Database Principles and Technologies - Based on Huawei Gaussdb
This open access book contains eight chapters that deal with database technologies, including the development history of database, database fundamentals, introduction to SQL syntax, classification of SQL syntax, database security fundamentals, database development environment, database design fundamentals, and the application of Huawei's cloud database product GaussDB database. This book can be used as a textbook for database courses in colleges and universities, and is also suitable as a reference book for the HCIA-GaussDB V1.5 certification examination. The Huawei GaussDB (for MySQL) used in the book is a Huawei cloud-based high-performance, highly applicable relational database that fully supports the syntax and functionality of the open source database MySQL. All the experiments in this book can be run on this database platform. As the world's leading provider of ICT (information and communication technology) infrastructure and smart terminals, Huawei's productsrange from digital data communication, cyber security, wireless technology, data storage, cloud computing, and smart computing to artificial intelligence.
Data Spaces
This open access book aims to educate data space designers to understand what is required to create a successful data space. It explores cutting-edge theory, technologies, methodologies, and best practices for data spaces for both industrial and personal data and provides the reader with a basis for understanding the design, deployment, and future directions of data spaces.The book captures the early lessons and experience in creating data spaces. It arranges these contributions into three parts covering design, deployment, and future directions respectively. The first part explores the design space of data spaces. The single chapters detail the organisational design for data spaces, data platforms, data governance federated learning, personal data sharing, data marketplaces, and hybrid artificial intelligence for data spaces.The second part describes the use of data spaces within real-world deployments. Its chapters are co-authored with industry experts and include case studies of data spaces in sectors including industry 4.0, food safety, FinTech, health care, and energy.The third and final part details future directions for data spaces, including challenges and opportunities for common European data spaces and privacy-preserving techniques for trustworthy data sharing.The book is of interest to two primary audiences: first, researchers interested in data management and data sharing, and second, practitioners and industry experts engaged in data-driven systems where the sharing and exchange of data within an ecosystem are critical.
Data Spaces
This open access book aims to educate data space designers to understand what is required to create a successful data space. It explores cutting-edge theory, technologies, methodologies, and best practices for data spaces for both industrial and personal data and provides the reader with a basis for understanding the design, deployment, and future directions of data spaces.The book captures the early lessons and experience in creating data spaces. It arranges these contributions into three parts covering design, deployment, and future directions respectively. The first part explores the design space of data spaces. The single chapters detail the organisational design for data spaces, data platforms, data governance federated learning, personal data sharing, data marketplaces, and hybrid artificial intelligence for data spaces.The second part describes the use of data spaces within real-world deployments. Its chapters are co-authored with industry experts and include case studies of data spaces in sectors including industry 4.0, food safety, FinTech, health care, and energy.The third and final part details future directions for data spaces, including challenges and opportunities for common European data spaces and privacy-preserving techniques for trustworthy data sharing.The book is of interest to two primary audiences: first, researchers interested in data management and data sharing, and second, practitioners and industry experts engaged in data-driven systems where the sharing and exchange of data within an ecosystem are critical.
Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
The 3-volume set LNAI 13280, LNAI 13281 and LNAI 13282 constitutes the proceedings of the 26th Pacific-Asia Conference on Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, PAKDD 2022, which was held during May 2022 in Chengdu, China. The 121 papers included in the proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 558 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: Data Science and Big Data Technologies, Part II: Foundations; and Part III: Applications.
Database Systems for Advanced Applications
The three-volume set LNCS 13245, 13246 and 13247 constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2022, held online, in April 2021. The total of 72 full papers, along with 76 short papers, are presented in this three-volume set was carefully reviewed and selected from 543 submissions. Additionally, 13 industrial papers, 9 demo papers and 2 PhD consortium papers are included. The conference was planned to take place in Hyderabad, India, but it was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Distributed, Ambient and Pervasive Interactions. Smart Living, Learning, Well-Being and Health, Art and Creativity
The two-volume set, LNCS 13325 and 13326, are conference proceedings that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Distributed, Ambient and Pervasive Interactions, DAPI 2022, held as part of the 24th International Conference, HCI International 2022, which took place during June-July 2022. The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 58 papers of DAPI 2022 are organized in topical sections named for each volume: Part I: User Experience and Interaction Design for Smart Ecosystems; Smart Cities, Smart Islands, and Intelligent Urban Living; Smart Artifacts in Smart Environments; and Opportunities and Challenges for the Near Future Smart EnvironmentsPart II: Smart Living in Pervasive IoT Ecosystems; Distributed, Ambient, and Pervasive Education and Learning; Distributed, Ambient, and Pervasive Well-being and Healthcare; and Smart Creativity and Art.
Distributed, Ambient and Pervasive Interactions. Smart Environments, Ecosystems, and Cities
The two-volume set, LNCS 13325 and 13326, are conference proceedings that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Distributed, Ambient and Pervasive Interactions, DAPI 2022, held as part of the 24th International Conference, HCI International 2022, which took place during June-July 2022. The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 58 papers of DAPI 2022 are organized in topical sections named for each volume: Part I: User Experience and Interaction Design for Smart Ecosystems; Smart Cities, Smart Islands, and Intelligent Urban Living; Smart Artifacts in Smart Environments; and Opportunities and Challenges for the Near Future Smart EnvironmentsPart II: Smart Living in Pervasive IoT Ecosystems; Distributed, Ambient, and Pervasive Education and Learning; Distributed, Ambient, and Pervasive Well-being and Healthcare; and Smart Creativity and Art.
Database Systems for Advanced Applications
The three-volume set LNCS 13245, 13246 and 13247 constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2022, held online, in April 2021. The total of 72 full papers, along with 76 short papers, are presented in this three-volume set was carefully reviewed and selected from 543 submissions. Additionally, 13 industrial papers, 9 demo papers and 2 PhD consortium papers are included. The conference was planned to take place in Hyderabad, India, but it was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
World Yearbook of Education 2021
Providing a comprehensive introduction to the topic of accountability and datafication in the governance of education, the World Yearbook of Education 2021 considers global policy dynamics and policy enactment processes.
