Der Sammelband vereint Beiträge von führenden Forscherinnen und Forschern im Bereich statistischer Methoden und deren Anwendung in den Sozialwissenschaften mit einem besonderen Fokus auf sozialen Räumen. Multivariate Skalierungsmethoden für kategoriale Daten, speziell Korrespondenzanalyse, werden verwendet um die wichtigsten Dimensionen aus komplexen Kreuztabellen mit vielen Variablen zu extrahieren und Zusammenhänge in den Daten bildlich darzustellen. In diesem Band werden statistische Weiterentwicklungen, grundsätzliche methodologische Überlegungen und empirische Anwendungen multivariater Analysemethoden diskutiert. Mehrere Anwendungsbeispiele thematisieren verschiedene Aspekte des Raumes und deren soziologische Bedeutung: die Rekonstruktion „sozialer Räume“ mit statistischen Methoden, die Illustration räumlicher Beziehungen zwischen Nähe, Distanz und Ungleichheit, aber auch konkrete Interaktionen in urbanen Räumen. Der Band erscheint zur Würdigung der wissenschaftlichen Leistungen von Prof. Jörg Blasius.

A full description of computer-based methods of analysis used to define and solve ecological problems. Multivariate techniques permit summary of complex sets of data and allow investigation of many problems which cannot be tackled experimentally because of practical restraints.

Systems Biomedicine is a field in perpetual development. By definition a translational discipline, it emphasizes the role of quantitative systems approaches in biomedicine and aims to offer solutions to many emerging problems characterized by levels and types of complexity and uncertainty unmet before. Many factors, including technological and societal ones, need to be considered. In particular, new technologies are providing researchers with the data deluge whose management and exploitation requires a reinvention of cross-disciplinary team efforts. The advent of “omics” and high-content imaging are examples of advances de facto establishing the necessity of systems approaches. Hypothesis-driven models and in silico validation tools in support to all the varieties of experimental applications call for a profound revision. The focus on phases like mining and assimilating the data has substantially increased so to allow for interpretable knowledge to be inferred. Notably, to be able to tackle the newly generated data dimensionality, heterogeneity and complexity, model-free and data-driven intensive applications are increasingly shaping the computational pipelines and architectures that quant specialists set aside of the high-throughput genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics platforms. As for the societal aspects, in many advanced societies health care needs now more than in the past to address the problem of managing ageing populations and their complex morbidity patterns. In parallel, there is a growing research interest on the impact that cross-disciplinary clinical, epidemiological and quantitative modelling studies can have in relation to outcomes potentially affecting the quality of life of many people. Complex systems, including those characterizing biomedicine, are assessed in both their functionality and stability, and also relatively to the capacity of generating information from diversity, variation, and complexity. Due to the combined interactions and effects, such systems embed prediction power available for instance in both target identification or marker discovery, or more generally for conducting inference about patients’ pathological states, i.e. normal versus disease, diagnostic or prognostic analysis, and preventive assessment (e.g., risk evaluation). The ultimate goal, personalized medicine, will be achieved based on the confluence of the system’s predictive power to patient-specific profiling.

Deep Learning models are at the core of artificial intelligence research today. It is well known that deep learning techniques are disruptive for Euclidean data, such as images or sequence data, and not immediately applicable to graph-structured data such as text. This gap has driven a wave of research for deep learning on graphs, including graph representation learning, graph generation, and graph classification. The new neural network architectures on graph-structured data (graph neural networks, GNNs in short) have performed remarkably on these tasks, demonstrated by applications in social networks, bioinformatics, and medical informatics. Despite these successes, GNNs still face many challenges ranging from the foundational methodologies to the theoretical understandings of the power of the graph representation learning. This book provides a comprehensive introduction of GNNs. It first discusses the goals of graph representation learning and then reviews the history, current developments, and future directions of GNNs. The second part presents and reviews fundamental methods and theories concerning GNNs while the third part describes various frontiers that are built on the GNNs. The book concludes with an overview of recent developments in a number of applications using GNNs. This book is suitable for a wide audience including undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, professors and lecturers, as well as industrial and government practitioners who are new to this area or who already have some basic background but want to learn more about advanced and promising techniques and applications.

Sources and Methods of Historical Demography covers the fundamental sources, methods, and approaches to explanatory modeling for describing, analyzing, and understanding demographic features of past societies. The book discusses the intellectual ancestry of historical demographic research, beginning in the 17th century; as well as the logic of basic techniques for reconstructing and analyzing information from fundamental source materials. The text also describes the full range of disciplines that have made major contributions to historical demography, and examples of empirical research. The book concludes by arguing the case for conducting historical demographic research with a broad, interdisciplinary ideal in mind. Historians and sociologists will find the book invaluable.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the application of artificial intelligence in social computing, from fundamental data processing to advanced social network computing. To broaden readers’ understanding of the topics addressed, it includes extensive data and a large number of charts and references, covering theories, techniques and applications. It particularly focuses on data collection, data mining, artificial intelligence algorithms in social computing, and several key applications of social computing application, and also discusses network propagation mechanisms and dynamic analysis, which provide useful insights into how information is disseminated in online social networks. This book is intended for readers with a basic knowledge of advanced mathematics and computer science.