László T. Kóczy – författare

This book presents appealing contributions on computational intelligence and mathematics, connecting both areas and offering solutions to a number of interesting, real-world problems. Such problems often require novel solutions, as complexity exceeds the tractable size. At the same time, the need for good-quality realistic solutions results in models and algorithms with a good balance of resource intensiveness and model quality (accuracy).

Many areas of knowledge call for hybrid solutions that combine traditional mathematical techniques and computational intelligence based on subsymbolic knowledge representation. Important research topics are focused on developing the interaction between computational intelligence and mathematics, in order to address various challenges of the current technological age.

This book presents recent research in the field of interaction between computational intelligence and mathematics. In the current technological age, we face the challenges of tackling very complex problems – in the usual sense, but also in the mathematical and theoretical computer science sense. However, even the most up-to-date results in mathematics, are unable to provide exact solutions of such problems, and no further technical advances will ever make it possible to find general and exact solutions. Constantly developing technologies (including social technologies) necessitate handling very complex problems. This has led to a search for acceptably “good” or precise solutions, which can be achieved by the combination of traditional mathematical techniques and computational intelligence tools, in order to solve the various problems emerging in many different areas to a satisfactory degree.

This book combines computational intelligence and mathematics to solve theoretical and real-world problems. The real challenges of engineering and other applied sciences, e.g. economics and management, the social sciences, etc., and even everyday life, are increasingly raising complex problems – both in the usual sense, but also in the mathematical and theoretical computer science sense, which is referred to as intractability. Finding exact solutions to the latest problems in mathematics is impossible, and it has been also shown that no further technical advance will ever make it possible to find general and exact solutions to such complex problems. Rather, the goal is to find solutions that are “good enough” or “acceptably accurate,” including models and corresponding algorithms, which is most often achieved by combining traditional mathematical techniques and computational intelligence tools, such as fuzzy systems, evolutionary and memetic algorithms, and artificial neural networks.

This book highlights a broad range of modern information technology tools, techniques, investigations and open challenges, mainly with applications in systems research and computational physics. Divided into three major sections, it begins by presenting specialized calculation methods in the framework of data analysis and intelligent computing. In turn, the second section focuses on application aspects, mainly for systems research, while the final section investigates how various tasks in the basic disciplines—mathematics and physics—can be tackled with the aid of contemporary IT methods. 

The book gathers selected presentations from the 3rd Conference on Information Technology, Systems Research and Computational Physics (ITSRCP''18), which took place on 2–5 July 2018 in Krakow, Poland. The intended readership includes interdisciplinary scientists and practitioners pursuing research at the interfaces of information technology, systems research, and computational physics.

This book collects the final versions of the highest quality papers presented at the conference 11th European Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Mathematics held on October 2–5, 2019, in Toledo (Spain). The conjugation of computational sciences with different mathematical tools is essential in order to solve different challenges that arise in a wide-ranging knowledge areas. Nowadays, many promising research lines are being developed in this direction from the theoretical and applicational perspectives.

In this publication, computational intelligence and mathematics are combined in interesting research works that aim to give answers to complex real problems. Moreover, the technical program of this conference included four excellent keynote speeches, given by Prof. José Luis Verdegay (Guidelines to solve Decision Making Problems), Prof. Joao Paulo Carvalho (Recommender Systems: Using Fuzzy Fingerprints for ``Proper'''' Recommendations), Dr. Andreja Tepavcevic (Special lattice valued structures and approximate solutions of linear equations), and Prof. Juan Moreno-Garcia (Generating linguistic descriptions using Linguistic Petri Nets).

The recent book of the series continues the collection of articles dealing with the important and efficient combination of traditional and novel mathematical approaches with various computational intelligence techniques, with a stress of fuzzy systems, and fuzzy logic.

Complex systems are theoretically intractable, as the need of time and space resources (e.g., computer capacity) exceed any implementable extent. How is it possible that in the practice, such problems are usually manageable with an acceptable quality by human experts? They apply expert domain knowledge and various methods of approximate modeling and corresponding algorithms. Computational intelligence is the mathematical tool box that collects techniques which are able to model such human interaction, while (new) mathematical approaches are developed and used everywhere where the complexity of the sub-task allows it. The innovative approaches in this book give answer to many questions on how to solve “unsolvable” problems.

This book is considered as a monograph but also as a potential textbook for graduate students, focusing on the application of FCMs for modelling and analysing the behaviour of multicomponent systems. In the last two decades, no monograph or textbook has been published on the topic Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM), so this new book is definitely filling a gap in the literature of computational intelligence.

The book is built up didactically, the novel results in the field being presented in the way of starting with two real-life case studies, one in the area of waste management, while the other one in modelling bank management systems. In both cases, the book starts with explaining the applied problem and then presenting how the model construction is done and what problems emerge when attempts are made for applying directly earlier results on FCM modelling. In the first case study, the problem of the oversimplification leads to inadequacy of the model, and then it is shown how new,much finer models can be built up based on expert domain knowledge. Then, the new problem of losing transparency and interpretability emerges, and as a solution, a new algorithm family is proposed that reduces FCMs to fewer components, while preserving the essential characteristics of the original model.

The second case study raises the problems of stability and sensitivity of FCMs, especially, considering that expert knowledge is often uncertain and subjective. The new results summarised in the book target the questions of how to ascertain whether an FCM is converging to one or several fixed point attractors, whether there is a bifurcation when parameters are changing, etc.

Both problems deal with the ultimate question whether the system modelled is stable and sustainable.

This book is focused on connecting two interesting research areas, mathematics and computational intelligence, by means of appealing contributions devoted to give solutions to different challenges of the current technological age.

It continues the collection of articles dealing with the important and efficient combination of these both areas, with a stress of fuzzy systems and fuzzy logic.

It also includes relevant papers on the development and application of mathematics, artificial intelligence, and automatic reasoning tools to Digital Forensics, which have been developed within the framework of the COST Action DigForASP-CA17124 (digforasp.uca.es).