A Few Things I Know About Her: A Personally Machine Learning Inspired Approach to Understand Surrounding Nature (Intelligent Systems Reference Library, 219)

This book reconsiders key issues, such as description and explanation, which affect data analytics. For starters: the soul does not exist. Once released from this cumbersome roommate, we are left with complex biological systems: namely, ourselves, who must configure their environment in terms of worlds that are compatible with what they sense. Far from supplying yet another cosmogony, the book provides the cultivated reader with computational tools for describing and understanding data arising from his surroundings, such as climate parameters or stock market trends, even the win/defeat story of his son football team. Besides the superposition of the very many universes considered by quantum mechanics, we aim to manage families of worlds that may have generated those data through the key feature of their compatibility. Starting from a sharp engineering of ourselves in term of pairs consisting of genome plus a neuron ensemble, we toss this feature in different cognitive frameworks within a span of exploitations ranging from probability distributions to the latest implementations of machine learning. From the perspective of human society as an ensemble of the above pairs, the book also provides scientific tools for analyzing the benefits and drawbacks of the modern paradigm of the world as a service.