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The paper examines whether the structure of the risk factor disclosure in an IPO prospectus helps explain the cross-section of first-day returns in a sample of Chinese initial public offerings. This paper analyzes the semantics and content of risk disclosure based on an unsupervised machine learning algorithm. From both long-term and short-term perspectives, this paper explores how the information effect and risk effect of risk disclosure play their respective roles. The results show that risk disclosure has a stronger risk effect at the semantic novelty level and a more substantial information effect at the risk content level. A novel aspect of the paper lies in the use of text analysis (semantic novelty and content richness) to characterize the structure of the risk factor disclosure. The study shows that initial IPO returns negatively correlate with semantic novelty and content richness. We show the interaction between risk effect and information effect on risk disclosure under the nature of the same stock plate. When enterprise information transparency is low, the impact of semantic novelty and content richness on the IPO market is respectively enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Operations in areas of importance to society are frequently modeled as mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problems. While MILP problems suffer from combinatorial complexity, Lagrangian Relaxation has been a beacon of hope to resolve the associated difficulties through decomposition. Due to the non-smooth nature of Lagrangian dual functions, the coordination aspect of the method has posed serious challenges. This paper presents several significant historical milestones (beginning with Polyak's pioneering work in 1967) toward improving Lagrangian Relaxation coordination through improved optimization of non-smooth functionals. Finally, this paper presents the most recent developments in Lagrangian Relaxation for fast resolution of MILP problems. The paper also briefly discusses the opportunities that Lagrangian Relaxation can provide at this point in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We carry on a long term analysis for Bitcoin price, which is currently among the most renowned crypto assets available on markets other than Forex. In the last decade Bitcoin has been under spotlights among traders all world wide, both because of its nature of pseudo–currency and for the high volatility its price has frequently experienced. Considering that Bitcoin price has earned over five orders of magnitude since 2009, the interest of investors has been increasingly motivated by the necessity of accurately predicting its value, not to mention that a comparative analysis with other assets as silver and gold has been under investigation, too. This paper reports two approaches for a long term Bitcoin price prediction. The first one follows more standard paradigms from regression and least squares frameworks. Our main contribution in this regard fosters conclusions which are able to justify the cyclic performance of Bitcoin price, in terms of its Stock–to–Flow. Our second approach is definitely novel in the literature, and indicates guidelines for long term forecasts of Bitcoin price based on Machine Learning (ML) methods, with a specific reference to Support Vector Machines (SVMs). Both these approaches are inherently data–driven, and the second one does not require any of the assumptions typically needed by solvers for classic regression problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islamic banking is among rapidly-growing components in the world's financial system. Within its institutions, continuous criteria of efficiency facilitate the evaluation of the impact of the reforms and policies on the banks' performance. In this paper, we employ the Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS) method for estimating the efficiency of Islamic banks in developed and developing countries. MARS is a well-known efficient method for the flexible modelling of high-dimensional data. Unlike previous work, using a nonparametric technique of such a robustness instead of parametric approaches contributes to the improvement of the various estimates, which provides investors with accurate and timely information they can immediately react upon for a better decision-making in turbulent times. On the one hand, the results of the experiments show that, in the emerging region, there is evidence of a strong linkage between Islamic banking efficiency and gross domestic product. On the other hand, in the developed region, the efficiency is rather based upon Sharia Supervisory Board and board committees. These outcomes confirm previous works showing that governance-related variables have a significant positive effect on Islamic banking efficiency. Furthermore, the overall MARS-based predictions reveal that Islamic banks operating in developed countries are relatively more efficient than their counterparts in emerging countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monte-Carlo based valuation in life insurance involves the simulation of various components of the balance sheet: portfolios, guarantees, assets mix, market conditions and many other specific risk factors; which can be time-consuming. In view of the time needed to achieve this task, insurers are then facing a trade-off of balancing the number of simulations against the uncertainty surrounding the estimated quantity. In the current paper, we propose a variance-reduction methodology using a machine learning technique. It roots from the unsupervised learning literature in conjunction with the quantization of random processes. The goal is to reduce the number of simulated Brownian paths, using auxiliary scenarios that can be seen as