Spaceborne Data Enters the Mainstream

<p><b>In today’s finance industry, data-driven decision-making is essential. <i>Financial Data Science with Python: An Integrated Approach to Analysis, Modeling, and Machine Learning</i> bridges the gap between traditional finance and modern data science, offering a comprehensive guide for students, analysts, and professionals.</b></p><p>This book equips readers with the tools to analyze complex financial data, build predictive models, and apply machine learning techniques to real-world financial challenges.</p><p>Beginning with foundational Python concepts, the author covers essential topics like data structures, object-oriented programming, and key libraries such as NumPy and Pandas. The book advances into more complex areas, including financial data processing, time series analysis with ARIMA and GARCH models, and both supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods tailored to finance. Practical techniques like regression, classification, and clustering are explored in a financial context.</p><p>A key feature is the hands-on approach. Through real-world examples, projects, and exercises, readers will apply Python to tasks like risk assessment, market forecasting, and financial pattern recognition. All code examples are provided in Jupyter Notebooks, enhancing interactivity.</p><p>Whether you’re a student building foundational skills, a financial analyst enhancing technical expertise, or a professional staying competitive in a data-driven industry, this book offers the knowledge and tools to succeed in financial data science.</p>

Demand and supply: trends in global agriculture

Global and regional scale agricultural monitoring systems aim to provide up-to-date information regarding food production to different actors and decision makers in support of global and national food security. To help reduce price volatility of the kind experienced between 2007 and 2011, a global system of agricultural monitoring systems is needed to ensure the coordinated flow of information in a timely manner for early warning purposes. A number of systems now exist that fill this role. This paper provides an overview of the eight main global and regional scale agricultural monitoring systems currently in operation and compares them based on the input data and models used, the outputs produced and other characteristics such as the role of the analyst, their interaction with other systems and the geographical scale at which they operate. Despite improvements in access to high resolution satellite imagery over the last decade and the use of numerous remote-sensing based products by the different systems, there are still fundamental gaps. Based on a questionnaire, discussions with the system experts and the literature, we present the main gaps in the data and in the methods. Finally, we propose some recommendations for addressing these gaps through ongoing improvements in remote sensing, harnessing new and innovative data streams and the continued sharing of more and more data.

The search for highly ionizing particles in nuclear track detectors (NTDs) traditionally requires experts to manually search through samples in order to identify regions of interest that could be a hint of physics beyond the standard model of particle physics. The advent of automated image acquisition and modern data science, including machine learning-based processing of data presents an opportunity to accelerate the process of searching for anomalies in NTDs that could be a hint of a new physics avatar. The potential for modern data science applied to this topic in the context of the MoEDAL experiment at the large Hadron collider at the European Centre for Nuclear Research, CERN, is discussed. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Topological avatars of new physics'.

We provide a brief introduction to the Oxford Review of Economic Policy’s issue on Food, which is concerned with the contemporary transformation of the global food and agriculture system.

This chapter presents a brief overview of the most recent optimization algorithms. The chapter starts by showing the difference between classical methods and modern methods. And then, some special types of problems solved by optimization algorithms are presented, including some open problems. After that, the initial modern optimization algorithms are listed; the recent optimization algorithms are shown with their main features. This section starts with the algorithms inspired by quantum mechanics and their solutions to intelligent systems. Also, this section shows other modern approaches merging intelligent techniques, neuroscience, data science, and machine learning.

In recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the demand for timely, comprehensive global agricultural intelligence. Timely information on global crop production is indispensable for combating the growing stress on the world’s crop production and for securing both short-term and long-term stable and reliable supply of food. Global agriculture monitoring systems are critical to providing this kind of intelligence and global earth observations are an essential component of an effective global agricultural monitoring system as they offer timely, objective, global information on croplands distribution, crop development and conditions as the growing season progresses. The Global Agriculture Monitoring Project (GLAM), a joint NASA, USDA, UMD and SDSU initiative, has built a global agricultural monitoring system that provides the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) with timely, easily accessible, scientifically-validated remotely-sensed data and derived products as well as data analysis tools, for crop-condition monitoring and production assessment. This system is an integral component of the USDA’s FAS Decision Support System (DSS) for agriculture. It has significantly improved the FAS crop analysts’ ability to monitor crop conditions, and to quantitatively forecast crop yields through the provision of timely, high-quality global earth observations data in a format customized for FAS alongside a suite of data analysis tools. FAS crop analysts use these satellite data in a ‘convergence of evidence’ approach with meteorological data, field reports, crop models, attaché reports and local reports. The USDA FAS is currently the only operational provider of timely, objective crop production forecasts at the global scale. These forecasts are routinely used by the other US Federal government agencies as well as by commodity trading companies, farmers, relief agencies and foreign governments. This paper discusses the operational components and new developments of the GLAM monitoring system as well as the future role of earth observations in global agricultural monitoring.

