Download or read book Dynamic Probabilistic Models and Social Structure written by Guillermo L. Gomez M and published by . This book was released on 2014-01-15 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Dynamic Probabilistic Models and Social Structure written by Guillermo L. Gómez M. and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mathematical models have been very successful in the study of the physical world. Galilei and Newton introduced point particles moving without friction under the action of simple forces as the basis for the description of concrete motions like the ones of the planets. This approach was sustained by appro priate mathematical methods, namely infinitesimal calculus, which was being developed at that time. In this way classical analytical mechanics was able to establish some general results, gaining insight through explicit solution of some simple cases and developing various methods of approximation for handling more complicated ones. Special relativity theory can be seen as an extension of this kind of modelling. In the study of electromagnetic phenomena and in general relativity another mathematical model is used, in which the concept of classical field plays the fundamental role. The equations of motion here are partial differential equations, and the methods of study used involve further developments of classical analysis. These models are deterministic in nature. However it was realized already in the second half of last century, through the work of Maxwell, Boltzmann, Gibbs and others, that in the discussion of systems involving a great number of particles, the deterministic description is not by itself of great help, in particu lar a suitable "weighting" of all possible initial conditions should be considered.

Download or read book Social Dynamics Models and Methods written by Nancy Brandon Tuma and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 1984-08-28 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Dynamics: Models and Methods focuses on sociological methodology and on the practice of sociological research. This book is organized into three parts encompassing 16 chapters that deal with the basic principles of social dynamics. The first part of this book considers the development of models and methods for causal analysis of the actual time paths of change in attributes of individual and social systems. This part also discusses the applications in which the use of dynamic models and methods seems to have enhanced the capacity to formulate and test sociological arguments. These models and methods are useful for answering questions about the detailed structure of social change processes. The second part explores the formulation of the continuous-time models of change in both quantitative and qualitative outcomes and the development of suitable methods for estimating these models from the kinds of data commonly available to sociologists. The third part describes a stochastic framework for analyzing both qualitative and quantitative outcome of social changes. This part also discusses the sociologists' perspective on the empirical study of social change processes. This text will be of great value to sociologists and sociological researchers.

Download or read book Decision Processes in Dynamic Probabilistic Systems written by A.V. Gheorghe and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Et moi - ... - si j'avait su comment en revenir. One service mathematics has rendered the je n'y serais point aile: human race. It has put common sense back where it belongs. on the topmost shelf next Jules Verne (0 the dusty canister labelled 'discarded non sense'. The series is divergent; therefore we may be able to do something with it. Eric T. Bell O. Heaviside Mathematics is a tool for thought. A highly necessary tool in a world where both feedback and non linearities abound. Similarly, all kinds of parts of mathematics serve as tools for other parts and for other sciences. Applying a simple rewriting rule to the quote on the right above one finds such statements as: 'One service topology has rendered mathematical physics .. .'; 'One service logic has rendered com puter science .. .'; 'One service category theory has rendered mathematics .. .'. All arguably true. And all statements obtainable this way form part of the raison d'etre of this series.

Download or read book Survival under Uncertainty written by Dimitri Volchenkov and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces and studies a number of stochastic models of subsistence, communication, social evolution and political transition that will allow the reader to grasp the role of uncertainty as a fundamental property of our irreversible world. At the same time, it aims to bring about a more interdisciplinary and quantitative approach across very diverse fields of research in the humanities and social sciences. Through the examples treated in this work – including anthropology, demography, migration, geopolitics, management, and bioecology, among other things – evidence is gathered to show that volatile environments may change the rules of the evolutionary selection and dynamics of any social system, creating a situation of adaptive uncertainty, in particular, whenever the rate of change of the environment exceeds the rate of adaptation. Last but not least, it is hoped that this book will contribute to the understanding that inherent randomness can also be a great opportunity – for social systems and individuals alike – to help face the challenge of “survival under uncertainty”.