path clusters, which efficiently and accurately approximate the initial ones with regards to an adequate measure of distance. Moreover, we introduce penalty to accommodate for various inputs of the initial conditions of risk factors. By doing so, we implicitly assign labels to the scenarios and thus advocate using a semi-supervised learning to enhance the performance of the scenarios reduction by imposing an additional impurity condition on the clusters based on these labels. This is made possible thanks to a decomposition property of the insurers cash-flows, which allows to disentangle the initial conditions of risk factors from the Brownian motions driving their dynamics. The training of the proposed learning algorithm is based on an adaptation of the well-known k-means algorithm. An intensive numerical study is carried out over a range of simulation setups to compare the performances of the proposed methodology. We show, numerically, that the proposed methodology outperforms some classical variance reduction approach. Also, using a real-life dataset, we show that our methodology outperforms some conventional variance reduction used by life insurance practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial institutions, investors, mining companies and related firms need an effective accurate forecasting model to examine gold price fluctuations in order to make correct decisions. This paper proposes an innovative approach to accurately forecast gold price movements and to interpret predictions. First, it compares six machine learning models. These models include two very recent methods: the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and CatBoost. The empirical findings indicate the superiority of XGBoost over other advanced machine learning models. Second, it proposes Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) in order to help policy makers to interpret the predictions of complex machine learning models and to examine the importance of various features that affect gold prices. Our results illustrate that the utilization of XGBoost along with SHAP approach could provide a significant boost in increasing the gold price forecasting performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Payment cards offer a simple and convenient method for making purchases. Owing to the increase in the usage of payment cards, especially in online purchases, fraud cases are on the rise. The rise creates financial risk and uncertainty, as in the commercial sector, it incurs billions of losses each year. However, real transaction records that can facilitate the development of effective predictive models for fraud detection are difficult to obtain, mainly because of issues related to confidentially of customer information. In this paper, we apply a total of 13 statistical and machine learning models for payment card fraud detection using both publicly available and real transaction records. The results from both original features and aggregated features are analyzed and compared. A statistical hypothesis test is conducted to evaluate whether the aggregated features identified by a genetic algorithm can offer a better discriminative power, as compared with the original features, in fraud detection. The outcomes positively ascertain the effectiveness of using aggregated features for undertaking real-world payment card fraud detection problems. [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]

As the only largest source of revenue and cost in a hospital, the operation room (OR) scheduling problem is a hot research topic. Nonetheless, an integrated model is the missing key to managing and improving the efficiency of ORs. This paper presents a fully integrated model regarding three concepts: meditating elective patients and emergency patients together, considering ORs and downstream units, and proposing hierarchical weekly, daily, and rescheduling models. Due to the inherent randomness in emergency patient arrival, a random forest machine learning model and geographical information systems are used to obtain the emergency patient surgery duration and arrival time, respectively. According to the machine learning model in weekly and daily scheduling, initially, fixed capacity is reserved for emergency patients. When an emergency patient arrives, the surgery starts if a reserved OR is available. Otherwise, the first available OR will be dedicated to the patient due to an emergency patient's higher priority than an elective patient. In this case, it is needed to reschedule the OT schedule for the remaining patient. Moreover, the three-phase model guarantees that an emergency patient assigns to an OR within a specific time limit. To solve the models, genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization are developed and compared. In addition, a real-world case study is undertaken at a hospital. The results of comparing the proposed approach to the hospital's current scheduling show that the three-phase model had a considerable positive effect on the ORs schedule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, investors face challenges in understanding price dynamics across assets. This paper explores the performance of the various type of machine learning algorithms (MLAs) to predict mid-price movement for Bitcoin futures prices. We use high-frequency intraday data to evaluate the relative forecasting performances across various time frequencies, ranging between 5 and 60-min. Our findings show that the average classification accuracy for five out of the six MLAs is consistently above the 50% threshold, indicating that MLAs outperform benchmark models such as ARIMA and random walk in forecasting Bitcoin futures prices. This highlights the importance and relevance of MLAs to produce accurate forecasts for bitcoin futures prices during the