Books about Approximate from Amazon.com

What do cars, toys, people, and jelly beans have in common? They can all be estimated Two friends try out their estimating skills and find out that estimating can have real rewards––especially when there’s a contest to enter!

.
Price: $2.48 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A complete and accessible introduction to the real-world applications of approximate dynamic programming

With the growing levels of sophistication in modern-day operations, it is vital for practitioners to understand how to approach, model, and solve complex industrial problems. Approximate Dynamic Programming is a result of the author's decades of experience working in large industrial settings to develop practical and high-quality solutions to problems that involve making decisions in the presence of uncertainty. This groundbreaking book uniquely integrates four distinct disciplines-Markov design processes, mathematical programming, simulation, and statistics-to demonstrate how to successfully model and solve a wide range of real-life problems using the techniques of approximate dynamic programming (ADP). The reader is introduced to the three curses of dimensionality that impact complex problems and is also shown how the post-decision state variable allows for the use of classical algorithmic strategies from operations research to treat complex stochastic optimization problems.

Designed as an introduction and assuming no prior training in dynamic programming of any form, Approximate Dynamic Programming contains dozens of algorithms that are intended to serve as a starting point in the design of practical solutions for real problems. The book provides detailed coverage of implementation challenges including: modeling complex sequential decision processes under uncertainty, identifying robust policies, designing and estimating value function approximations, choosing effective stepsize rules, and resolving convergence issues.

With a focus on modeling and algorithms in conjunction with the language of mainstream operations research, artificial intelligence, and control theory, Approximate Dynamic Programming:
*

Models complex, high-dimensional problems in a natural and practical way, which draws on years of industrial projects
*

Introduces and emphasizes the power of estimating a value function around the post-decision state, allowing solution algorithms to be broken down into three fundamental steps: classical simulation, classical optimization, and classical statistics
*

Presents a thorough discussion of recursive estimation, including fundamental theory and a number of issues that arise in the development of practical algorithms
*

Offers a variety of methods for approximating dynamic programs that have appeared in previous literature, but that have never been presented in the coherent format of a book

Motivated by examples from modern-day operations research, Approximate Dynamic Programming is an accessible introduction to dynamic modeling and is also a valuable guide for the development of high-quality solutions to problems that exist in operations research and engineering. The clear and precise presentation of the material makes this an appropriate text for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate courses, while also serving as a reference for researchers and practitioners. A companion Web site is available for readers, which includes additional exercises, solutions to exercises, and data sets to reinforce the book's main concepts..
Price: $88.85 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In The Long Wait, the focus is on estimation Josh and Zack arrive at Thrillenium Park and head straight for the Cosmic Beetle ride only to find themselves on the end of a very long line. How long will they have to wait? Will the ride be worth it? Math Concept: ESTIMATION, 32 pages, 6 1/2( x 9, Ages 6-8..
Price: $1.81 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This major anthology of writings by legendary poet tristan tzara (1896-1963) reveals the various facets of Tzara's style: from the deliberately disconnected to the sustained and lyric; from the fragmentary to the visionary and the epic; from the tormented or the nostalgic to the severe; from the simple to the complex. The accent falls constantly on two recurring elements: on action or the spectacle of action and on the attempt to find a language which will translate it. Of particular importance is the inclusion of Tzara's epic poem of 1925-30 "Approximate Man." Now widely regarded as the poetic masterpiece of Surrealism.

This new and fully revised title, translated, edited, and updated by Mary Ann Caws for Black Widow Press includes a critical introduction, an account of the more interesting variants of tzara's poems, and an essay new to this edition "Dada's Temper, Our Text," which provides an insightful view into the historical context of "Approximate man.".
Price: $12.36 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The popular Rookie Books expand their horizons - to all corners of the globe! With this series all about geography, emergent readers will take off on adventures to cities, nations, waterways, and habitats around the world…and right in their own backyards..
Price: $2.47 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Case-based reasoning (CBR) has received a great deal of attention in recent years and has established itself as a core methodology in the field of artificial intelligence. The key idea of CBR is to tackle new problems by referring to similar problems that have already been solved in the past. More precisely, CBR proceeds from individual experiences in the form of cases. The generalization beyond these experiences typically relies on a kind of regularity assumption demanding that 'similar problems have similar solutions'.

Making use of different frameworks of approximate reasoning and reasoning under uncertainty, notably probabilistic and fuzzy set-based techniques, this book develops formal models of the above inference principle, which is fundamental to CBR. The case-based approximate reasoning methods thus obtained especially emphasize the heuristic nature of case-based inference and aspects of uncertainty in CBR. This way, the book contributes to a solid foundation of CBR which is grounded on formal concepts and techniques from the aforementioned fields. Besides, it establishes interesting relationships between CBR and approximate reasoning, which not only cast new light on existing methods but also enhance the development of novel approaches and hybrid systems.

This books is suitable for researchers and practioners in the fields of artifical intelligence, knowledge engineering and knowledge-based systems.

.
Price: $77.84 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Approximate dynamic programming solves decision and control problems

While advances in science and engineering have enabled us to design and build complex systems, how to control and optimize them remains a challenge. This was made clear, for example, by the major power outage across dozens of cities in the Eastern United States and Canada in August of 2003. Learning and approximate dynamic programming (ADP) is emerging as one of the most promising mathematical and computational approaches to solve nonlinear, large-scale, dynamic control problems under uncertainty. It draws heavily both on rigorous mathematics and on biological inspiration and parallels, and helps unify new developments across many disciplines.

The foundations of learning and approximate dynamic programming have evolved from several fields--optimal control, artificial intelligence (reinforcement learning), operations research (dynamic programming), and stochastic approximation methods (neural networks). Applications of these methods span engineering, economics, business, and computer science. In this volume, leading experts in the field summarize the latest research in areas including:

• Reinforcement learning and its relationship to supervised learning
• Model-based adaptive critic designs
• Direct neural dynamic programming
• Hierarchical decision-making
• Multistage stochastic linear programming for resource allocation problems
• Concurrency, multiagency, and partial observability
• Backpropagation through time and derivative adaptive critics
• Applications of approximate dynamic programming and reinforcement learning in control-constrained agile missiles; power systems; heating, ventilation, and air conditioning; helicopter flight control; transportation and more.

.
Price: $98.96 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The outline of the thesis is as follows Chapter 2 discusses the use of Laplacian smoothing in order to improve the accuracy of semi-analytical sensitivities. Chapter 3 explains how these sensitivities can be used to construct response surfaces..
Price: $59.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]