Download or read book Extreme Events in Nature and Society written by Sergio Albeverio and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-02-18 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Significant, and usually unwelcome, surprises, such as floods, financial crisis, epileptic seizures, or material rupture, are the topics of Extreme Events in Nature and Society. The book, authored by foremost experts in these fields, reveals unifying and distinguishing features of extreme events, including problems of understanding and modelling their origin, spatial and temporal extension, and potential impact. The chapters converge towards the difficult problem of anticipation: forecasting the event and proposing measures to moderate or prevent it. Extreme Events in Nature and Society will interest not only specialists, but also the general reader eager to learn how the multifaceted field of extreme events can be viewed as a coherent whole.

Download or read book Quantitative Sociodynamics written by D. Helbing and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quantitative Sociodynamics presents a general strategy for interdisciplinary model building and its application to a quantitative description of behavioural changes based on social interaction processes. Originally, the crucial methods for the modeling of complex systems (stochastic methods and nonlinear dynamics) were developed in physics but they have very often proved their explanatory power in chemistry, biology, economics and the social sciences. Quantitative Sociodynamics provides a unified and comprehensive overview of the different stochastic methods, their interrelations and properties. In addition, it introduces the most important concepts from nonlinear dynamics (synergetics, chaos theory). The applicability of these fascinating concepts to social phenomena is carefully discussed. By incorporating decision-theoretical approaches a very fundamental dynamic model is obtained which seems to open new perspectives in the social sciences. It includes many established models as special cases, e.g. the logistic equation, the gravity model, some diffusion models, the evolutionary game theory and the social field theory, but it also implies numerous new results. Examples concerning opinion formation, migration, social field theory; the self-organization of behavioural conventions as well as the behaviour of customers and voters are presented and illustrated by computer simulations. Quantitative Sociodynamics is relevant both for social scientists and natural scientists who are interested in the application of stochastic and synergetics concepts to interdisciplinary topics.

Download or read book Arrovian Aggregation Models written by Fuad T. Aleskerov and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aggregation of individual opinions into a social decision is a problem widely observed in everyday life. For centuries people tried to invent the `best' aggregation rule. In 1951 young American scientist and future Nobel Prize winner Kenneth Arrow formulated the problem in an axiomatic way, i.e., he specified a set of axioms which every reasonable aggregation rule has to satisfy, and obtained that these axioms are inconsistent. This result, often called Arrow's Paradox or General Impossibility Theorem, had become a cornerstone of social choice theory. The main condition used by Arrow was his famous Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives. This very condition pre-defines the `local' treatment of the alternatives (or pairs of alternatives, or sets of alternatives, etc.) in aggregation procedures. Remaining within the framework of the axiomatic approach and based on the consideration of local rules, Arrovian Aggregation Models investigates three formulations of the aggregation problem according to the form in which the individual opinions about the alternatives are defined, as well as to the form of desired social decision. In other words, we study three aggregation models. What is common between them is that in all models some analogue of the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives condition is used, which is why we call these models Arrovian aggregation models. Chapter 1 presents a general description of the problem of axiomatic synthesis of local rules, and introduces problem formulations for various versions of formalization of individual opinions and collective decision. Chapter 2 formalizes precisely the notion of `rationality' of individual opinions and social decision. Chapter 3 deals with the aggregation model for the case of individual opinions and social decisions formalized as binary relations. Chapter 4 deals with Functional Aggregation Rules which transform into a social choice function individual opinions defined as choice functions. Chapter 5 considers another model – Social Choice Correspondences when the individual opinions are formalized as binary relations, and the collective decision is looked for as a choice function. Several new classes of rules are introduced and analyzed.