Enterprise Architecture and Cartography
This textbook provides guidance to both students and practitioners of enterprise architecture (EA) on how to develop and maintain enterprise models. Rather than providing yet another list of EA notations and frameworks from A to Z, it focuses on methods to perform such tasks. The problem of EA maintenance, named Enterprise Cartography, is an important aspect addressed in this book because EA is a never ending challenge that increases as the organization transformations pace also increases. The long time perspective also entails the evolution of architectural frameworks and notations, something that does not occur when developing new models. Thus, a catalogue of patterns, principles and methods is presented to develop and maintain EA models and views. After a general introduction to the book in chapter 1, chapter 2 presents basic concepts for EA modeling. Chapter 3 further details the set of EA concepts needed to present the patterns, and principles, which are subsequently introduced in chapter 4. Next, chapter 5 describes enterprise cartography concepts and principles. The remaining book then turns to techniques and methodologies. In chapter 6 an EA development method is summarized. In chapter 7 an enterprise strategy design approach is proposed, while in chapter 8 a business process design methodology is described. Chapters 9 and 10 focus on information architecture and information systems architecture design approaches, including information systems architecture planning and application portfolio management. Eventually, chapter 11 describes a method for enterprise cartography (EC) design. Last not least, several case studies on EA and EC are proposed in the last chapter.
Introduction to Distributed Self-Stabilizing Algorithms
This book aims at being a comprehensive and pedagogical introduction to the concept of self-stabilization, introduced by Edsger Wybe Dijkstra in 1973. Self-stabilization characterizes the ability of a distributed algorithm to converge within finite time to a configuration from which its behavior is correct (i.e., satisfies a given specification), regardless the arbitrary initial configuration of the system. This arbitrary initial configuration may be the result of the occurrence of a finite number of transient faults. Hence, self-stabilization is actually considered as a versatile non-masking fault tolerance approach, since it recovers from the effect of any finite number of such faults in an unified manner. Another major interest of such an automatic recovery method comes from the difficulty of resetting malfunctioning devices in a large-scale (and so, geographically spread) distributed system (the Internet, Pair-to-Pair networks, and Delay Tolerant Networks are examples of such distributed systems). Furthermore, self-stabilization is usually recognized as a lightweight property to achieve fault tolerance as compared to other classical fault tolerance approaches. Indeed, the overhead, both in terms of time and space, of state-of-the-art self-stabilizing algorithms is commonly small. This makes self-stabilization very attractive for distributed systems equipped of processes with low computational and memory capabilities, such as wireless sensor networks. After more than 40 years of existence, self-stabilization is now sufficiently established as an important field of research in theoretical distributed computing to justify its teaching in advanced research-oriented graduate courses. This book is an initiation course, which consists of the formal definition of self-stabilization and its related concepts, followed by a deep review and study of classical (simple) algorithms, commonly used proof schemes and design patterns, as well as premium results issued from the self-stabilizing community. As often happens in the self-stabilizing area, in this book we focus on the proof of correctness and the analytical complexity of the studied distributed self-stabilizing algorithms. Finally, we underline that most of the algorithms studied in this book are actually dedicated to the high-level atomic-state model, which is the most commonly used computational model in the self-stabilizing area. However, in the last chapter, we present general techniques to achieve self-stabilization in the low-level message passing model, as well as example algorithms.
State-Space Control Systems
These days, nearly all the engineering problem are solved with the aid of suitable computer packages. This book shows how MATLAB/Simulink could be used to solve state-space control problems. In this book, it is assumed that you are familiar with the theory and concepts of state-space control, i.e., you took or you are taking a course on state-space control system and you read this book in order to learn how to solve state-space control problems with the aid of MATLAB/Simulink. The book is composed of three chapters. Chapter 1 shows how a state-space mathematical model could be entered into the MATLAB/Simulink environment. Chapter 2 shows how a nonlinear system could be linearized around the desired opperating point with the aid of tools provided by MATLAB/Simulink. Finally, Chapter 3 shows how a state-space controller could be designed with the aid MATLAB and be tested with Simulink. The book will be usefull for students and practical engineers who want to design a state-space control system.
Distributed Computing Pearls
Computers and computer networks are one of the most incredible inventions of the 20th century, having an ever-expanding role in our daily lives by enabling complex human activities in areas such as entertainment, education, and commerce. One of the most challenging problems in computer science for the 21st century is to improve the design of distributed systems where computing devices have to work together as a team to achieve common goals. In this book, I have tried to gently introduce the general reader to some of the most fundamental issues and classical results of computer science underlying the design of algorithms for distributed systems, so that the reader can get a feel of the nature of this exciting and fascinating field called distributed computing. The book will appeal to the educated layperson and requires no computer-related background. I strongly suspect that also most computer-knowledgeable readers will be able to learn something new.
Distributed Computing by Oblivious Mobile Robots
The study of what can be computed by a team of autonomous mobile robots, originally started in robotics and AI, has become increasingly popular in theoretical computer science (especially in distributed computing), where it is now an integral part of the investigations on computability by mobile entities. The robots are identical computational entities located and able to move in a spatial universe; they operate without explicit communication and are usually unable to remember the past; they are extremely simple, with limited resources, and individually quite weak. However, collectively the robots are capable of performing complex tasks, and form a system with desirable fault-tolerant and self-stabilizing properties. The research has been concerned with the computational aspects of such systems. In particular, the focus has been on the minimal capabilities that the robots should have in order to solve a problem. This book focuses on the recent algorithmic results in the field of distributed computing by oblivious mobile robots (unable to remember the past). After introducing the computational model with its nuances, we focus on basic coordination problems: pattern formation, gathering, scattering, leader election, as well as on dynamic tasks such as flocking. For each of these problems, we provide a snapshot of the state of the art, reviewing the existing algorithmic results. In doing so, we outline solution techniques, and we analyze the impact of the different assumptions on the robots' computability power. Table of Contents: Introduction / Computational Models / Gathering and Convergence / Pattern Formation / Scatterings and Coverings / Flocking / Other Directions
Decidability of Parameterized Verification
While the classic model checking problem is to decide whether a finite system satisfies a specification, the goal of parameterized model checking is to decide, given finite systems ����(n) parameterized by n ∈ ℕ, whether, for all n ∈ ℕ, the system ����(n) satisfies a specification. In this book we consider the important case of ����(n) being a concurrent system, where the number of replicated processes depends on the parameter n but each process is independent of n. Examples are cache coherence protocols, networks of finite-state agents, and systems that solve mutual exclusion or scheduling problems. Further examples are abstractions of systems, where the processes of the original systems actually depend on the parameter. The literature in this area has studied a wealth of computational models based on a variety of synchronization and communication primitives, including token passing, broadcast, and guarded transitions. Often, different terminology is used in the literature, and results are based on implicit assumptions. In this book, we introduce a computational model that unites the central synchronization and communication primitives of many models, and unveils hidden assumptions from the literature. We survey existing decidability and undecidability results, and give a systematic view of the basic problems in this exciting research area.
