Imagine you had to write a postmortem containing statements like these?
- We were unable to resolve the outage as quickly as we would have hoped because our decision making was impacted by extreme stress.
- We spent two hours repeatedly applying the fix that worked during the previous outage, only to find out that it made no difference in this on...
This book introduces new methods for measuring and analyzing residential segregation. It begins by placing all popular segregation indices in the "difference of group means" framework wherein index scores can be obtained as simple differences of group means on individual-level residential attainments scored from area racial composition. ...
Bayesian methods for statistical analysis is a book on statistical methods for analysing a wide variety of data. The book consists of 12 chapters, starting with basic concepts and covering numerous topics, including Bayesian estimation, decision theory, prediction, hypothesis testing, hierarchical models, Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, finite po...
This open access book offers a practical guide into research ethics for undergraduate students in the social sciences. A step-by-step approach of the most viable issues, in-depth discussions of case histories and a variety of didactical tools will aid the student to grasp the issues at hand and help him or her develop strategies to deal with them.T...
'This is an excellent and engaging resource on delusions. The idea that delusions should not be seen as radically different from other beliefs… is an important challenge to much contemporary thinking and practice. It should be of interest to anyone studying delusional beliefs, and to all those who aim to help people who are troubled by them....
Predicting the time needed to complete a project, task or daily activity can be difficult and people frequently underestimate how long an activity will take. This book sheds light on why and when this happens, what we should do to avoid it and how to give more realistic time predictions. It describes methods for predicting time usage in situations ...
AI is transforming numerous industries. Machine Learning Yearning, a free ebook from Andrew Ng, teaches you how to structure Machine Learning projects.
This book is focused not on teaching you ML algorithms, but on how to make ML algorithms work. After reading Machine Learning Yearning, you will be able to:
- Prioritize the most promising direc...
As machine learning is increasingly leveraged to find patterns, conduct analysis, and make decisions - sometimes without final input from humans who may be impacted by these findings - it is crucial to invest in bringing more stakeholders into the fold. This book of Python projects in machine learning tries to do just that: to equip the developers ...
This book demonstrates how nonlinear/non-Gaussian Bayesian time series estimation methods were used to produce a probability distribution of potential MH370 flight paths. It provides details of how the probabilistic models of aircraft flight dynamics, satellite communication system measurements, environmental effects and radar data were constructed...
This book details tools and procedures for data collections of hard-to-reach, hard-to-survey populations. Inside, readers will discover first-hand insights from experts who share their successes as well as their failures in their attempts to identify and measure human vulnerabilities across the life course. Coverage first provides an introduction o...
This book compares the lessons learned from a wetland-perspective approach to the changing climate and the requirements of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) with regard to environmental conservation. Examples from Germany and Poland are discussed due to the efficiency of their respective implementations of water conservation policies. Although th...
This open access textbook provides the background needed to correctly use, interpret and understand statistics and statistical data in diverse settings. Part I makes key concepts in statistics readily clear. Parts I and II give an overview of the most common tests (t-test, ANOVA, correlations) and work out their statistical principles. Part III pr...
The objective of this report is to examine the extent to which countries in Latin America and the Caribbean participate in global value chains and what are the drivers of such participation. Production processes have been increasingly fragmented worldwide. For example, the production of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner involves 43 suppliers located in 13...
This book summarizes the vast amount of research related to teaching and learning probability that has been conducted for more than 50 years in a variety of disciplines. It begins with a synthesis of the most important probability interpretations throughout history: intuitive, classical, frequentist, subjective, logical propensity and axiomatic vie...
This book describes and explains the educational method of Case-Based Clinical Reasoning (CBCR) used successfully in medical schools to prepare students to think like doctors before they enter the clinical arena and become engaged in patient care. Although this approach poses the paradoxical problem of a lack of clinical experience that is so essen...
If you know how to program with Python and also know a little about probability, you're ready to tackle Bayesian statistics. With this book, you'll learn how to solve statistical problems with Python code instead of mathematical notation, and use discrete probability distributions instead of continuous mathematics. Once you get the math o...
