number of important results. The book also includes the numerical and analytical approaches to the analyses of complex time series that are most common in the physical and natural sciences. Further, it is self-contained and readily accessible to students, scientists, and researchers who are familiar with traditional methods of mathematics, such as ordinary, and partial differential equations. The codes for analysing continuous time series are available in an R package developed by the research group Turbulence, Wind energy and Stochastic (TWiSt) at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Joachim Peinke. This package makes it possible to extract the (stochastic) evolution equation underlying a set of data or measurements.

This book presents selected peer-reviewed contributions from the International Work-Conference on Time Series, ITISE 2017, held in Granada, Spain, September 18-20, 2017. It discusses topics in time series analysis and forecasting, including advanced mathematical methodology, computational intelligence methods for time series, dimensionality reduction and similarity measures, econometric models, energy time series forecasting, forecasting in real problems, online learning in time series as well as high-dimensional and complex/big data time series. The series of ITISE conferences provides a forum for scientists, engineers, educators and students to discuss the latest ideas and implementations in the foundations, theory, models and applications in the field of time series analysis and forecasting. It focuses on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research encompassing computer science, mathematics, statistics and econometrics.

In this contribution, several probabilistic tools to study population dynamics are developed. The focus is on scaling limits of qualitatively different stochastic individual based models and the long time behavior of some classes of limiting processes. Structured population dynamics are modeled by measure-valued processes describing the individual behaviors and taking into account the demographic and mutational parameters, and possible interactions between individuals. Many quantitative parameters appear in these models and several relevant normalizations are considered, leading to infinite-dimensional deterministic or stochastic large-population approximations. Biologically relevant questions are considered, such as extinction criteria, the effect of large birth events, the impact of environmental catastrophes, the mutation-selection trade-off, recovery criteria in parasite infections, genealogical properties of a sample of individuals. These notes originated from a lecture series on Structured Population Dynamics at Ecole polytechnique (France). Vincent Bansaye and Sylvie Méléard are Professors at Ecole Polytechnique (France). They are a specialists of branching processes and random particle systems in biology. Most of their research concerns the applications of probability to biodiversity, ecology and evolution.

When I ?rst came across the term data mining and knowledge discovery in databases, I was excited and curious to ?nd out what it was all about. I was excited because the term tends to convey a new ?eld that is in the making. I was curious because I wondered what it was doing that the other ?elds of research, such as statistics and the broad ?eld of arti?cial intelligence, were not doing. After reading up on the literature, I have come to realize that it is not much different from conventional data analysis. The commonly used de?nition of knowledge discovery in databases: “the non-trivial process of identifying valid, novel, potentially useful, and ultimately understandable patterns in data” is actually in line with the core mission of conventional data analysis. The process employed by conventional data analysis is by no means trivial, and the patterns in data to be unraveled have, of course, to be valid, novel, useful and understandable. Therefore, what is the commotion all about? Careful scrutiny of the main lines of research in data mining and knowledge discovery again told me that they are not much different from that of conventional data analysis. Putting aside data warehousing and database m- agement aspects, again a main area of research in conventional database research, the rest of the tasks in data mining are largely the main concerns of conventional data analysis.

This volume of selected and peer-reviewed contributions on the latest developments in time series analysis and forecasting updates the reader on topics such as analysis of irregularly sampled time series, multi-scale analysis of univariate and multivariate time series, linear and non-linear time series models, advanced time series forecasting methods, applications in time series analysis and forecasting, advanced methods and online learning in time series and high-dimensional and complex/big data time series. The contributions were originally presented at the International Work-Conference on Time Series, ITISE 2016, held in Granada, Spain, June 27-29, 2016. The series of ITISE conferences provides a forum for scientists, engineers, educators and students to discuss the latest ideas and implementations in the foundations, theory, models and applications in the field of time series analysis and forecasting. It focuses on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research encompassing the disciplines of computer science, mathematics, statistics and econometrics.