Utility Theory

This book explains and illustrates recent developments and advances in decision-making and risk analysis. It demonstrates how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have not only benefitted from classical decision analysis concepts such as expected utility maximization but have also contributed to making normative decision theory more useful by forcing it to confront realistic complexities. These include skill acquisition, uncertain and time-consuming implementation of intended actions, open-world uncertainties about what might happen next and what consequences actions can have, and learning to cope effectively with uncertain and changing environments. The result is a more robust and implementable technology for AI/ML-assisted decision-making.

Mathematics of Fuzzy Sets: Logic, Topology and Measure Theory is a major attempt to provide much-needed coherence for the mathematics of fuzzy sets. Much of this book is new material required to standardize this mathematics, making this volume a reference tool with broad appeal as well as a platform for future research. Fourteen chapters are organized into three parts: mathematical logic and foundations (Chapters 1-2), general topology (Chapters 3-10), and measure and probability theory (Chapters 11-14).

The continuous wavelet transform has deep mathematical roots in the work of Alberto P. Calderon. His seminal paper on complex method of interpolation and intermediate spaces provided the main tool for describing function spaces and their approximation properties. The Calderon identities allow one to give integral representations of many natural operators by using simple pieces of such operators, which are more suited for analysis. These pieces, which are essentially spectral projections, can be chosen in clever ways and have proved to be of tremendous utility in various problems of numerical analysis, multidimensional signal processing, video data compression, and reconstruction of high resolution images and high quality speech. A proliferation of research papers and a couple of books, written in English (there is an earlier book written in French), have emerged on the subject.

Mathematics of Fuzzy Sets: Logic, Topology and Measure Theory is a major attempt to provide much-needed coherence for the mathematics of fuzzy sets. Much of this book is new material required to standardize this mathematics, making this volume a reference tool with broad appeal as well as a platform for future research. Fourteen chapters are organized into three parts: mathematical logic and foundations (Chapters 1-2), general topology (Chapters 3-10), and measure and probability theory (Chapters 11-14).