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This book provides a fundamentally new approach to pattern recognition in which objects are characterized by relations to other objects instead of by using features or models. This 'dissimilarity representation' bridges the gap between the traditionally opposing approaches of statistical and structural pattern recognition. Physical phenomena, objects and events in the world are related in various and often complex ways. Such relations are usually modeled in the form of graphs or diagrams. While this is useful for communication between experts, such representation is difficult to combine and integrate by machine learning procedures. However, if the relations are captured by sets of dissimilarities, general data analysis procedures may be applied for analysis. With their detailed description of an unprecedented approach absent from traditional textbooks, the authors have crafted an essential book for every researcher and systems designer studying or developing pattern recognition systems.

This is the first comprehensive book dedicated entirely to the field of decision trees in data mining and covers all aspects of this important technique. Decision trees have become one of the most powerful and popular approaches in knowledge discovery and data mining, the science and technology of exploring large and complex bodies of data in order to discover useful patterns. The area is of great importance because it enables modeling and knowledge extraction from the abundance of data available. Both theoreticians and practitioners are continually seeking techniques to make the process more efficient, cost-effective and accurate. Decision trees, originally implemented in decision theory and statistics, are highly effective tools in other areas such as data mining, text mining, information extraction, machine learning, and pattern recognition. This book invites readers to explore the many benefits in data mining that decision trees offer:

Written by the founders of the new and expanding field of numerical algebraic geometry, this is the first book that uses an algebraic-geometric approach to the numerical solution of polynomial systems and also the first one to treat numerical methods for finding positive dimensional solution sets. The text covers the full theory from methods developed for isolated solutions in the 1980's to the most recent research on positive dimensional sets.

A Physarum machine is a programmable amorphous biological computer experimentally implemented in the vegetative state of true slime mould Physarum polycephalum. It comprises an amorphous yellowish mass with networks of protoplasmic veins, programmed by spatial configurations of attracting and repelling gradients.

This book is concerned with a fundamentally novel approach to graph-based pattern recognition based on vector space embedding of graphs. It aims at condensing the high representational power of graphs into a computationally efficient and mathematically convenient feature vector.

Researchers from various disciplines such as pattern recognition, statistics, and machine learning have explored the use of ensemble methodology since the late seventies. Thus, they are faced with a wide variety of methods, given the growing interest in the field. This book aims to impose a degree of order upon this diversity by presenting a coherent and unified repository of ensemble methods, theories, trends, challenges and applications.

The principal aim of this book is to introduce topology and its many applications viewed within a framework that includes a consideration of compactness, completeness, continuity, filters, function spaces, grills, clusters and bunches, hyperspace topologies, initial and final structures, metric spaces, metrization, nets, proximal continuity, proximity spaces, separation axioms, and uniform spaces. This book provides a complete framework for the study of topology with a variety of applications in science and engineering that include camouflage filters, classification, digital image processing, forgery detection, Hausdorff raster spaces, image analysis, microscopy, paleontology, pattern recognition, population dynamics, stem cell biology, topological psychology, and visual merchandising.

This book introduces an unified function approximation approach to the control of uncertain robot manipulators containing general uncertainties. It works for free space tracking control as well as compliant motion control. It is applicable to the rigid robot and the flexible joint robot. Even with actuator dynamics, the unified approach is still feasible. All these features make the book stand out from other existing publications.

This book presents the results of an assessment of the state of robotics in Japan, South Korea, Western Europe and Australia and a comparison of robotics R&D programs in these countries with those in the United States. The comparisons include areas like robotic vehicles, space robotics, service robots, humanoid robots, networked robots, and robots for biological and medical applications, and based on criteria such as quality, scope, funding and commercialization. This important study identifies a number of areas where the traditional lead of the United States is being overtaken by developments in other countries.Sample Chapter(s)Chapter 1: Introduction (84 KB)Contents:Robotic VehiclesSpace RoboticsHumanoidsIndustrial, Personal, and Service RobotsRobotics for Biological and Medical ApplicationsNetworked RobotsReadership: Researchers and graduate students in robotics and automated systems, electrical and mechanical engineering, international economics, artificial intelligence and machine perception.

An important obstacle in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is the significant degradation of haptic feedback (sensation of touch) to the surgeon about surgical instrument's interaction with tissue. This monograph is concerned with devices and methods required for incorporating haptic feedback in master-slave robotic MIS systems. In terms of devices, novel mechanisms are designed including a surgical end-effector (slave) with full force sensing capabilities and a surgeon-robot interface (master) with full force feedback capabilities.