The technique of data fusion has been used extensively in information retrieval due to the complexity and diversity of tasks involved such as web and social networks, legal, enterprise, and many others. This book presents both a theoretical and empirical approach to data fusion. Several typical data fusion algorithms are discussed, analyzed and evaluated. A reader will find answers to the following questions, among others: What are the key factors that affect the performance of data fusion algorithms significantly? What conditions are favorable to data fusion algorithms? CombSum and CombMNZ, which one is better? and why? What is the rationale of using the linear combination method? How can the best fusion option be found under any given circumstances?
"Foreword I am very pleased to provide a foreword for this timely work on distributed fusion. I have been involved in fusion research for the last 15 years, focused on transforming data to support more effective decision making. During that time, I have relied heavily on the advice of the editors of this book and many of the chapter authors to help set the directions for Army-focused basic and applied information fusion initiatives. I first met the editors about 12 years ago at an Army-sponsored fusion workshop where it was clear that the issues of increased sensors and data sources, along with the introduction of web-based information architectures, had finally overwhelmed the analysis community. Most of the discussions were focused on the problems. But Dave Hall and Jim Llinas began addressing the solutions. They identified relevant terms and definitions, outlined algorithms for specific fusion tasks, addressed many of the evolving architectural issues, pinpointed key technical barriers, and proposed directions for future research. They clearly were long-time experts in the field; but, more importantly, they were visionary in their recognition of rapidly evolving trends in information management and the impact those trends would have on the field of data fusion. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that this, their latest book (along with colleagues), would be focused on distributed fusion. While there are numerous texts and handbooks on data fusion in general (many written or edited by the editors and authors of this book), there are two major trends that motivate the need for this work. First, the very concept of defense operations has dramatically changed. Modern military missions include, for example, coalitionbased counterinsurgency, counternarcotics,"--
"Data fusion and search result diversification are two critical research topics in information retrieval. Data fusion approaches combine search result lists in order to produce a new and hopefully better ranking. We propose two data fusion models for microblog search that exploit temporal information and infer rank scores of missing documents in the lists to be fused. We also propose a fusion method based on manifolds. The method constructs manifolds, let low ranked documents be rewarded to be relevant by high ranked documents in the same manifolds, and utilize the top-k documents as anchors to enhance the efficiency of data fusion. Search result diversification is widely being studied as a way of tackling query ambiguity. Instead of trying to identify the "correct" interpretation behind a query, the idea is to make the search results diversified so that users with different backgrounds will find at least one of these results to be relevant. We examine the hypothesis that data fusion can improve performance in terms of diversity metrics, and proposes a new data fusion method, called diversified data fusion for search result diversification. We also study the problem of personalized diversification via supervised learning, with the goal of enhancing both diversification and personalization performance. The results in this thesis show how both our proposed data fusion and search result diversification methods improve retrieval performance and how they relate to each other. The insights in this thesis may be used to improve retrieval performance for a range of tasks in information retrieval."--Samenvatting auteur.
This new resource provides a coherent, intuitive, and theoretical foundation for the fusion and exploitation of traditional sensor data as well as text-based information. In addition to presenting a detailed discussion of base-level data fusion requirements, a variety of higher level exploitation algorithms are presented that perform fully automated relationship discovery, rank interest level of entities, and support context-sensitive behavior understanding (both static and dynamic context). This book identifies eight canonical fusion forms as well as twenty foundational fusion services to enable formal mapping between models and services. Normalization and representation processes for (hard) sensor data and (soft) semantic data are described as well as methods for combining hard and soft data. Included is a prototype fusion system developed to implement virtually all the presented applications in order to demonstrate the robustness and utility of the design principles presented in this resource. The prototype system presented supports a variety of user workflows and all the applications are fully integrated. There is extensive fusion system output for unclassified scenarios to permit the reader to fully understand all presented design principles. This book also presents context-sensitive fuzzy semantic spatial and temporal reasoning.