Implementation and Application of Automata
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata, CIAA 2022, held in Rouen, France in June/ July 2022. The 16 regular papers presented together with 3 invited lectures in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 26 submissions. The topics of the papers covering various fields in the application, implementation, and theory of automata and related structures.
Network Topology and Fault-Tolerant Consensus
As the structure of contemporary communication networks grows more complex, practical networked distributed systems become prone to component failures. Fault-tolerant consensus in message-passing systems allows participants in the system to agree on a common value despite the malfunction or misbehavior of some components. It is a task of fundamental importance for distributed computing, due to its numerous applications. We summarize studies on the topological conditions that determine the feasibility of consensus, mainly focusing on directed networks and the case of restricted topology knowledge at each participant. Recently, significant efforts have been devoted to fully characterize the underlying communication networks in which variations of fault-tolerant consensus can be achieved. Although the deduction of analogous topological conditions for undirected networks of known topology had shortly followed the introduction of the problem, their extension to the directed network case has been proven a highly non-trivial task. Moreover, global knowledge restrictions, inherent in modern large-scale networks, require more elaborate arguments concerning the locality of distributed computations. In this work, we present the techniques and ideas used to resolve these issues. Recent studies indicate a number of parameters that affect the topological conditions under which consensus can be achieved, namely, the fault model, the degree of system synchrony (synchronous vs. asynchronous), the type of agreement (exact vs. approximate), the level of topology knowledge, and the algorithm class used (general vs. iterative). We outline the feasibility and impossibility results for various combinations of the above parameters, extensively illustrating the relation between network topology and consensus.
Distributed Graph Coloring
The focus of this monograph is on symmetry breaking problems in the message-passing model of distributed computing. In this model a communication network is represented by a n-vertex graph G = (V, E), whose vertices host autonomous processors. The processors communicate over the edges of G in discrete rounds. The goal is to devise algorithms that use as few rounds as possible. A typical symmetry-breaking problem is the problem of graph coloring. Denote by ? the maximum degree of G. While coloring G with ? + 1 colors is trivial in the centralized setting, the problem becomes much more challenging in the distributed one. One can also compromise on the number of colors, if this allows for more efficient algorithms. Other typical symmetry-breaking problems are the problems of computing a maximal independent set (MIS) and a maximal matching (MM). The study of these problems dates back to the very early days of distributed computing. The founding fathers of distributed computing laid firm foundations for the area of distributed symmetry breaking already in the eighties. In particular, they showed that all these problems can be solved in randomized logarithmic time. Also, Linial showed that an O(?2)-coloring can be solved very efficiently deterministically. However, fundamental questions were left open for decades. In particular, it is not known if the MIS or the (? + 1)-coloring can be solved in deterministic polylogarithmic time. Moreover, until recently it was not known if in deterministic polylogarithmic time one can color a graph with significantly fewer than ?2 colors. Additionally, it was open (and still open to some extent) if one can have sublogarithmic randomized algorithms for the symmetry breaking problems. Recently, significant progress was achieved in the study of these questions. More efficient deterministic and randomized (? + 1)-coloring algorithms were achieved. Deterministic ?1 + o(1)-coloring algorithms with polylogarithmic running time were devised. Improved (and often sublogarithmic-time) randomized algorithms were devised. Drastically improved lower bounds were given. Wide families of graphs in which these problems are solvable much faster than on general graphs were identified. The objective of our monograph is to cover most of these developments, and as a result to provide a treatise on theoretical foundations of distributed symmetry breaking in the message-passing model. We hope that our monograph will stimulate further progress in this exciting area.
Iot and Big Data Analytics for Smart Cities
The book emphasizes the challenges, architectural models, intelligent frameworks with smart decision- making systems using Big Data and IoT with case studies. The book illustrates the benefits of Big Data and IoT methods in framing smart systems for smart applications.
Advanced Information Systems Engineering
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE 2022, which was held in Leuven, Belgium, during June 6-10, 2022.The 31 full papers included in these proceedings were selected from 203 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Process mining; sustainable and explainable applications; tools and methods to support research and design; process modeling; natural language processing techniques in IS engineering; process monitoring and simulation; graph and network models; model analysis and comprehension; recommender systems; conceptual models, metamodels and taxonomies; and services engineering and digitalization.
Feedback Control Systems
Feedback control systems is an important course in aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and mechatronics engineering, to name just a few. Feedback control systems improve the system's behavior so the desired response can be acheived. The first course on control engineering deals with Continuous Time (CT) Linear Time Invariant (LTI) systems. Plenty of good textbooks on the subject are available on the market, so there is no need to add one more. This book does not focus on the control engineering theories as it is assumed that the reader is familiar with them, i.e., took/takes a course on control engineering, and now wants to learn the applications of MATLAB(R) in control engineering. The focus of this book is control engineering applications of MATLAB(R) for a first course on control engineering.
Mining Structures of Factual Knowledge from Text
The real-world data, though massive, is largely unstructured, in the form of natural-language text. It is challenging but highly desirable to mine structures from massive text data, without extensive human annotation and labeling. In this book, we investigate the principles and methodologies of mining structures of factual knowledge (e.g., entities and their relationships) from massive, unstructured text corpora. Departing from many existing structure extraction methods that have heavy reliance on human annotated data for model training, our effort-light approach leverages human-curated facts stored in external knowledge bases as distant supervision and exploits rich data redundancy in large text corpora for context understanding. This effort-light mining approach leads to a series of new principles and powerful methodologies for structuring text corpora, including (1) entity recognition, typing and synonym discovery, (2) entity relation extraction, and (3) open-domain attribute-valuemining and information extraction. This book introduces this new research frontier and points out some promising research directions.
