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The pulp and paper industry is critical to global industrial and economic development. Recently, India's pulp and paper industries have been facing severe competitive challenges. The challenges have impaired the environmental performance and resulted in the closure of several operations. Assessment and prediction of the performance of the Indian pulp and paper industry using various parameters is a critical task for researchers. This study proposes a framework for performance assessment and prediction based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), Artificial Neural Networks, and Deep Learning (DL) to assist industry administration and decision-making. We presented a case study based on eight industries to demonstrate the methodology's applicability. This study analyses and predicts industry performance based on sample data observations over 30 years. The result suggests the DEA-DL-based efficiency prediction has an overall MSE of 0.08 compared with the actual efficiency. Furthermore, the efficiency rankings are compared between the three techniques. The results suggest that the integrated DEA-DL method is primarily accurate in most scenarios with the actual values. The findings of this study provide a comprehensive analysis of environmental performance for policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every contact centre engages in some form of Call Quality Monitoring in order to improve agent performance and customer satisfaction. Call centres have traditionally used a manual process to sort, select, and analyse a representative sample of interactions for evaluation purposes. Unfortunately, such a process is marked by subjectivity, which in turn results in a distorted picture of agent performance. To address the challenge of identifying and removing subjectivity, empirical research is required. In this paper, we introduce an evidence-based, machine learning-driven framework for the automatic detection of subjective calls. We analyse a corpus of seven hours of recorded calls from a real-estate call centre using Deep Neural Network (DNN) for a multi-classification problem. The study establishes the first baseline for subjectivity detection, with an accuracy of 75%, which is comparable to relevant speech studies in emotional recognition and performance classification. We conclude, among other things, that in order to achieve the best performance evaluation, subjective calls should be removed from the evaluation process or subjective scores deducted from the overall results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the significant challenges in the sports industry is identifying the factors influencing match results and their respective weightage. For appropriate recommendations to the team management and the team players, there is a need to predict the match and quantify the important factors for which prediction models need to be developed. The second thing required is identifying talented and emerging players and performing an associative analysis of the important factors to the match-winning outcome. This paper formulates a hybrid machine learning-clustering-associative rules model. This paper also implements the framework for cricket matches, one of the most popular sports globally watched by billions around the world. We predict the match outcome for One day Internationals (ODIs) and Twenty 20 s (T20s) (two formats of Cricket representing fifty over and twenty over versions respectively) adopting state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, and Deep neural networks. The variable importance is computed using machine-learning techniques and further statistically validated through the regression model. The emerging talented players are identified by clustering. Association rules are generated for determining the best possible winning outcome. The results show that environmental conditions are equally crucial for determining a match result, as are internal quantitative factors. The model is thus helpful for both team management and for players to improve their winning strategy and also for discovering emerging players to form an unbeatable team. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of contaminants in metal alloys products is the main problem affecting the product quality, which is an important requirement for competitiveness in industries. This paper proposes the application of a relevance vector machine for regression (RVR) and a support vector machine for regression (SVR) optimized by a self-adaptive differential evolution algorithm for regression to model the phosphorus concentration levels in a steelmaking process based on actual data. In general, the appropriate choice of learning hyperparameters is a crucial step in obtaining a well-tuned RVM and SVM. To address this issue, we apply a self-adaptive differential evolution algorithm, which is an evolutionary algorithm for global optimization. We compare the performance of the RVR and SVR models with the ridge regression, multiple linear regression, model trees, artificial neural network, and random vector functional link neural network models. RVR and SVR models have smaller RMSE values and better performance than the other models. Our study indicates that the RVR and SVR models are adequate tools for predicting the phosphorus concentration levels in the steelmaking process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important composite indicators (CIs) to assess the development of countries or regions is the human development index (HDI) which is used by the United Nations (UN) to rank countries. HDI has three dimensions including healthy life, population education, and standard of living. A total of four different sub-indicators are defined for these three dimensions. The UN evaluates and ranks all countries using a simple arithmetic or geometric average of the sub-indicators and then categorizes the countries into four different groups based on their HDI scores. To measure the HDI, the benefit-of-the-doubt (BOD) model is used by researchers instead of the geometric mean. The conventional BOD model has some main drawbacks. The first is not accounting for data uncertainty, and the second is evaluating countries using different weights for the same sub-indicators. Furthermore, BOD model is not capable of predicting countries' future HDI scores. To overcome these deficiencies, this paper proposes a common weight fuzzy BOD (CWFBOD) model to measure the HDI scores. First, to take into account the uncertainty, data are considered fuzzy numbers, and a fuzzy BOD model (FBOD) is introduced. Then, to find a set of common weights for the three dimensions of HDI, the proposed FBOD model is transformed into a multiple-objective CWFBOD model. To convert and solve the multiple objective CWFBOD model to a single objective model, a fuzzy theory approach is used. In addition, of predicting the future HDI scores of countries, an artificial neural network (ANN) is designed and trained, where the original data on sub-indicators health, education, and income are considered as the features, and the HDI scores generated by CWBOD are assumed as the target of ANN. Finally, this study applies the fuzzy C-Means clustering technique to cluster all countries into four different clusters based on the HDI scores generated by FBOD and CWFBOD models. To illustrate the ability of the proposed methodology, the HDI scores of 190 countries during the period of 2015–2021 have been estimated and predicted. The results show that the proposed integrated methodology can be effectively used to estimate and predict the HDI scores as well as to cluster countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is critical for data-driven decision making to increase resource utilization, operational performance, and service quality in various industry domains, particularly in healthcare. Using AI in healthcare operations can significantly improve treatment outcomes and enhance patient satisfaction while reducing costs. In this paper, we propose a multi-stage framework to build an AI-based decision support tool that can predict the 5-year survivability of lung cancer patients. We evaluate the proposed framework using the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results dataset pertaining to the 1973–2015 period obtained from the National Institutes of Health. The first stage entails data preprocessing and target creation. The second stage applies six AI algorithms with feature selection through Particle Swarm Optimization and hyperparameter tuning with Cross-Validation. These Algorithms include Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Random Forests (RF), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), Artificial Neural Network, and Naïve Bayes. The results show that RF and AdaBoost models yield an AUC rate of 0.94 and outperform the other models. Stage 3 utilizes permutation importance to interpret the RF and AdaBoost models and applies Tree-based Augmented Naïve Bayes to gain insights regarding the interrelations among important features. The results of Stage 3 delineate that the number of lymph nodes containing metastases), the number of tumors that patients have had in their lifetime, the patient's age, and the microscopic composition of cells rank among the topmost important features and can significantly impact patient survivability. We think this study has significant practical implications in helping physicians predict prognosis and develop treatment plans for lung cancer patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]