Gilbert Ritschard - Böcker

This book reviews the latest techniques in exploratory data mining (EDM) for the analysis of data in the social and behavioral sciences to help researchers assess the predictive value of different combinations of variables in large data sets. Methodological findings and conceptual models that explain reliable EDM techniques for predicting and understanding various risk mechanisms are integrated throughout. Numerous examples illustrate the use of these techniques in practice. Contributors provide insight through hands-on experiences with their own use of EDM techniques in various settings. Readers are also introduced to the most popular EDM software programs. A related website at http://mephisto.unige.ch/pub/edm-book-supplement/offers color versions of the book’s figures, a supplemental paper to chapter 3, and R commands for some chapters. The results of EDM analyses can be perilous – they are often taken as predictions with little regard for cross-validating the results. This carelessness can be catastrophic in terms of money lost or patients misdiagnosed. This book addresses these concerns and advocates for the development of checks and balances for EDM analyses. Both the promises and the perils of EDM are addressed.Editors McArdle and Ritschard taught the "Exploratory Data Mining" Advanced Training Institute of the American Psychological Association (APA). All contributors are top researchers from the US and Europe. Organized into two parts--methodology and applications, the techniques covered include decision, regression, and SEM tree models, growth mixture modeling, and time based categorical sequential analysis. Some of the applications of EDM (and the corresponding data) explored include:selection to college based on risky prior academic profilesthe decline of cognitive abilities in older personsglobal perceptions of stress in adulthoodpredicting mortality from demographics and cognitive abilitiesrisk factors during pregnancy and the impact on neonatal developmentIntended as a reference for researchers, methodologists, and advanced students in the social and behavioral sciences including psychology, sociology, business, econometrics, and medicine, interested in learning to apply the latest exploratory data mining techniques. Prerequisites include a basic class in statistics.

This book reviews the latest techniques in exploratory data mining (EDM) for the analysis of data in the social and behavioral sciences to help researchers assess the predictive value of different combinations of variables in large data sets. Methodological findings and conceptual models that explain reliable EDM techniques for predicting and understanding various risk mechanisms are integrated throughout. Numerous examples illustrate the use of these techniques in practice. Contributors provide insight through hands-on experiences with their own use of EDM techniques in various settings. Readers are also introduced to the most popular EDM software programs. A related website at http://mephisto.unige.ch/pub/edm-book-supplement/offers color versions of the book’s figures, a supplemental paper to chapter 3, and R commands for some chapters. The results of EDM analyses can be perilous – they are often taken as predictions with little regard for cross-validating the results. This carelessness can be catastrophic in terms of money lost or patients misdiagnosed. This book addresses these concerns and advocates for the development of checks and balances for EDM analyses. Both the promises and the perils of EDM are addressed.Editors McArdle and Ritschard taught the "Exploratory Data Mining" Advanced Training Institute of the American Psychological Association (APA). All contributors are top researchers from the US and Europe. Organized into two parts--methodology and applications, the techniques covered include decision, regression, and SEM tree models, growth mixture modeling, and time based categorical sequential analysis. Some of the applications of EDM (and the corresponding data) explored include:selection to college based on risky prior academic profilesthe decline of cognitive abilities in older personsglobal perceptions of stress in adulthoodpredicting mortality from demographics and cognitive abilitiesrisk factors during pregnancy and the impact on neonatal developmentIntended as a reference for researchers, methodologists, and advanced students in the social and behavioral sciences including psychology, sociology, business, econometrics, and medicine, interested in learning to apply the latest exploratory data mining techniques. Prerequisites include a basic class in statistics.

This open access book provides innovative methods and original applications of sequence analysis (SA) and related methods for analysing longitudinal data describing life trajectories such as professional careers, family paths, the succession of health statuses, or the time use. The applications as well as the methodological contributions proposed in this book pay special attention to the combined use of SA and other methods for longitudinal data such as event history analysis, Markov modelling, and sequence network. The methodological contributions in this book include among others original propositions for measuring the precarity of work trajectories, Markov-based methods for clustering sequences, fuzzy and monothetic clustering of sequences, network-based SA, joint use of SA and hidden Markov models, and of SA and survival models. The applications cover the comparison of gendered occupational trajectories in Germany, the study of the changes in women market participation in Denmark, the study of typical day of dual-earner couples in Italy, of mobility patterns in Togo, of internet addiction in Switzerland, and of the quality of employment career after a first unemployment spell. As such this book provides a wealth of information for social scientists interested in quantitative life course analysis, and all those working in sociology, demography, economics, health, psychology, social policy, and statistics.

This open access book provides innovative methods and original applications of sequence analysis (SA) and related methods for analysing longitudinal data describing life trajectories such as professional careers, family paths, the succession of health statuses, or the time use.

During the last decade, the French-speaking scientific community developed a very strong research activity in the field of Knowledge Discovery and Management (KDM or EGC for “Extraction et Gestion des Connaissances” in French), which is concerned with, among others, Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery, Business Intelligence, Knowledge Engineering and SemanticWeb. The recent and novel research contributions collected in this book are extended and reworked versions of a selection of the best papers that were originally presented in French at the EGC 2009 Conference held in Strasbourg, France on January 2009.The volume is organized in four parts. Part I includes five papers concerned by various aspects of supervised learning or information retrieval. Part II presents five papers concerned with unsupervised learning issues. Part III includes two papers on data streaming and two on security while in Part IV the last four papers are concerned with ontologies and semantic.

During the last decade, Knowledge Discovery and Management (KDM or, in French, EGC for Extraction et Gestion des connaissances) has been an intensive and fruitful research topic in the French-speaking scientific community. In 2003, this enthusiasm for KDM led to the foundation of a specific French-speaking association, called EGC, dedicated to supporting and promoting this topic. More precisely, KDM is concerned with the interface between knowledge and data such as, among other things, Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery, Business Intelligence, Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web. The recent and novel research contributions collected in this book are extended and reworked versions of a selection of the best papers that were originally presented in French at the EGC 2010 Conference held in Tunis, Tunisia in January 2010. The volume is organized in three parts. Part I includes four chapters concerned with various aspects of Data Cube and Ontology-based representations. Part II is composed of four chapters concerned with Efficient Pattern Mining issues, while in Part III the last four chapters address Data Preprocessing and Information Retrieval.

During the last decade, the French-speaking scientific community developed a very strong research activity in the field of Knowledge Discovery and Management (KDM or EGC for “Extraction et Gestion des Connaissances” in French), which is concerned with, among others, Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery, Business Intelligence, Knowledge Engineering and SemanticWeb. The recent and novel research contributions collected in this book are extended and reworked versions of a selection of the best papers that were originally presented in French at the EGC 2009 Conference held in Strasbourg, France on January 2009.The volume is organized in four parts. Part I includes five papers concerned by various aspects of supervised learning or information retrieval. Part II presents five papers concerned with unsupervised learning issues. Part III includes two papers on data streaming and two on security while in Part IV the last four papers are concerned with ontologies and semantic.