Publisher's Synopsis
A book aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduates in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, linguistics, applied mathematics and data analysis.;Facing a host of experiences in a complex world, an important human activity is to break up these activities into more manageable components - the process of categorization. Furthermore, the acquisition of concepts and categorical structures is a fundamental part of any learning process, and a significant part of any human communication consists of an exchange of categorical information.;This book focuses on bringing together the cognitive research on categories and concepts and traditional classificatory data analysis - two major and intrinsically related scientific disciplines that study these topics. It provides an overview of today's most important cognitive-theoretical views on categories and concepts, and should be relevant to all interested in concepts in cognitive science, AI, linguistics, applied mathematics and data analysis.;The classification of concepts and categories has been a key issue for cognitive psychologists and data analysists. In this volume, the cognitive and data-analytic approaches are brought together for the first time. The book contains a state-of-the-art overview of current theoretical views on concepts and a tutorial introduction into data-analytic techniques to induce categories and category descriptions. It also reviews empirical evidence comparing these views and describes several applications.