Download or read book A Course in Stochastic Processes written by Denis Bosq and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text is an Elementary Introduction to Stochastic Processes in discrete and continuous time with an initiation of the statistical inference. The material is standard and classical for a first course in Stochastic Processes at the senior/graduate level (lessons 1-12). To provide students with a view of statistics of stochastic processes, three lessons (13-15) were added. These lessons can be either optional or serve as an introduction to statistical inference with dependent observations. Several points of this text need to be elaborated, (1) The pedagogy is somewhat obvious. Since this text is designed for a one semester course, each lesson can be covered in one week or so. Having in mind a mixed audience of students from different departments (Math ematics, Statistics, Economics, Engineering, etc.) we have presented the material in each lesson in the most simple way, with emphasis on moti vation of concepts, aspects of applications and computational procedures. Basically, we try to explain to beginners questions such as "What is the topic in this lesson?" "Why this topic?", "How to study this topic math ematically?". The exercises at the end of each lesson will deepen the stu dents' understanding of the material, and test their ability to carry out basic computations. Exercises with an asterisk are optional (difficult) and might not be suitable for homework, but should provide food for thought.

Download or read book Fundamentals of Uncertainty Calculi with Applications to Fuzzy Inference written by Michel Grabisch and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the vision that machines can be rendered smarter, we have witnessed for more than a decade tremendous engineering efforts to implement intelligent sys tems. These attempts involve emulating human reasoning, and researchers have tried to model such reasoning from various points of view. But we know precious little about human reasoning processes, learning mechanisms and the like, and in particular about reasoning with limited, imprecise knowledge. In a sense, intelligent systems are machines which use the most general form of human knowledge together with human reasoning capability to reach decisions. Thus the general problem of reasoning with knowledge is the core of design methodology. The attempt to use human knowledge in its most natural sense, that is, through linguistic descriptions, is novel and controversial. The novelty lies in the recognition of a new type of un certainty, namely fuzziness in natural language, and the controversality lies in the mathematical modeling process. As R. Bellman [7] once said, decision making under uncertainty is one of the attributes of human intelligence. When uncertainty is understood as the impossi bility to predict occurrences of events, the context is familiar to statisticians. As such, efforts to use probability theory as an essential tool for building intelligent systems have been pursued (Pearl [203], Neapolitan [182)). The methodology seems alright if the uncertain knowledge in a given problem can be modeled as probability measures.

Download or read book Statistical Analysis of Observations of Increasing Dimension written by V.L. Girko and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Statistical Analysis of Observations of Increasing Dimension is devoted to the investigation of the limit distribution of the empirical generalized variance, covariance matrices, their eigenvalues and solutions of the system of linear algebraic equations with random coefficients, which are an important function of observations in multidimensional statistical analysis. A general statistical analysis is developed in which observed random vectors may not have density and their components have an arbitrary dependence structure. The methods of this theory have very important advantages in comparison with existing methods of statistical processing. The results have applications in nuclear and statistical physics, multivariate statistical analysis in the theory of the stability of solutions of stochastic differential equations, in control theory of linear stochastic systems, in linear stochastic programming, in the theory of experiment planning.

Download or read book Markets Risk and Money written by Bertrand Munier and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the writings of Maurice Allais, 1988 Nobel Laureate in Economics have only been published in French. Thus to date, economists, management scientists and operations researchers have been severely restricted in gaining access to his work. Markets, Risk and Money presents, for the first time in English, Allais' unconventional views on economic competition, the significance of free markets and overlapping generations, risk psychology, central banking, taxation systems, monetary dynamics and reform. The volume provides a consistent vision of our society and offers readers an evaluation of the impact of Allais' work on our present body of knowledge. Markets, Risk and Money contains contributions from a number of distinguished European and American scholars including Bertrand Munier, Thierry Montbrial, J. Lesourne, Claude Ponsard, Edmond Malinvaud, André Babeau, Marcel Boiteux, Lola L. Lopes, Mark J. Machina, James B. Ramsey, Xavier Freixas, B. Roy and D. Bouyssou, Werner Leinfellner and Jean-Jacques Durand. A biographical sketch and complete bibliography of the author are also included.

