Anatoly A. Zhigljavsky - Böcker

One service mathematics has rendered the 'Et moi, ...* si j'avait su comment en revenir. je n'y serais point aIle.' human mee. It has put common sense back Jules Verne where it belongs, on the topmost shelf next to the dusty canister labelled 'discarded non- The series is divergent; therefore we may be sense'. Eric T. Bell able to do something with it. O. Heaviside Mathematics is a tool for thought. A highly necessary tool in a world where both feedback and non- linearities abound. Similarly, all kinds of parts of mathematics serve as tools for other parts and for other sciences. Applying a simple rewriting rule to the quote on the right above one finds such statements as: 'One service topology has rendered mathematical physics ...'; 'One service logic has rendered com- puter science ...'; 'One service category theory has rendered mathematics ...'. All arguably true. And all statements obtainable this way form part of the raison d'etre of this series.

This volume presents the state of optimum experimental design at the beginning of the new millennium, with an emphasis on developing areas. The contributions range from theory to applications, starting with a glimpse back to the beginnings of optimum experimental design. Theoretical chapters cover the properties and methods of construction of designs. Applications include chapters on sequential design problems in the pharmaceutical industry and on the designs with discrete factors in agriculture. There are chapters on training neural networks, on the efficient selection of sampling methods, and on problems arising in glass making and in herbicide resistance of Brazilian weeds. The contributors, from a variety of countries, include many acknowledged experts whose work reflects the international spread of activity in the subject. Experimentalists as well as research workers and students in statistics should find much to interest them in these papers.

This volume contains many of the papers presented at the conference "Optimum Design 2000: Prospects for the New Millennium" held in Cardiff, UK on April 12th - 14th, 2000. The majority of the papers consider aspects of optimum experimental design from the theoretical to applications. Many of the optimisation problems arising in the optimum design theory in general and the articles in this volume in particular, fall into the category of nonconvex, including global, optimization. The papers are organised in two sections. Since we are at the beginning of a new millennium the first paper starts by looking back at the beginnings of optimum exper­ imental design in 1917 and sketches the development up to Kiefer's paper read to the Royal Statistical Society in 1959. This is the first in a group of papers which we have labelled "Theory", which cover the more general aspects, such as the properties and methods of construction of designs. In the "Applications" section there are papers on sequential design problems arising in the pharmaceutical industry and on the designs with discrete factors which occur in agriculture. There are also papers on training neural networks, on the efficient design of sampling methods, on design problems in mixtures, arising from a study of glass manufacturing, and on the resistance of Brazilian weeds to herbicides. The number attending the meeting was deliberately limited to 50 in order to encour­ age a workshop atmosphere and the exchange of ideas.

Over the last 15 years, singular spectrum analysis (SSA) has proven very successful. It has already become a standard tool in climatic and meteorological time series analysis and well known in nonlinear physics and signal processing. However, despite the promise it holds for time series applications in other disciplines, SSA is not widely known among statisticians and econometrists, and although the basic SSA algorithm looks simple, understanding what it does and where its pitfalls lay is by no means simple.Analysis of Time Series Structure: SSA and Related Techniques provides a careful, lucid description of its general theory and methodology. Part I introduces the basic concepts, and sets forth the main findings and results, then presents a detailed treatment of the methodology. After introducing the basic SSA algorithm, the authors explore forecasting and apply SSA ideas to change-point detection algorithms. Part II is devoted to the theory of SSA. Here the authors formulate and prove the statements of Part I. They address the singular value decomposition (SVD) of real matrices, time series of finite rank, and SVD of trajectory matrices.Based on the authors' original work and filled with applications illustrated with real data sets, this book offers an outstanding opportunity to obtain a working knowledge of why, when, and how SSA works. It builds a strong foundation for successfully using the technique in applications ranging from mathematics and nonlinear physics to economics, biology, oceanology, social science, engineering, financial econometrics, and market research.