The Nest of Knowledge

Environmental Data Analysis with MatLab is a new edition that expands fundamentally on the original with an expanded tutorial approach, new crib sheets, and problem sets providing a clear learning path for students and researchers working to analyze real data sets in the environmental sciences. Since publication of the bestselling Environmental Data Analysis with MATLAB®, many advances have been made in environmental data analysis. One only has to consider the global warming debate to realize how critically important it is to be able to derive clear conclusions from often noisy data drawn from a broad range of sources. The work teaches the basics of the underlying theory of data analysis and then reinforces that knowledge with carefully chosen, realistic scenarios.

This book explores new alternative metaheuristic developments that have proved to be effective in their application to several complex problems. Though most of the new metaheuristic algorithms considered offer promising results, they are nevertheless still in their infancy. To grow and attain their full potential, new metaheuristic methods must be applied in a great variety of problems and contexts, so that they not only perform well in their reported sets of optimization problems, but also in new complex formulations. The only way to accomplish this is to disseminate these methods in various technical areas as optimization tools. In general, once a scientist, engineer or practitioner recognizes a problem as a particular instance of a more generic class, he/she can select one of several metaheuristic algorithms that guarantee an expected optimization performance. Unfortunately, the set of options are concentrated on algorithms whose popularity and high proliferation outstrip those of the new developments. This structure is important, because the authors recognize this methodology as the best way to help researchers, lecturers, engineers and practitioners solve their own optimization problems.