SIAM Monographs on Discrete Mathematics and Applications – serie

This monograph offers a systematic quantitative approach to the analysis, evaluation, and design of electoral systems. Today, electoral reform is of concern to newborn democracies as well as many old ones. The authors use mathematical models and automatic procedures, when possible, to solve some of the problems that arise in the comparison of existing systems as well as in the construction of new ones. One distinctive feature of the book is the emphasis on single- and multiple-criteria optimization methods. This powerful tool kit will help political researchers evaluate and choose an appropriate electoral system.A general formal model is included as well as a coding system to describe, identify, and classify electoral systems. Evaluation criteria and the corresponding performance indicators are discussed. A treatment of electoral formulas as algorithms to minimize actual cost functions or disproportionality indexes is also included. Neutral automatic procedures for political districting are presented, and the process of electoral reform is analyzed from historical and political points of view.

This well-organized reference is a definitive encyclopedia for the literature on graph classes. It contains a survey of more than 200 classes of graphs, organized by types of properties used to define and characterize the classes, citing key theorems and literature references for each. The authors state results without proof, providing readers with easy access to far more key theorems than are commonly found in other mathematical texts. Interconnections between graph classes are also provided to make the book useful to a variety of readers.

Finite functions (in particular, Boolean functions) play a fundamental role in computer science and discrete mathematics. This book describes representations of Boolean functions that have small size for many important functions and which allow efficient work with the represented functions. The representation size of important and selected functions is estimated, upper and lower bound techniques are studied, efficient algorithms for operations on these representations are presented, and the limits of those techniques are considered.This book is the first comprehensive description of theory and applications. Research areas like complexity theory, efficient algorithms, data structures, and discrete mathematics will benefit from the theory described in this book. The results described within have applications in verification, computer-aided design, model checking, and discrete mathematics. This is the only book to investigate the representation size of Boolean functions and efficient algorithms on these representations.

This volume presents the locality-sensitive approach to distributed network algorithms - the utilization of locality to simplify control structures and algorithms and reduce their costs. The author begins with an introductory exposition of distributed network algorithms focusing on topics that illustrate the role of locality in distributed algorithmic techniques. He then introduces locality-preserving network representations and describes sequential and distributed techniques for their construction. Finally, the applicability of the locality-sensitive approach is demonstrated through several applications.Distributed Computing: A Locality-Sensitive Approach is the only book that gives a thorough exposition of network spanners and other locality-preserving network representations such as sparse covers and partitions. The book is useful for computer scientists interested in distributed computing, electrical engineers interested in network architectures and protocols, and for discrete mathematicians and graph theorists.

Combinatorial data analysis (CDA) refers to a wide class of methods for the study of relevant data sets in which the arrangement of a collection of objects is absolutely central. The focus of this monograph is on the identification of arrangements, which are then further restricted to where the combinatorial search is carried out by a recursive optimization process based on the general principles of dynamic programming (DP).The authors provide a comprehensive and self-contained review delineating a very general DP paradigm or schema that can serve two functions. First, the paradigm can be applied in various special forms to encompass all previously proposed applications suggested in the classification literature. Second, the paradigm can lead directly to many more novel uses. An appendix is included as a user's manual for a collection of programs available as freeware.The incorporation of a wide variety of CDA tasks under one common optimization framework based on DP is one of the book's strongest points. The authors include verifiably optimal solutions to nontrivially sized problems over the array of data analysis tasks discussed.

Many fundamental combinatorial problems, arising in such diverse fields as artificial intelligence, logic, graph theory, and linear algebra, can be formulated as Boolean constraint satisfaction problems (CSP). This book is devoted to the study of the complexity of such problems. The authors' goal is to develop a framework for classifying the complexity of Boolean CSP in a uniform way. In doing so, they bring out common themes underlying many concepts and results in both algorithms and complexity theory. The results and techniques presented here show that Boolean CSP provide an excellent framework for discovering and formally validating “global” inferences about the nature of computation.This book presents a novel and compact form of a compendium that classifies an infinite number of problems by using a rule-based approach. This enables practitioners to determine whether or not a given problem is known to be computationally intractable. It also provides a complete classification of all problems that arise in restricted versions of central complexity classes such as NP, NPO, NC, PSPACE, and #P.

This concise, readable book provides a sampling of the very large, active, and expanding field of artificial neural network theory. It considers select areas of discrete mathematics linking combinatorics and the theory of the simplest types of artificial neural networks. Neural networks have emerged as a key technology in many fields of application, and an understanding of the theories concerning what such systems can and cannot do is essential.The author discusses interesting connections between special types of Boolean functions and the simplest types of neural networks. Some classical results are presented with accessible proofs, together with some more recent perspectives, such as those obtained by considering decision lists. In addition, probabilistic models of neural network learning are discussed. Graph theory, some partially ordered set theory, computational complexity, and discrete probability are among the mathematical topics involved. Pointers to further reading and an extensive bibliography make this book a good starting point for research in discrete mathematics and neural networks.

Algebraic Theory of Automata Networks investigates automata networks as algebraic structures and develops their theory in line with other algebraic theories, such as those of semigroups, groups, rings, and fields. The authors also investigate automata networks as products of automata, that is, as compositions of automata obtained by cascading without feedback or with feedback of various restricted types or, most generally, with the feedback dependencies controlled by an arbitrary directed graph. This self-contained book surveys and extends the fundamental results in regard to automata networks, including the main decomposition theorems of Letichevsky, of Krohn and Rhodes, and of others.It summarizes the most important results of the past four decades regarding automata networks and presents many new results discovered since the last book on this subject was published. It contains several new methods and special techniques not discussed in other books, including characterization of homomorphically complete classes of automata under the cascade product; products of automata with semi-Letichevsky criterion and without any Letichevsky criteria; automata with control words; primitive products and temporal products; network completeness for digraphs having all loop edges; complete finite automata network graphs with minimal number of edges; and emulation of automata networks by corresponding asynchronous ones.