Cultural selection theory has been rejected by many social scientists. The objections against this theory are listed and commented. Some of the objections can be dismissed as expressions of preference for one perspective over another. Different perspectives lead scientists to make different kinds of discoveries, but all perspectives are valid, and no theory or perspective can cover all aspects ...

Marker-assisted backcrossing is routinely applied in breeding programs for gene introgression. While selection theory is the most important tool for the design of breeding programs for improvement of quantitative characters, no general selection theory is available for marker-assisted backcrossing. In this treatise, we develop a theory for marker-assisted selection for the proportion of the gen...

The longstanding debate about the importance of group (multilevel) selection suffers from a lack of formal models that describe explicit selection events at multiple levels. Here, we describe a general class of models for two-level evolutionary processes which include birth and death events at both levels. The models incorporate the state-dependent rates at which these events occur. The models ...

Feature selection plays an important role in knowledge discovery from many application domains with high-dimensional data. Many feature selection algorithms have been developed and shown successful at improving predictive accuracy of learning models while reducing feature space dimensionality and model complexity. Besides high accuracy, the stability of feature selection the insensitivity of th...

Genetic algorithms are random heuristic search (RHS) algorithms for adaptive systems with a wide range of applications in search, optimisation, pattern recognition and machine learning as well as signal processing. Despite their widespread use a general theory is still lacking. A promising approach is offered by the dynamical system model which describes the stochastic trajectory of a populatio...

The Neutral Theory Models describing the dynamics of genetic variants with no effect on fitness—so-called neutral models—have been around almost as long as the field of population genetics (Fisher 1922; Wright 1931). Decades after the first models were introduced Motoo Kimura gave a complete description of the dynamics of neutral mutations in finite populations, using mathematical tools borrowe...

In this paper, we address the problem of feature subset selection using rough set theory. We propose a scalable algorithm to find a set of reducts based on discernibility function, which is an alternative solution for the exhaustive approach. Our study shows that our algorithm improves the classical one from three points of view: computation time, reducts size and the accuracy of induced model.

So melancholy a neglect of Darwin’s work suggests reflections upon the use of those rare and precious possessions of man—great books. It was, we believe, the custom of the late Professor Freeman to warn his students that mastery of one great book was worth any amount of knowledge of many lesser ones. The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much s...

Rissanen’s Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle for model selection proposes that, among a predetermined collection of models, we choose the one which assigns the shortest description to the data at hand. In this context, a “description” is a lossless representation of the data that also takes into account the cost of describing the chosen model itself. We examine how the MDL principle mi...

A method for indicator selection is proposed in this paper. The method, which adopts the General Methodology and Design Research approach, consists of four steps: Problem Identification, Requirement Gathering, Indicator Extraction, and Evaluation. Rough Set approach also has been applied in the Indicator Extraction phase. This phase consists of 5 steps: Data selection, Data Preprocessing, Discr...