Discrete Thoughts

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PierCarlo Nicola

This book presents the contributions of the 20th century to economic theory in a mathematical language and in historical sequence. General equilibrium is the focal point of the book; but also a number of macroeconomic models, especially with respect to the first half of the century, are considered. Dynamic models are extensively studied per se, and not merely as extensions of their static counterparts. The book with its extensive bibliography gives a broad view over the developments in mathematical economics and is therefore an invaluable source of information for researchers and students working in this field.

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edited with an introduction by Donald Winch

The appearance of a treatise like the present, on a subject on which so many works of merit already exist, may be thought to require some explanation. It might perhaps be sufficient to say, that no existing treatise on Political Ecomony contains the latest improvements which have been made in the theory of the subject. Many new ideas, and new applications of ideas, have been elicited by the discussions of the last few years, especially those on Currency, on Foreign Trade, and on the important topics connected more or less intimately with Colonization: and there seems reason that the field of Political Economy should be re-surveyed in its whole extent, if only for the purpose of incorporating the results of these speculations, and bringing them into harmony with the principles previosly laid down by the best thinkers on the subject.."

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Shu-Heng Chen, Paul P. Wang

Due to the ability to handle specific characteristics of economics and finance forecasting problems like e.g. non-linear relationships, behavioral changes, or knowledge-based domain segmentation, we have recently witnessed a phenomenal growth of the application of computational intelligence methodologies in this field. In this volume, Chen and Wang collected not just works on traditional computational intelligence approaches like fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms, but also examples for more recent technologies like e.g. rough sets, support vector machines, wavelets, or ant algorithms. After an introductory chapter with a structural description of all the methodologies, the subsequent parts describe novel applications of these to typical economics and finance problems like business forecasting, currency crisis discrimination, foreign exchange markets, or stock markets behavior.

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Nelson Mendonça Mattos

"This book addresses the development of a new generation of systems, Knowledge Base Management Systems (KBMS), specially constructed for effective and efficient management of knowledge bases, with the aim of filling part of the technological gap between artificial intelligence and databases. The book first investigates in detail the design process, the architecture, and the working methods of knowledge based systems (KS) in order to point out the key characteristics of the field as well as its current limitations, which serve then as basis for an exact formulation of KS requirements. An analysis and evaluation of other approaches (e.g., conventional DBS, non-standard DBS, coupling expert systems and DBS) to knowledge management is given. The book shows that in developing KBMS, the experience obtained by the investigation of each of these approaches is extremely important since they provide the basic concepts for building KBMS. The approaches should not be viewed as complete and final but as part of research work towards KBMS. A novel architecture is described for KBMS which integrates the functionality, flexibility and modeling power of DBS and AI. The main part of the book deals with all important architectural problems of KBMS: methods for knowledge representation with special emphasis on abstraction concepts, language proposals, and concepts for performance improvement. The book is based on practical experience accumulated over five years of successful research in coupling existing expert systems and DBS, extending DBS with deductive capabilities, and above all in the design and implementation of a KBMS prototype. Thus the book's proposals are illustrated with detailed descriptions of their realization in existing systems or prototypes."--PUBLISHER'S WEBSITE.