Acknowledgments I am grateful to those who are involved in the research project, conducted t the graduate School of Engineering, Kobe University, on neural, fuzzy, d support vector machine-based classifiers and function approximators, for their efforts in developing new methods and programs. Discussions with Dr Seiichi Ozawa were always helpful. Special thanks are due to them and current graduate and undergraduate students: T Inoue, K. Sakaguchi, T. Takigawa F. Takahashi, Y. Hirokawa, T Nishikawa, K. Kaieda, Y Koshiba, D. Tsujin- shi, Y. Miyamoto, S. Katagiri, T. Yamasaki, T. Kikuchi, K. Morikawa, Y ihara, Y. Torii, N. Matsui, Y. Hosokawa, T. Nagatani, K. Morikawa. T. Ishii. K. Iwamura. T. Kitamura. S. Muraoka. S. Takeuchi. Y Tajiri, and R. Yabuwaki; and a then PhD student T. Ban I thank A. Ralescu for having used my draft version of the book as a duate course text and having given me many useful comments. Thanks are also due to V. Kecman, H Nakayama, S. Miyamoto, J. A. K. Suykens, F. Anouar, G. C Cawley, H Motoda, A Inoue, F Schwenker Lu and J. T. Dearmon for their valuable discussions and useful comments This book includes my students' and my papers published in journals and proceedings of international conferences. I must thank many anony ous reviewers who reviewed our papers for their constructive comments and pointing out errors and missing references in improving the papers and consequently my book The Internet was a valuable source of information in writing the book preparingthesecondeditionIextensivelyusedScoPus(hTtps://www. scopus.com/home.url)tocheckthewell-citedpapersandtriedtoinclude those papers that are relevant to my book. Most of the papers listed in References were obtained from the Internet, from either authors home pages free downloadable sites such EsanN:http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/esann/proceedings /electronicproceedings htm papersAcknowledgments I am grateful to those who are involved in the research project, conducted at the Graduate School of Engineering, Kobe University, on neural, fuzzy, and support vector machine-based classifiers and function approximators, for their efforts in developing new methods and programs. Discussions with Dr. Seiichi Ozawa were always helpful. Special thanks are due to them and current graduate and undergraduate students: T. Inoue, K. Sakaguchi, T. Takigawa, F. Takahashi, Y. Hirokawa, T. Nishikawa, K. Kaieda, Y. Koshiba, D. Tsujin￾ishi, Y. Miyamoto, S. Katagiri, T. Yamasaki, T. Kikuchi, K. Morikawa, Y. Kamata, M. Ashihara, Y. Torii, N. Matsui, Y. Hosokawa, T. Nagatani, K. Morikawa, T. Ishii, K. Iwamura, T. Kitamura, S. Muraoka, S. Takeuchi, Y. Tajiri, and R. Yabuwaki; and a then PhD student T. Ban. I thank A. Ralescu for having used my draft version of the book as a graduate course text and having given me many useful comments. Thanks are also due to V. Kecman, H. Nakayama, S. Miyamoto, J. A. K. Suykens, F. Anouar, G. C. Cawley, H. Motoda, A. Inoue, F. Schwenker, N. Kasabov, B.-L. Lu, and J. T. Dearmon for their valuable discussions and useful comments. This book includes my students’ and my papers published in journals and proceedings of international conferences. I must thank many anony￾mous reviewers who reviewed our papers for their constructive comments and pointing out errors and missing references in improving the papers and consequently my book. The Internet was a valuable source of information in writing the book. In preparing the second edition, I extensively used SCOPUS (https://www. scopus.com/home.url) to check the well-cited papers and tried to include those papers that are relevant to my book. Most of the papers listed in References were obtained from the Internet, from either authors’ home pages or free downloadable sites such as ESANN: http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/esann/proceedings /electronicproceedings.htm JMLR: http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/papers/ xi