Articulation and Intelligibility
Immediately following the Second World War, between 1947 and 1955, several classic papers quantified the fundamentals of human speech information processing and recognition. In 1947 French and Steinberg published their classic study on the articulation index. In 1948 Claude Shannon published his famous work on the theory of information. In 1950 Fletcher and Galt published their theory of the articulation index, a theory that Fletcher had worked on for 30 years, which integrated his classic works on loudness and speech perception with models of speech intelligibility. In 1951 George Miller then wrote the first book Language and Communication, analyzing human speech communication with Claude Shannon's just published theory of information. Finally in 1955 George Miller published the first extensive analysis of phone decoding, in the form of confusion matrices, as a function of the speech-to-noise ratio. This work extended the Bell Labs' speech articulation studies with ideas from Shannon's Information theory. Both Miller and Fletcher showed that speech, as a code, is incredibly robust to mangling distortions of filtering and noise. Regrettably much of this early work was forgotten. While the key science of information theory blossomed, other than the work of George Miller, it was rarely applied to aural speech research. The robustness of speech, which is the most amazing thing about the speech code, has rarely been studied. It is my belief (i.e., assumption) that we can analyze speech intelligibility with the scientific method. The quantitative analysis of speech intelligibility requires both science and art. The scientific component requires an error analysis of spoken communication, which depends critically on the use of statistics, information theory, and psychophysical methods. The artistic component depends on knowing how to restrict the problem in such a way that progress may be made. It is critical to tease out the relevant from the irrelevant and dig for the key issues. This will focus us on the decoding of nonsense phonemes with no visual component, which have been mangled by filtering and noise. This monograph is a summary and theory of human speech recognition. It builds on and integrates the work of Fletcher, Miller, and Shannon. The long-term goal is to develop a quantitative theory for predicting the recognition of speech sounds. In Chapter 2 the theory is developed for maximum entropy (MaxEnt) speech sounds, also called nonsense speech. In Chapter 3, context is factored in. The book is largely reflective, and quantitative, with a secondary goal of providing an historical context, along with the many deep insights found in these early works.
User-Centered Data Management
This lecture covers several core issues in user-centered data management, including how to design usable interfaces that suitably support database tasks, and relevant approaches to visual querying, information visualization, and visual data mining. Novel interaction paradigms, e.g., mobile and interfaces that go beyond the visual dimension, are also discussed. Table of Contents: Why User-Centered / The Early Days: Visual Query Systems / Beyond Querying / More Advanced Applications / Non-Visual Interfaces / Conclusions
Latent Semantic Mapping
Latent semantic mapping (LSM) is a generalization of latent semantic analysis (LSA), a paradigm originally developed to capture hidden word patterns in a text document corpus. In information retrieval, LSA enables retrieval on the basis of conceptual content, instead of merely matching words between queries and documents. It operates under the assumption that there is some latent semantic structure in the data, which is partially obscured by the randomness of word choice with respect to retrieval. Algebraic and/or statistical techniques are brought to bear to estimate this structure and get rid of the obscuring ""noise."" This results in a parsimonious continuous parameter description of words and documents, which then replaces the original parameterization in indexing and retrieval. This approach exhibits three main characteristics: -Discrete entities (words and documents) are mapped onto a continuous vector space; -This mapping is determined by global correlation patterns; and -Dimensionality reduction is an integral part of the process. Such fairly generic properties are advantageous in a variety of different contexts, which motivates a broader interpretation of the underlying paradigm. The outcome (LSM) is a data-driven framework for modeling meaningful global relationships implicit in large volumes of (not necessarily textual) data. This monograph gives a general overview of the framework, and underscores the multifaceted benefits it can bring to a number of problems in natural language understanding and spoken language processing. It concludes with a discussion of the inherent tradeoffs associated with the approach, and some perspectives on its general applicability to data-driven information extraction. Contents: I. Principles / Introduction / Latent Semantic Mapping / LSM Feature Space / Computational Effort / Probabilistic Extensions / II. Applications/ Junk E-mail Filtering / Semantic Classification / Language Modeling / Pronunciation Modeling / Speaker Verification / TTS Unit Selection / III. Perspectives / Discussion / Conclusion / Bibliography
Natural Language Processing for Historical Texts
More and more historical texts are becoming available in digital form. Digitization of paper documents is motivated by the aim of preserving cultural heritage and making it more accessible, both to laypeople and scholars. As digital images cannot be searched for text, digitization projects increasingly strive to create digital text, which can be searched and otherwise automatically processed, in addition to facsimiles. Indeed, the emerging field of digital humanities heavily relies on the availability of digital text for its studies. Together with the increasing availability of historical texts in digital form, there is a growing interest in applying natural language processing (NLP) methods and tools to historical texts. However, the specific linguistic properties of historical texts -- the lack of standardized orthography, in particular -- pose special challenges for NLP. This book aims to give an introduction to NLP for historical texts and an overview of the state of the art in this field. The book starts with an overview of methods for the acquisition of historical texts (scanning and OCR), discusses text encoding and annotation schemes, and presents examples of corpora of historical texts in a variety of languages. The book then discusses specific methods, such as creating part-of-speech taggers for historical languages or handling spelling variation. A final chapter analyzes the relationship between NLP and the digital humanities. Certain recently emerging textual genres, such as SMS, social media, and chat messages, or newsgroup and forum postings share a number of properties with historical texts, for example, nonstandard orthography and grammar, and profuse use of abbreviations. The methods and techniques required for the effective processing of historical texts are thus also of interest for research in other domains. Table of Contents: Introduction / NLP and Digital Humanities / Spelling in Historical Texts / Acquiring Historical Texts / Text Encoding andAnnotation Schemes / Handling Spelling Variation / NLP Tools for Historical Languages / Historical Corpora / Conclusion / Bibliography
Relational and XML Data Exchange
Data exchange is the problem of finding an instance of a target schema, given an instance of a source schema and a specification of the relationship between the source and the target. Such a target instance should correctly represent information from the source instance under the constraints imposed by the target schema, and it should allow one to evaluate queries on the target instance in a way that is semantically consistent with the source data. Data exchange is an old problem that re-emerged as an active research topic recently, due to the increased need for exchange of data in various formats, often in e-business applications. In this lecture, we give an overview of the basic concepts of data exchange in both relational and XML contexts. We give examples of data exchange problems, and we introduce the main tasks that need to addressed. We then discuss relational data exchange, concentrating on issues such as relational schema mappings, materializing target instances (including canonical solutions and cores), query answering, and query rewriting. After that, we discuss metadata management, i.e., handling schema mappings themselves. We pay particular attention to operations on schema mappings, such as composition and inverse. Finally, we describe both data exchange and metadata management in the context of XML. We use mappings based on transforming tree patterns, and we show that they lead to a host of new problems that did not arise in the relational case, but they need to be addressed for XML. These include consistency issues for mappings and schemas, as well as imposing tighter restrictions on mappings and queries to achieve tractable query answering in data exchange. Table of Contents: Overview / Relational Mappings and Data Exchange / Metadata Management / XML Mappings and Data Exchange
