Soft Computing for Intelligent Data Analysis

Intelligent data analysis (IDA) i s an interdisciplinary study concerned with the effective analysis of data. This paper will briefly look at some of the key issues in intelligent data analysis, discuss the opportunit ies f o r soft computing in this context, and present .several IDA case studies in which soft computing has played key roles. These studies are all concerned with complex real-world problem solving, including consistency checking between m a s s spectral data with proposed chemical structures, screening f o r glaucoma and other eye diseases, forecasting of visual field deteriorat ion, and diagnosis in an oil refinery involving multivariate t ime series. Bayesian networks, evolutionary computation, neural networks, and machine learning in general are some of those soft computing techniques effectively used in these studies.