The Prague Conferences on Information Theory, Statistical Decision Functions, and Random Processes have been organized every three years since 1956. During the eighteen years of their existence the Prague Conferences developed from a platform for presenting results obtained by a small group of researchers into a probabilistic congress, this being documented by the increasing number of participants as well as of presented papers. The importance of the Seventh Prague Conference has been emphasized by the fact that this Conference was held jointly with the eighth European Meeting of Statisticians. This joint meeting was held from August 18 to 23, 1974 at the Technical University of Prague. The Conference was organized by the Institute of Information Theory and Automation of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and was sponsored by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, by the Committee for the European Region of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and by the International As sociation for Statistics in Physical Sciences. More than 300 specialists from 25 countries participated in the Conference. In 57 sessions 164 papers (including 17 invited papers) were read, 128 of which are published in the present two volumes of the Transactions of the Conference. Volume A includes papers related mainly to probability theory and stochastic processes, whereas the papers of Volume B concern mainly statistics and information theory.

Applied Stochastic Processes is a collection of papers dealing with stochastic processes, stochastic equations, and their applications in many fields of science. One paper discusses stochastic systems involving randomness in the system itself that can be a large dynamical multi-input, multi-output system. Examples of a large system are the national economy of a major country or when an acoustic wave is propagating as in the atmosphere, ocean, or sea. Another paper proves that only the average properties of the molecules of biology can be measured with precision in the test tube; and disputes a "simplistic" model of the cell as defined by a miniature Laplaces' universe. The paper notes that the way existing cells are constructed implies that quantum mechanical principles lead to certain questions (about simple experiments) having only statistical answers. Another paper addresses the detection of distributed, fluctuating targets in a reverberation limited, randomly time, and space varying transmission media. This approach is done by using the concepts of "random Green's functions" and the "stochastic Green's function." The collection will prove useful for cellular researchers, mathematicians, physicist, engineers, and academicians in the field of applied mathematics, statistics, and chemistry.

1981- in 2 v.: v.1, Subject index; v.2, Title index, Publisher/title index, Association name index, Acronym index, Key to publishers' and distributors' abbreviations.

An attempt was made to place the relationship between recognition and classification on the one hand and between theory and application of statistical classification on the other hand, in proper perspective. Compound decision theory is the latest step in the evolution of the most general model in which to imbed statistical classification problems arising in recognition system design. For the nonformalizable aspects of design, interactive approaches, namely those in which the human is part of the loop in the design process, with different classification and heuristic algorithms at his call, seem to be most promising. (Author).