Download or read book Vaguely Defined Objects written by M. Wygralak and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-11-23 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, an impetuous development of new, unconventional theories, methods, techniques and technologies in computer and information sciences, systems analysis, decision-making and control, expert systems, data modelling, engineering, etc. , resulted in a considerable increase of interest in adequate mathematical description and analysis of objects, phenomena, and processes which are vague or imprecise by their very nature. Classical two-valued logic and the related notion of a set, together with its mathematical consequences, are then often inadequate or insufficient formal tools, and can even become useless for applications because of their (too) categorical character: 'true - false', 'belongs - does not belong', 'is - is not', 'black - white', '0 - 1', etc. This is why one replaces classical logic by various types of many-valued logics and, on the other hand, more general notions are introduced instead of or beside that of a set. Let us mention, for instance, fuzzy sets and derivative concepts, flou sets and twofold fuzzy sets, which have been created for different purposes as well as using distinct formal and informal motivations. A kind of numerical information concerning of 'how many' elements those objects are composed seems to be one of the simplest and more important types of information about them. To get it, one needs a suitable notion of cardinality and, moreover, a possibility to calculate with such cardinalities. Unfortunately, neither fuzzy sets nor the other nonclassical concepts have been equipped with a satisfactory (nonclassical) cardinality theory.

Download or read book Non Classical Logics and their Applications to Fuzzy Subsets written by Ulrich Höhle and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Non-Classical Logics and their Applications to Fuzzy Subsets is the first major work devoted to a careful study of various relations between non-classical logics and fuzzy sets. This volume is indispensable for all those who are interested in a deeper understanding of the mathematical foundations of fuzzy set theory, particularly in intuitionistic logic, Lukasiewicz logic, monoidal logic, fuzzy logic and topos-like categories. The tutorial nature of the longer chapters, the comprehensive bibliography and index make it suitable as a valuable and important reference for graduate students as well as research workers in the field of non-classical logics. The book is arranged in three parts: Part A presents the most recent developments in the theory of Heyting algebras, MV-algebras, quantales and GL-monoids. Part B gives a coherent and current account of topos-like categories for fuzzy set theory based on Heyting algebra valued sets, quantal sets of M-valued sets. Part C addresses general aspects of non-classical logics including epistemological problems as well as recursive properties of fuzzy logic.

Download or read book Limit Theorems and Applications of Set Valued and Fuzzy Set Valued Random Variables written by Shoumei Li and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the pioneering works by Robbins {1944, 1945) and Choquet (1955), the notation of a set-valued random variable (called a random closed set in literatures) was systematically introduced by Kendall {1974) and Matheron {1975). It is well known that the theory of set-valued random variables is a natural extension of that of general real-valued random variables or random vectors. However, owing to the topological structure of the space of closed sets and special features of set-theoretic operations ( cf. Beer [27]), set-valued random variables have many special properties. This gives new meanings for the classical probability theory. As a result of the development in this area in the past more than 30 years, the theory of set-valued random variables with many applications has become one of new and active branches in probability theory. In practice also, we are often faced with random experiments whose outcomes are not numbers but are expressed in inexact linguistic terms.

Download or read book A Course in Mathematical and Statistical Ecology written by Anil Gore and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Course in Mathematical and Statistical Ecology

Download or read book Models and Experiments in Risk and Rationality written by Bertrand Munier and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1994-10-31 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Models and Experiments in Risk and Rationality presents original contributions to the areas of individual choice, experimental economics, operations and analysis, multiple criteria decision making, market uncertainty, game theory and social choice. The papers, which were presented at the FUR VI conference, are arranged to appear in order of increasing complexity of the decision environment or social context in which they situate themselves. The first section `Psychological Aspects of Risk-Bearing', considers choice at the purely individual level and for the most part, free of any specific economic or social context. The second section examines individual choice within the classical expected utility approach while the third section works from a perspective that includes non-expected utility preferences over lotteries. Section four, `Multiple Criteria Decision-Making Under Uncertainty', considers the more specialized but crucial context of uncertain choice involving tradeoffs between competing criteria -- a field which is becoming of increasing importance in applied decision analysis. The final two sections examine uncertain choice in social or group contexts.