Data Stream Management
Many applications process high volumes of streaming data, among them Internet traffic analysis, financial tickers, and transaction log mining. In general, a data stream is an unbounded data set that is produced incrementally over time, rather than being available in full before its processing begins. In this lecture, we give an overview of recent research in stream processing, ranging from answering simple queries on high-speed streams to loading real-time data feeds into a streaming warehouse for off-line analysis. We will discuss two types of systems for end-to-end stream processing: Data Stream Management Systems (DSMSs) and Streaming Data Warehouses (SDWs). A traditional database management system typically processes a stream of ad-hoc queries over relatively static data. In contrast, a DSMS evaluates static (long-running) queries on streaming data, making a single pass over the data and using limited working memory. In the first part of this lecture, we will discuss research problems in DSMSs, such as continuous query languages, non-blocking query operators that continually react to new data, and continuous query optimization. The second part covers SDWs, which combine the real-time response of a DSMS by loading new data as soon as they arrive with a data warehouse's ability to manage Terabytes of historical data on secondary storage. Table of Contents: Introduction / Data Stream Management Systems / Streaming Data Warehouses / Conclusions
Mobile Robotics for Multidisciplinary Study
This lecture provides an introduction to the field of mobile robotics and the intersection between multiple robotics-related disciplines including electrical, mechanical, computer, software engineering and computer science. It is intended for an upper-level undergraduate or first-year graduate students interested in mobile robotics and artificial intelligence with some experience in object-oriented programming and controls. Focus areas will include robotics history, hardware, control and software. Specific topics include robot components, effectors and actuators, locomotion, kinematics, sensors, feedback control, control architectures, representation, navigation, localization and mapping. The end of each chapter includes review questions as well as exercises to provide applications for the concepts as well as opportunities for further study. Table of Contents: Introduction / Hardware / Control / Software
Uncertain Schema Matching
Schema matching is the task of providing correspondences between concepts describing the meaning of data in various heterogeneous, distributed data sources. Schema matching is one of the basic operations required by the process of data and schema integration, and thus has a great effect on its outcomes, whether these involve targeted content delivery, view integration, database integration, query rewriting over heterogeneous sources, duplicate data elimination, or automatic streamlining of workflow activities that involve heterogeneous data sources. Although schema matching research has been ongoing for over 25 years, more recently a realization has emerged that schema matchers are inherently uncertain. Since 2003, work on the uncertainty in schema matching has picked up, along with research on uncertainty in other areas of data management. This lecture presents various aspects of uncertainty in schema matching within a single unified framework. We introduce basic formulations of uncertainty and provide several alternative representations of schema matching uncertainty. Then, we cover two common methods that have been proposed to deal with uncertainty in schema matching, namely ensembles, and top-K matchings, and analyze them in this context. We conclude with a set of real-world applications. Table of Contents: Introduction / Models of Uncertainty / Modeling Uncertain Schema Matching / Schema Matcher Ensembles / Top-K Schema Matchings / Applications / Conclusions and Future Work
Control Systems Synthesis
This book introduces the so-called ""stable factorization approach"" to the synthesis of feedback controllers for linear control systems. The key to this approach is to view the multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) plant for which one wishes to design a controller as a matrix over the fraction field F associated with a commutative ring with identity, denoted by R, which also has no divisors of zero. In this setting, the set of single-input, single-output (SISO) stable control systems is precisely the ring R, while the set of stable MIMO control systems is the set of matrices whose elements all belong to R. The set of unstable, meaning not necessarily stable, control systems is then taken to be the field of fractions F associated with R in the SISO case, and the set of matrices with elements in F in the MIMO case. The central notion introduced in the book is that, in most situations of practical interest, every matrix P whose elements belong to F can be ""factored"" as a ""ratio"" of two matrices N, D whose elements belong to R, in such a way that N, D are coprime. In the familiar case where the ring R corresponds to the set of bounded-input, bounded-output (BIBO)-stable rational transfer functions, coprimeness is equivalent to two functions not having any common zeros in the closed right half-plane including infinity. However, the notion of coprimeness extends readily to discrete-time systems, distributed-parameter systems in both the continuous- as well as discrete-time domains, and to multi-dimensional systems. Thus the stable factorization approach enables one to capture all these situations within a common framework. The key result in the stable factorization approach is the parametrization of all controllers that stabilize a given plant. It is shown that the set of all stabilizing controllers can be parametrized by a single parameter R, whose elements all belong to R. Moreover, every transfer matrix in the closed-loop system is an affine function of the design parameter R. Thus problems of reliable stabilization, disturbance rejection, robust stabilization etc. can all be formulated in terms of choosing an appropriate R. This is a reprint of the book Control System Synthesis: A Factorization Approach originally published by M.I.T. Press in 1985. Table of Contents: Filtering and Sensitivity Minimization / Robustness / Extensions to General Settings
Automatic Parallelization
Compiling for parallelism is a longstanding topic of compiler research. This book describes the fundamental principles of compiling "regular" numerical programs for parallelism. We begin with an explanation of analyses that allow a compiler to understand the interaction of data reads and writes in different statements and loop iterations during program execution. These analyses include dependence analysis, use-def analysis and pointer analysis. Next, we describe how the results of these analyses are used to enable transformations that make loops more amenable to parallelization, and discuss transformations that expose parallelism to target shared memory multicore and vector processors. We then discuss some problems that arise when parallelizing programs for execution on distributed memory machines. Finally, we conclude with an overview of solving Diophantine equations and suggestions for further readings in the topics of this book to enable the interested reader to delve deeper into the field. Table of Contents: Introduction and overview / Dependence analysis, dependence graphs and alias analysis / Program parallelization / Transformations to modify and eliminate dependences / Transformation of iterative and recursive constructs / Compiling for distributed memory machines / Solving Diophantine equations / A guide to further reading
Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is the field of study that analyzes people's opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions from written language. It is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing and is also widely studied in data mining, Web mining, and text mining. In fact, this research has spread outside of computer science to the management sciences and social sciences due to its importance to business and society as a whole. The growing importance of sentiment analysis coincides with the growth of social media such as reviews, forum discussions, blogs, micro-blogs, Twitter, and social networks. For the first time in human history, we now have a huge volume of opinionated data recorded in digital form for analysis. Sentiment analysis systems are being applied in almost every business and social domain because opinions are central to almost all human activities and are key influencers of our behaviors. Our beliefs and perceptions of reality, and the choices we make, are largely conditioned on how others see and evaluate the world. For this reason, when we need to make a decision we often seek out the opinions of others. This is true not only for individuals but also for organizations. This book is a comprehensive introductory and survey text. It covers all important topics and the latest developments in the field with over 400 references. It is suitable for students, researchers and practitioners who are interested in social media analysis in general and sentiment analysis in particular. Lecturers can readily use it in class for courses on natural language processing, social media analysis, text mining, and data mining. Lecture slides are also available online. Table of Contents: Preface / Sentiment Analysis: A Fascinating Problem / The Problem of Sentiment Analysis / Document Sentiment Classification / Sentence Subjectivity and Sentiment Classification / Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis / Sentiment Lexicon Generation /Opinion Summarization / Analysis of Comparative Opinions / Opinion Search and Retrieval / Opinion Spam Detection / Quality of Reviews / Concluding Remarks / Bibliography / Author Biography
Control Systems Synthesis
This book introduces the so-called ""stable factorization approach"" to the synthesis of feedback controllers for linear control systems. The key to this approach is to view the multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) plant for which one wishes to design a controller as a matrix over the fraction field F associated with a commutative ring with identity, denoted by R, which also has no divisors of zero. In this setting, the set of single-input, single-output (SISO) stable control systems is precisely the ring R, while the set of stable MIMO control systems is the set of matrices whose elements all belong to R. The set of unstable, meaning not necessarily stable, control systems is then taken to be the field of fractions F associated with R in the SISO case, and the set of matrices with elements in F in the MIMO case. The central notion introduced in the book is that, in most situations of practical interest, every matrix P whose elements belong to F can be ""factored"" as a ""ratio"" of two matrices N, D whose elements belong to R, in such a way that N, D are coprime. In the familiar case where the ring R corresponds to the set of bounded-input, bounded-output (BIBO)-stable rational transfer functions, coprimeness is equivalent to two functions not having any common zeros in the closed right half-plane including infinity. However, the notion of coprimeness extends readily to discrete-time systems, distributed-parameter systems in both the continuous- as well as discrete-time domains, and to multi-dimensional systems. Thus the stable factorization approach enables one to capture all these situations within a common framework. The key result in the stable factorization approach is the parametrization of all controllers that stabilize a given plant. It is shown that the set of all stabilizing controllers can be parametrized by a single parameter R, whose elements all belong to R. Moreover, every transfer matrix in the closed-loop system is an affine function of the design parameter R. Thus problems of reliable stabilization, disturbance rejection, robust stabilization etc. can all be formulated in terms of choosing an appropriate R. This is a reprint of the book Control System Synthesis: A Factorization Approach originally published by M.I.T. Press in 1985. Table of Contents: Introduction / Proper Stable Rational Functions / Scalar Systems: An Introduction / Matrix Rings / Stabilization
Visual Analysis of Multilayer Networks
The emergence of multilayer networks as a concept from the field of complex systems provides many new opportunities for the visualization of network complexity, and has also raised many new exciting challenges. The multilayer network model recognizes that the complexity of relationships between entities in real-world systems is better embraced as several interdependent subsystems (or layers) rather than a simple graph approach. Despite only recently being formalized and defined, this model can be applied to problems in the domains of life sciences, sociology, digital humanities, and more. Within the domain of network visualization there already are many existing systems, which visualize data sets having many characteristics of multilayer networks, and many techniques, which are applicable to their visualization. In this Synthesis Lecture, we provide an overview and structured analysis of contemporary multilayer network visualization. This is not only for researchers in visualization, but also for those who aim to visualize multilayer networks in the domain of complex systems, as well as those solving problems within application domains. We have explored the visualization literature to survey visualization techniques suitable for multilayer network visualization, as well as tools, tasks, and analytic techniques from within application domains. We also identify the research opportunities and examine outstanding challenges for multilayer network visualization along with potential solutions and future research directions for addressing them.
Data Mining and Market Intelligence
This book is written to address the issues relating to data gathering, data warehousing, and data analysis, all of which are useful when working with large amounts of data. Using practical examples of market intelligence, this book is designed to inspire and inform readers on how to conduct market intelligence by leveraging data and technology, supporting smart decision making. The book explains some suitable methodologies for data analysis that are based on robust statistical methods. For illustrative purposes, the author uses real-life data for all the examples in this book. In addition, the book discusses the concepts, techniques, and applications of digital media and mobile data mining. Hence, this book is a guide tool for policy makers, academics, and practitioners whose areas of interest are statistical inference, applied statistics, applied mathematics, business mathematics, quantitative techniques, and economic and social statistics.
Graph Mining
What does the Web look like? How can we find patterns, communities, outliers, in a social network? Which are the most central nodes in a network? These are the questions that motivate this work. Networks and graphs appear in many diverse settings, for example in social networks, computer-communication networks (intrusion detection, traffic management), protein-protein interaction networks in biology, document-text bipartite graphs in text retrieval, person-account graphs in financial fraud detection, and others. In this work, first we list several surprising patterns that real graphs tend to follow. Then we give a detailed list of generators that try to mirror these patterns. Generators are important, because they can help with "what if" scenarios, extrapolations, and anonymization. Then we provide a list of powerful tools for graph analysis, and specifically spectral methods (Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)), tensors, and case studies like the famous "pageRank" algorithm and the "HITS" algorithm for ranking web search results. Finally, we conclude with a survey of tools and observations from related fields like sociology, which provide complementary viewpoints. Table of Contents: Introduction / Patterns in Static Graphs / Patterns in Evolving Graphs / Patterns in Weighted Graphs / Discussion: The Structure of Specific Graphs / Discussion: Power Laws and Deviations / Summary of Patterns / Graph Generators / Preferential Attachment and Variants / Incorporating Geographical Information / The RMat / Graph Generation by Kronecker Multiplication / Summary and Practitioner's Guide / SVD, Random Walks, and Tensors / Tensors / Community Detection / Influence/Virus Propagation and Immunization / Case Studies / Social Networks / Other Related Work / Conclusions
On Transactional Concurrency Control
This book contains a number of chapters on transactional database concurrency control. This volume's entire sequence of chapters can summarized as follows: A two-sentence summary of the volume's entire sequence of chapters is this: traditional locking techniques can be improved in multiple dimensions, notably in lock scopes (sizes), lock modes (increment, decrement, and more), lock durations (late acquisition, early release), and lock acquisition sequence (to avoid deadlocks). Even if some of these improvements can be transferred to optimistic concurrency control, notably a fine granularity of concurrency control with serializable transaction isolation including phantom protection, pessimistic concurrency control is categorically superior to optimistic concurrency control, i.e., independent of application, workload, deployment, hardware, and software implementation.
