Dynamic Probabilistic Models and Social Structure

Dynamic Probabilistic Models and Social Structure
Author: Guillermo L. Gómez M.
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 458
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9401125244

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.

Decision Processes in Dynamic Probabilistic Systems

Decision Processes in Dynamic Probabilistic Systems
Author: A.V. Gheorghe
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9400904932

'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.

Extreme Events in Nature and Society

Extreme Events in Nature and Society
Author: Sergio Albeverio
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2006-02-18
Genre: Science
ISBN: 354028611X

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.

Quantitative Sociodynamics

Quantitative Sociodynamics
Author: D. Helbing
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2013-03-14
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9401585164

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.

Arrovian Aggregation Models

Arrovian Aggregation Models
Author: Fuad T. Aleskerov
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2013-06-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1475745427

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.

A Course in Stochastic Processes

A Course in Stochastic Processes
Author: Denis Bosq
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2013-03-09
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9401587698

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.

Fundamentals of Uncertainty Calculi with Applications to Fuzzy Inference

Fundamentals of Uncertainty Calculi with Applications to Fuzzy Inference
Author: Michel Grabisch
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2013-04-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9401584494

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.

Statistical Analysis of Observations of Increasing Dimension

Statistical Analysis of Observations of Increasing Dimension
Author: V.L. Girko
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2013-03-09
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9401585679

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.

Markets, Risk and Money

Markets, Risk and Money
Author: Bertrand Munier
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9401107807

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.