Medical image mining is one of the most rewarding and challenging field of application in data mining and knowledge discovery. Soft computing is a consortium of methodologies that provides flexible information processing capability. Its aim is to exploit the tolerance for imprecision, uncertainty, approximate reasoning, and limited truth in order to achieve tractability, robustness, and low-cos...

This special issue of the Journal is devoted to the work of twelve eminent speech scientists who apply novel soft computing methods to address some of the most difficult and persistent problems facing speech recognition systems today. I first heard these scientists discuss their innovative soft computing algorithms at the University of Salamanca where the Sixth International Conference on Soft ...

The stock market is a complex and dynamic system with noisy, non-stationary and chaotic data series. Prediction of a financial market is more challenging due to chaos and uncertainty of the system. Soft computing techniques are progressively gaining presence in the financial world. Compared to traditional techniques to predict the market direction, soft computing is gaining the advantage of acc...

Biometrics, the computer-based validation of persons' identity, is becoming more and more essential due to the increasing demand for high-security systems. A biometric system testi es the authenticity of a speci c physiological or behavioral characteristic possessed by a user. New requirements over actual biometric systems as robustness, higher recognition rates, tolerance for imprecision and u...

The main objective for the research presented in this special issue is to advance theoretical basis in soft computing, for the purpose of improving applications. Why is this theoretical research needed? Because soft computing in general (and intelligent control and decision making in particular) are, in many aspects, still an art. To make this methodology easier to apply, we must use the experi...