Individual and Collective Graph Mining
Graphs naturally represent information ranging from links between web pages, to communication in email networks, to connections between neurons in our brains. These graphs often span billions of nodes and interactions between them. Within this deluge of interconnected data, how can we find the most important structures and summarize them? How can we efficiently visualize them? How can we detect anomalies that indicate critical events, such as an attack on a computer system, disease formation in the human brain, or the fall of a company? This book presents scalable, principled discovery algorithms that combine globality with locality to make sense of one or more graphs. In addition to fast algorithmic methodologies, we also contribute graph-theoretical ideas and models, and real-world applications in two main areas: Individual Graph Mining: We show how to interpretably summarize a single graph by identifying its important graph structures. We complement summarization with inference, which leverages information about few entities (obtained via summarization or other methods) and the network structure to efficiently and effectively learn information about the unknown entities. Collective Graph Mining: We extend the idea of individual-graph summarization to time-evolving graphs, and show how to scalably discover temporal patterns. Apart from summarization, we claim that graph similarity is often the underlying problem in a host of applications where multiple graphs occur (e.g., temporal anomaly detection, discovery of behavioral patterns), and we present principled, scalable algorithms for aligning networks and measuring their similarity. The methods that we present in this book leverage techniques from diverse areas, such as matrix algebra, graph theory, optimization, information theory, machine learning, finance, and social science, to solve real-world problems. We present applications of our exploration algorithms to massive datasets, including a Web graph of 6.6 billion edges, a Twitter graph of 1.8 billion edges, brain graphs with up to 90 million edges, collaboration, peer-to-peer networks, browser logs, all spanning millions of users and interactions.
Datalog and Logic Databases
The use of logic in databases started in the late 1960s. In the early 1970s Codd formalized databases in terms of the relational calculus and the relational algebra. A major influence on the use of logic in databases was the development of the field of logic programming. Logic provides a convenient formalism for studying classical database problems and has the important property of being declarative, that is, it allows one to express what she wants rather than how to get it. For a long time, relational calculus and algebra were considered the relational database languages. However, there are simple operations, such as computing the transitive closure of a graph, which cannot be expressed with these languages. Datalog is a declarative query language for relational databases based on the logic programming paradigm. One of the peculiarities that distinguishes Datalog from query languages like relational algebra and calculus is recursion, which gives Datalog the capability to express queries like computing a graph transitive closure. Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in Datalog in a variety of emerging application domains such as data integration, information extraction, networking, program analysis, security, cloud computing, ontology reasoning, and many others. The aim of this book is to present the basics of Datalog, some of its extensions, and recent applications to different domains.
Transaction Processing on Modern Hardware
The last decade has brought groundbreaking developments in transaction processing. This resurgence of an otherwise mature research area has spurred from the diminishing cost per GB of DRAM that allows many transaction processing workloads to be entirely memory-resident. This shift demanded a pause to fundamentally rethink the architecture of database systems. The data storage lexicon has now expanded beyond spinning disks and RAID levels to include the cache hierarchy, memory consistency models, cache coherence and write invalidation costs, NUMA regions, and coherence domains. New memory technologies promise fast non-volatile storage and expose unchartered trade-offs for transactional durability, such as exploiting byte-addressable hot and cold storage through persistent programming that promotes simpler recovery protocols. In the meantime, the plateauing single-threaded processor performance has brought massive concurrency within a single node, first in the form of multi-core, andnow with many-core and heterogeneous processors. The exciting possibility to reshape the storage, transaction, logging, and recovery layers of next-generation systems on emerging hardware have prompted the database research community to vigorously debate the trade-offs between specialized kernels that narrowly focus on transaction processing performance vs. designs that permit transactionally consistent data accesses from decision support and analytical workloads. In this book, we aim to classify and distill the new body of work on transaction processing that has surfaced in the last decade to navigate researchers and practitioners through this intricate research subject.
Detecting Fake News on Social Media
In the past decade, social media has become increasingly popular for news consumption due to its easy access, fast dissemination, and low cost. However, social media also enables the wide propagation of "fake news," i.e., news with intentionally false information. Fake news on social media can have significant negative societal effects. Therefore, fake news detection on social media has recently become an emerging research area that is attracting tremendous attention. This book, from a data mining perspective, introduces the basic concepts and characteristics of fake news across disciplines, reviews representative fake news detection methods in a principled way, and illustrates challenging issues of fake news detection on social media. In particular, we discussed the value of news content and social context, and important extensions to handle early detection, weakly-supervised detection, and explainable detection. The concepts, algorithms, and methods described in this lecture can help harness the power of social media to build effective and intelligent fake news detection systems. This book is an accessible introduction to the study of detecting fake news on social media. It is an essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners to understand, manage, and excel in this area. This book is supported by additional materials, including lecture slides, the complete set of figures, key references, datasets, tools used in this book, and the source code of representative algorithms. The readers are encouraged to visit the book website for the latest information: http: //dmml.asu.edu/dfn/
Information and Influence Propagation in Social Networks
Research on social networks has exploded over the last decade. To a large extent, this has been fueled by the spectacular growth of social media and online social networking sites, which continue growing at a very fast pace, as well as by the increasing availability of very large social network datasets for purposes of research. A rich body of this research has been devoted to the analysis of the propagation of information, influence, innovations, infections, practices and customs through networks. Can we build models to explain the way these propagations occur? How can we validate our models against any available real datasets consisting of a social network and propagation traces that occurred in the past? These are just some questions studied by researchers in this area. Information propagation models find applications in viral marketing, outbreak detection, finding key blog posts to read in order to catch important stories, finding leaders or trendsetters, information feed ranking, etc. A number of algorithmic problems arising in these applications have been abstracted and studied extensively by researchers under the garb of influence maximization. This book starts with a detailed description of well-established diffusion models, including the independent cascade model and the linear threshold model, that have been successful at explaining propagation phenomena. We describe their properties as well as numerous extensions to them, introducing aspects such as competition, budget, and time-criticality, among many others. We delve deep into the key problem of influence maximization, which selects key individuals to activate in order to influence a large fraction of a network. Influence maximization in classic diffusion models including both the independent cascade and the linear threshold models is computationally intractable, more precisely #P-hard, and we describe several approximation algorithms and scalable heuristics that have been proposed in the literature. Finally, we also deal with key issues that need to be tackled in order to turn this research into practice, such as learning the strength with which individuals in a network influence each other, as well as the practical aspects of this research including the availability of datasets and software tools for facilitating research. We conclude with a discussion of various research problems that remain open, both from a technical perspective and from the viewpoint of transferring the results of research into industry strength applications.