The global agriculture, aquaculture, fishing and forestry (AAFF) energy system is subject to three unsustainable trends: (1) the approaching biophysical limits of AAFF; (2) the role of AAFF as a driver of environmental degradation; and (3) the long-term declining energy efficiency of AAFF due to growing dependence on fossil fuels. In response, we conduct a net energy analysis for the period 1971–2017 and review existing studies to investigate the global AAFF energy system and its vulnerability to the three unsustainable trends from an energetic perspective. We estimate the global AAFF system represents 27.9% of societies energy supply in 2017, with food energy representing 20.8% of societies total energy supply. We find that the net energy-return-on-investment (net EROI) of global AAFF increased from 2.87:1 in 1971 to 4.05:1 in 2017. We suggest that rising net EROI values are being fuelled in part by ‘depleting natures accumulated energy stocks’. We also find that the net energy balance of AAFF increased by 130% in this period, with at the same time a decrease in both the proportion of rural residents and also the proportion of the total population working in AAFF—which decreased from 19.8 to 10.3%. However, this comes at the cost of growing fossil fuel dependency which increased from 43.6 to 62.2%. Given the increasing probability of near-term fossil fuel scarcity, the growing impacts of climate change and environmental degradation, and the approaching biophysical limits of global AAFF, ‘Odum’s hoax’ is likely soon to be revealed.

In modern data science, it is often not enough to obtain only a data-driven model with a good prediction quality. On the contrary, it is more interesting to understand the properties of the model, which parts could be replaced to obtain better results. Such questions are unified under machine learning interpretability questions, which could be considered one of the area's raising topics. In the paper, we use multi-objective evolutionary optimization for composite data-driven model learning to obtain the algorithm's desired properties. It means that whereas one of the apparent objectives is precision, the other could be chosen as the complexity of the model, robustness, and many others. The method application is shown on examples of multi-objective learning of composite models, differential equations, and closed-form algebraic expressions are unified and form approach for model-agnostic learning of the interpretable models.

Biogenic amines in honey bee cognition: neurochemical pathways and stress impacts.

Modern Data Science with R is a comprehensive data science textbook for undergraduates that incorporates statistical and computational thinking to solve real-world problems with data. Rather than focus exclusively on case studies or programming syntax, this book illustrates how statistical programming in the state-of-the-art R/RStudio computing environment can be leveraged to extract meaningful information from a variety of data in the service of addressing compelling statistical questions. Contemporary data science requires a tight integration of knowledge from statistics, computer science, mathematics, and a domain of application. This book will help readers with some background in statistics and modest prior experience with coding develop and practice the appropriate skills to tackle complex data science projects. The book features a number of exercises and has a flexible organization conducive to teaching a variety of semester courses.

Entropic statistics is a collection of statistical methodologies with a special perspective: the underlying random system is described exclusively based on label-independent parameters, also known as entropies. Statistical models based on entropies are increasingly popular inspired by needs in modern data science. However the general theoretical support for statistical inference based on these models is porous and needs attention. In this article, several basic entropic objects are first introduced on a countable alphabet, including entropic parameters, general entropies, entropic moments, and an entropic moment-generating function. The main objective of this article is to establish the fact that a sample version of the entropic moment-generating function, properly normed, converges to a Gaussian process. The asymptotic Gaussian process may serve as an anchor point in probability for deriving entropy-based statistical inferential tools.

Identifying influential variables in high-dimensional matrix-valued data while controlling the false discovery rate (FDR) is a critical challenge in modern data science. We propose a novel, model-free procedure specifically designed for simultaneous row and column selection in matrix predictor regression. Our approach utilizes folding selection subspaces (FSS) to formulate structured hypotheses and employs data splitting to construct mirror statistics from FSS estimators. This design bypasses restrictive model specification and the need for p-value computation. Key theoretical contributions include establishing the asymptotic distribution of FSS estimators and proving the mirror statistic is asymptotically symmetric with respect to zero under the null hypothesis. Using the symmetry, we develop a multiple hypothesis testing procedure with data-driven thresholds that provably controls the FDR for row and column at the desired level asymptotically. The framework is further extended to control element-wise FDR under specific structural assumptions. Extensive simulations and a real data analysis demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method over existing approaches across various settings.

Modern information theory is largely developed in connection with random elements residing in large, complex, and discrete data spaces, or alphabets. Lacking natural metrization and hence moments, the associated probability and statistics theory must rely on information measures in the form of various entropies, for example, Shannon’s entropy, mutual information and Kullback–Leibler divergence, which are functions of an entropic basis in the form of a sequence of entropic moments of varying order. The entropicmoments collectively characterize the underlying probability distribution on the alphabet, and hence provide an opportunity to develop statistical procedures for their estimation. As such statistical development becomes an increasingly important line of research in modern data science, the relationship between the underlying distribution and the asymptotic behavior of the entropic moments, as the order increases, becomes a technical issue of fundamental importance. This paper offers a general methodology to capture the relationship between the rates of divergence of the entropic moments and the types of underlying distributions, for a special class of distributions. As an application of the established results, it is demonstrated that the asymptotic normality of the remarkable Turing’s formula for missing probabilities holds under distributions with much thinner tails than those previously known.

This chapter explores the similarities and differences between classical statistics, mathematical analysis, and modern data science in educational leadership and management. It defines classical statistics, covering descriptive statistics, regression, hypothesis testing, time series, and clustering while emphasizing mathematical analysis as a tool for refining models, optimizing solutions, and enhancing interpretability. The chapter examines data science practices, assessing their integration into quantitative analysis. It discusses the philosophical foundations of quantitative analysis, the principles behind inference, and technological advances in data science. Finally, it evaluates data science's role in management, emphasizing AI, big data, and multidisciplinary approaches. Mathematical analysis enhances algorithm stability, predictive modeling, and decision-making, reinforcing the synergy between these fields. Their integration fosters sophisticated and effective analyses in education and management.