In this volume, international researchers of the field describe and discuss the systematic review method in its application to research in education. Alongside fundamental methodical considerations, reflections and practice examples are included and provide an introduction and overview on systematic reviews in education research.
Reflections on th...
'This free book addresses an urgent issue on which little organized information exists. It reflects experience in Africa but is highly relevant to other fragile states as well.'—Constantine Michalopoulos, John Hopkins University, USA and former Director of Economic Policy and Co-ordination at the World BankFragile countries face a tripl...
This open access book provides an alternative theoretical framework of irregular migration that allows to overcome many of the contradictions and theoretical impasses displayed by the majority of approaches in current literature. The analytical framework allows moving from an interpretation biased by methodological nationalism, to a more general sy...
This free book provides up-to-date information on best practice to improve experimental design and quality of research in non-clinical pharmacology and biomedicine....
There could be no more opportune time than the start of the third millennium AD to produce an entirely new atlas of world history. Not only does this symbolic (if arbitrary) moment provoke a mood of public retrospection, but the pace of global change itself demands a greater awareness of "whole world" history.
More than 20 years have p...
This free book will focus on theoretical aspects of Statistical Learning and Sequential Prediction. Until recently, these two subjects have been treated separately within the learning community. The course will follow a unified approach to analyzing learning in both scenarios. To make this happen, we shall bring together ideas from probability and ...
This timely and applied textbook brings together leading scientists to illustrate how key theories and concepts in social psychology help to predict and explain behavior, and can be successfully applied to benefit social and practical problems. It focuses on robust theories and models known for their successful applications and covers a diverse ran...
This book approaches the study of critical care with teaching in mind. In medicine "teachable moments" usually occur in clinical context, where the engagement in a real case exemplifies principles of diagnosis or therapy. In order to replicate the teaching method, selected cases are presented within each chapter offering the reader an opp...
James McCaffrey leads you through the fundamental concepts of neural networks, including their architecture, input-output, tanh and softmax activation, back-propagation, error and accuracy, normalization and encoding, and model interpretation. Although most concepts are relatively simple, there are many of them, and they interact with each other in...
The subject of this book is automated learning, or, as we will more often call it, Machine Learning (ML). That is, we wish to program computers so that they can "learn" from input available to them. Roughly speaking, learning is the process of converting experience into expertise or knowledge. The input to a learning algorithm is training...
Microsoft CNTK (Cognitive Toolkit, formerly Computational Network Toolkit), an open source code framework, enables you to create feed-forward neural network time series prediction systems, convolutional neural network image classifiers, and other deep learning systems. In Introduction to CNTK Succinctly, author James McCaffrey offers instruction on...
Inclusive language remains a hot topic. Despite decades of empirical evidence and revisions of formal language use, many inclusive adaptations of English and German continue to be ignored or contested. But how to convince speakers of the importance of inclusive language? Rewriting Language provides one possible answer: by engaging readers with the ...
This outlook provides a focused assessment of the state of public capital in the major European countries and identifies areas where public investment could contribute more to stable and sustainable growth. A European Public Investment Outlook brings together contributions from a range of international authors from diverse intellectual and professi...
This open book offers up-to-date advice and practical guidance on how to undertake a discrete choice experiment as a tool for environmental valuation. It discusses crucial issues in designing, implementing and analysing choice experiments. Compiled by leading experts in the field, the book promotes discrete choice analysis in environmental valuatio...
This open book provides a theoretical framework and case studies on decision science for regional sustainability by integrating the natural and social sciences. The cases discussed include solution-oriented transdisciplinary studies on the environment, disasters, health, governance and human cooperation. Based on these case studies and comprehensiv...
This open book introduces the reader to the foundations of AI and ethics. It discusses issues of trust, responsibility, liability, privacy and risk. It focuses on the interaction between people and the AI systems and Robotics they use. Designed to be accessible for a broad audience, reading this book does not require prerequisite technical, legal o...