This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the concepts and idea of multisensor data fusion. It is an extensively revised second edition of the author's successful book: "Multi-Sensor Data Fusion: An Introduction" which was originally published by Springer-Verlag in 2007. The main changes in the new book are: New Material: Apart from one new chapter there are approximately 30 new sections, 50 new examples and 100 new references. At the same time, material which is out-of-date has been eliminated and the remaining text has been rewritten for added clarity. Altogether, the new book is nearly 70 pages longer than the original book. Matlab code: Where appropriate we have given details of Matlab code which may be downloaded from the worldwide web. In a few places, where such code is not readily available, we have included Matlab code in the body of the text. Layout. The layout and typography has been revised. Examples and Matlab code now appear on a gray background for easy identification and advancd material is marked with an asterisk. The book is intended to be self-contained. No previous knowledge of multi-sensor data fusion is assumed, although some familarity with the basic tools of linear algebra, calculus and simple probability is recommended. Although conceptually simple, the study of mult-sensor data fusion presents challenges that are unique within the education of the electrical engineer or computer scientist. To become competent in the field the student must become familiar with tools taken from a wide range of diverse subjects including: neural networks, signal processing, statistical estimation, tracking algorithms, computer vision and control theory. All too often, the student views multi-sensor data fusion as a miscellaneous assortment of different processes which bear no relationship to each other. In contrast, in this book the processes are unified by using a common statistical framework. As a consequence, the underlying pattern of relationships that exists between the different methodologies is made evident. The book is illustrated with many real-life examples taken from a diverse range of applications and contains an extensive list of modern references.
The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) was formed in the Computer Science Department ofthe University ofMassachusetts, Amherst in 1992. The core support for the Center came from a National Science Foun- tion State/Industry/University Cooperative Research Center(S/IUCRC) grant, although there had been a sizeable information retrieval (IR) research group for over 10 years prior to that grant. Thebasic goal ofthese Centers is to combine basic research, applied research, and technology transfer. The CIIR has been successful in each of these areas, in that it has produced over 270 research papers, has been involved in many successful government and industry collaborations, and has had a significant role in high-visibility Internet sites and start-ups. As a result of these efforts, the CIIR has become known internationally as one of the leading research groups in the area of information retrieval. The CIIR focuses on research that results in more effective and efficient access and discovery in large, heterogeneous, distributed, text and multimedia databases. The scope of the work that is done in the CIIR is broad and goes significantly beyond “traditional” areas of information retrieval such as retrieval models, cross-lingual search, and automatic query expansion. The research includes both low-level systems issues such as the design of protocols and architectures for distributed search, as well as more human-centered topics such as user interface design, visualization and data mining with text, and multimedia retrieval.
Medical data exists in several formats, from structured data and medical reports to 1D signals, 2D images, 3D volumes, or even higher dimensional data such as temporal 3D sequences. Healthcare experts can make auscultation reports in text format; electrocardiograms can be printed in time series format, x-rays saved as images; volume can be provided through angiography; temporal information by echocardiograms, and 4D information extracted through flow MRI. Another typical source of variability is the existence of data from different time points, such as pre and post treatment, for instance. These large and highly diverse amounts of information need to be organized and mined in an appropriate way so that meaningful information can be extracted. New multimodal data fusion techniques are able to combine salient information into one single source to ensure better diagnostic accuracy and assessment. Data Fusion Techniques and Applications for Smart Healthcare covers cutting-edge research from both academia and industry with a particular emphasis on recent advances in algorithms and applications that involve combining multiple sources of medical information. This book can be used as a reference for practicing engineers, scientists, and researchers. It will also be useful for graduate students and practitioners from government and industry as well as healthcare technology professionals working on state-of-the-art information fusion solutions for healthcare applications. Presents broad coverage of applied case studies using data fusion techniques to mine, organize, and interpret medical data Investigates how data fusion techniques offer a new solution for dealing with massive amounts of medical data coming from diverse sources and multiple formats Focuses on identifying challenges, solutions, and new directions that will be useful for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners from government, academia, industry, and healthcare
This book brings together for the first time the complete theory of data based neurofuzzy modelling and the linguistic attributes of fuzzy logic in a single cohesive mathematical framework. After introducing the basic theory of data based modelling new concepts including extended additive and multiplicative submodels are developed. All of these algorithms are illustrated with benchmark examples to demonstrate their efficiency. The book aims at researchers and advanced professionals in time series modelling, empirical data modelling, knowledge discovery, data mining and data fusion.