Multidimensional Mining of Massive Text Data
Unstructured text, as one of the most important data forms, plays a crucial role in data-driven decision making in domains ranging from social networking and information retrieval to scientific research and healthcare informatics. In many emerging applications, people's information need from text data is becoming multidimensional--they demand useful insights along multiple aspects from a text corpus. However, acquiring such multidimensional knowledge from massive text data remains a challenging task. This book presents data mining techniques that turn unstructured text data into multidimensional knowledge. We investigate two core questions. (1) How does one identify task-relevant text data with declarative queries in multiple dimensions? (2) How does one distill knowledge from text data in a multidimensional space? To address the above questions, we develop a text cube framework. First, we develop a cube construction module that organizes unstructured data into a cube structure, by discovering latent multidimensional and multi-granular structure from the unstructured text corpus and allocating documents into the structure. Second, we develop a cube exploitation module that models multiple dimensions in the cube space, thereby distilling from user-selected data multidimensional knowledge. Together, these two modules constitute an integrated pipeline: leveraging the cube structure, users can perform multidimensional, multigranular data selection with declarative queries; and with cube exploitation algorithms, users can extract multidimensional patterns from the selected data for decision making. The proposed framework has two distinctive advantages when turning text data into multidimensional knowledge: flexibility and label-efficiency. First, it enables acquiring multidimensional knowledge flexibly, as the cube structure allows users to easily identify task-relevant data along multiple dimensions at varied granularities and further distill multidimensional knowledge. Second, the algorithms for cube construction and exploitation require little supervision; this makes the framework appealing for many applications where labeled data are expensive to obtain.
Probabilistic Databases
Probabilistic databases are databases where the value of some attributes or the presence of some records are uncertain and known only with some probability. Applications in many areas such as information extraction, RFID and scientific data management, data cleaning, data integration, and financial risk assessment produce large volumes of uncertain data, which are best modeled and processed by a probabilistic database. This book presents the state of the art in representation formalisms and query processing techniques for probabilistic data. It starts by discussing the basic principles for representing large probabilistic databases, by decomposing them into tuple-independent tables, block-independent-disjoint tables, or U-databases. Then it discusses two classes of techniques for query evaluation on probabilistic databases. In extensional query evaluation, the entire probabilistic inference can be pushed into the database engine and, therefore, processed as effectively as the evaluation of standard SQL queries. The relational queries that can be evaluated this way are called safe queries. In intensional query evaluation, the probabilistic inference is performed over a propositional formula called lineage expression: every relational query can be evaluated this way, but the data complexity dramatically depends on the query being evaluated, and can be #P-hard. The book also discusses some advanced topics in probabilistic data management such as top-k query processing, sequential probabilistic databases, indexing and materialized views, and Monte Carlo databases. Table of Contents: Overview / Data and Query Model / The Query Evaluation Problem / Extensional Query Evaluation / Intensional Query Evaluation / Advanced Techniques
Incomplete Data and Data Dependencies in Relational Databases
The chase has long been used as a central tool to analyze dependencies and their effect on queries. It has been applied to different relevant problems in database theory such as query optimization, query containment and equivalence, dependency implication, and database schema design. Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the chase as an important tool in several database applications, such as data exchange and integration, query answering in incomplete data, and many others. It is well known that the chase algorithm might be non-terminating and thus, in order for it to find practical applicability, it is crucial to identify cases where its termination is guaranteed. Another important aspect to consider when dealing with the chase is that it can introduce null values into the database, thereby leading to incomplete data. Thus, in several scenarios where the chase is used the problem of dealing with data dependencies and incomplete data arises. This book discusses fundamental issues concerning data dependencies and incomplete data with a particular focus on the chase and its applications in different database areas. We report recent results about the crucial issue of identifying conditions that guarantee the chase termination. Different database applications where the chase is a central tool are discussed with particular attention devoted to query answering in the presence of data dependencies and database schema design. Table of Contents: Introduction / Relational Databases / Incomplete Databases / The Chase Algorithm / Chase Termination / Data Dependencies and Normal Forms / Universal Repairs / Chase and Database Applications
Probabilistic Approaches to Recommendations
The importance of accurate recommender systems has been widely recognized by academia and industry, and recommendation is rapidly becoming one of the most successful applications of data mining and machine learning. Understanding and predicting the choices and preferences of users is a challenging task: real-world scenarios involve users behaving in complex situations, where prior beliefs, specific tendencies, and reciprocal influences jointly contribute to determining the preferences of users toward huge amounts of information, services, and products. Probabilistic modeling represents a robust formal mathematical framework to model these assumptions and study their effects in the recommendation process. This book starts with a brief summary of the recommendation problem and its challenges and a review of some widely used techniques Next, we introduce and discuss probabilistic approaches for modeling preference data. We focus our attention on methods based on latent factors, such as mixture models, probabilistic matrix factorization, and topic models, for explicit and implicit preference data. These methods represent a significant advance in the research and technology of recommendation. The resulting models allow us to identify complex patterns in preference data, which can be exploited to predict future purchases effectively. The extreme sparsity of preference data poses serious challenges to the modeling of user preferences, especially in the cases where few observations are available. Bayesian inference techniques elegantly address the need for regularization, and their integration with latent factor modeling helps to boost the performances of the basic techniques. We summarize the strengths and weakness of several approaches by considering two different but related evaluation perspectives, namely, rating prediction and recommendation accuracy. Furthermore, we describe how probabilistic methods based on latent factors enable the exploitation of preference patterns in novel applications beyond rating prediction or recommendation accuracy. We finally discuss the application of probabilistic techniques in two additional scenarios, characterized by the availability of side information besides preference data. In summary, the book categorizes the myriad probabilistic approaches to recommendations and provides guidelines for their adoption in real-world situations.
