Computational Discovery of Scientific Knowledge: Introduction, Techniques, and Applications in Environmental and Life Sciences

Description

Advances in technology have enabled the collection of data from scientific observations, simulations, and experiments at an ever-increasing pace. For the scientist and engineer to benefit from these enhanced data collecting capabilities, it is becoming clear that semi-automated data analysis techniques must be applied to find the useful information in the data. Computational scientific discovery methods can be used to this end: they focus on applying computational methods to automate scientific activities, such as finding laws from observational data. In contrast to mining scientific data, which focuses on building highly predictive models, computational scientific discovery puts a strong emphasis on discovering knowledge represented in formalisms used by scientists and engineers, such as numeric equations and reaction pathways. This state-of-the-art survey provides an introduction to computational approaches to the discovery of scientific knowledge and gives an overview of recent advances in this area, including techniques and applications in environmental and life sciences. The 15 articles presented are partly inspired by the contributions of the International Symposium on Computational Discovery of Communicable Knowledge, held in Stanford, CA, USA in March 2001. More representative coverage of recent research in computational scientific discovery is achieved by a significant number of additional invited contributions. Front Matter....Pages - Computational Discovery of Scientific Knowledge....Pages 1-14 Front Matter....Pages 15-15 Communicable Knowledge in Automated System Identification....Pages 17-43 Incorporating Engineering Formalisms into Automated Model Builders....Pages 44-68 Integrating Domain Knowledge in Equation Discovery....Pages 69-97 Communicability Criteria of Law Equations Discovery....Pages 98-119 Quantitative Revision of Scientific Models....Pages 120-137 Discovering Communicable Models from Earth Science Data....Pages 138-157 Structure Discovery from Massive Spatial Data Sets Using Intelligent Simulation Tools....Pages 158-174 Computational Discovery in Pure Mathematics....Pages 175-201 Front Matter....Pages 203-203 Automatic Computational Discovery of Chemical Reaction Networks Using Genetic Programming....Pages 205-227 Discovery of Genetic Networks Through Abduction and Qualitative Simulation....Pages 228-247 Learning Qualitative Models of Physical and Biological Systems....Pages 248-272 Logic and the Automatic Acquisition of Scientific Knowledge: An Application to Functional Genomics....Pages 273-289 Drug Discovery as an Example of Literature-Based Discovery....Pages 290-306 Literature Based Discovery Support System and Its Application to Disease Gene Identification....Pages 307-326 Back Matter....Pages -