The Fitness of Information (eBook)

Theories and practices to assess critical information in a
complex adaptive system

Organized for readers to follow along easily, The Fitness of
Information: Quantitative Assessments of Critical Evidence
provides a structured outline of the key challenges in assessing
crucial information in a complex adaptive system. Illustrating a
variety of computational and explanatory challenges, the book
demonstrates principles and practical implications of exploring and
assessing the fitness of information in an extensible framework of
adaptive landscapes.

The book's first three chapters introduce fundamental
principles and practical examples in connection to the nature of
aesthetics, mental models, and the subjectivity of evidence. In
particular, the underlying question is how these issues can be
addressed quantitatively, not only computationally but also
explanatorily. The next chapter illustrates how one can reduce the
level of complexity in understanding the structure and dynamics of
scientific knowledge through the design and use of the CiteSpace
system for visualizing and analyzing emerging trends in scientific
literature. The following two chapters explain the concepts of
structural variation and the fitness of information in a framework
that builds on the idea of fitness landscape originally introduced
to study population evolution. The final chapter presents a
dual-map overlay technique and demonstrates how it supports a
variety of analytic tasks for a new type of portfolio
analysis.

The Fitness of Information: Quantitative Assessments of Critical
Evidence also features:

* In-depth case studies and examples that characterize
far-reaching concepts, illustrate underlying principles, and
demonstrate profound challenges and complexities at various levels
of analytic reasoning

* Wide-ranging topics that underline the common theme, from the
subjectivity of evidence in criminal trials to detecting early
signs of critical transitions and mechanisms behind radical
patents

* An extensible and unifying framework for visual analytics by
transforming analytic reasoning tasks to the assessment of critical
evidence

The Fitness of Information: Quantitative Assessments of Critical
Evidence is a suitable reference for researchers, analysts, and
practitioners who are interested in analyzing evidence and making
decisions with incomplete, uncertain, and even conflicting
information. The book is also an excellent textbook for
upper-undergraduate and graduate-level courses on visual analytics,
information visualization, and business analytics and decision
support systems.