COVID-19 turmoil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study utilizes classification models to provide a robust algorithm for imbalanced data where the minority class is of the interest, that is, in the context of default payments. In developing an integrated predictive accuracy algorithm, this study proposes machine learning classifiers and applies DNN, SVM, KNN, and ANN. The proposed algorithm utilizes a 30,000 imbalanced dataset to improve the accuracy of the prediction of default payments by implementing oversampling and undersampling strategies, such as synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE), SVM SMOTE, random undersampling, and ALL-KNN. The results indicate that the SVM under the ALL-KNN sampling technique is able to achieve an accuracy of 98.6%, with the lowest cross entropy loss measurement of 0.028. Through the accurate implementation of the neural networks and neurons used in the proposed algorithm, this paper presents better insights into the functioning of the neural networks when used in conjunction with the resampling techniques. Using the methodology and algorithm presented in this study, credit risk assessments can be more accurately predicted in practical applications where most of the clients are categorized as non-default payments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is standard cardiology practice for patients suffering from ventricular arrhythmias (the main cause of sudden cardiac death) belonging to high risk populations to be treated via the implantation of Subcutaneous Implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (S-ICDs). S-ICDs carry a risk of so-called T wave over sensing (TWOS), which can lead to inappropriate shocks that carry an inherent health risk. For this reason, according to current practice patients' Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are manually screened by a cardiologist over 10 s to assess the T:R ratio—the ratio between the amplitudes of the T and R waves which is used as a marker for the likelihood of TWOS—with a plastic template. Unfortunately, the temporal variability of a patient' T:R ratio can render such a screening procedure, which relies on an inevitably short ECG segment due to its manual nature, unreliable. In this paper, we propose and investigate a tool based on deep learning for the automatic prediction of the T:R ratios from multiple 10-second segments of ECG recordings capable of carrying out a 24-hour automated screening. Thanks to the significantly increased screening window, such a screening would provide far more reliable T:R ratio predictions than the currently utilized 10-second, template-based, manual screening is capable of. Our tool is the first, to the best of our knowledge, to fully automate such an otherwise manual and potentially inaccurate procedure. From a methodological perspective, we evaluate different deep learning model architectures for our tool, assess a range of stochastic-gradient-descent-based optimization methods for training their underlying deep-learning model, perform hyperparameter tuning, and create ensembles of the best performing models in order to identify which combination leads to the best performance. We find that the resulting model, which has been integrated into a prototypical tool for use by clinicians, is able to predict T:R ratios with very high accuracy. Thanks to this, our automated T:R ratio detection tool will enable clinicians to provide a completely automated assessment of whether a patient is eligible for S-ICD implantation which is more reliable than current practice thanks to adopting a significantly longer ECG screening window which better and more accurately captures the behavior of the patient's T:R ratio than the current manual practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gastric Cancer is the most common malignancy of the digestive tract, which is the third leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. The early prognosis methods, especially Machine Learning (ML)-based approaches are one of the main strategies against GC, which have become a necessity to identify and prognosticate the factors that affect the GC. They enable the specialists to accelerate the subsequent clinical management of patients, who suffer from the GC. This paper aims at creating an Ensemble Method inspired from ML to predict the most significant factors of the GC occurrence. The main objective of this research is to predict the probabilities of the GC occurrence and its associated deaths. To achieve this goal, the created EM benefits from some ML-based methods, including Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO)/Ridge Regression, Elastic Net, Logistic Regression (LR), Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs), and Deep Neural Network (DNN). The purpose of the provided EM is to lessen the prediction errors for the large number of the patients' features. The main novelties of this research include: (i) A sequential EM created by a Stacking method to predict the probability of the GC and associated deaths; (ii) Benefiting from the significance level to make an accurate prediction; (iii) Employing two Chi-square tests to select the influent features; (iv) Tuning the parameters of the applied ML models to avoid over-fitting and intensifying the errors; (v) Applying different kinds of the regression methods to treat hyper-dimension cases; (vi) A new model for weighting the applied ML models. The outcomes of the implementation of the created EM in seven pioneer hospitals in the field of GC show that the designed EM generates more precise predictions with an accuracy of 97.9% and 76.3% to predict the GC and its associated deaths, respectively. Moreover, the obtained results from the Area Under Curve (AUC) validates and confirms the capability of the created EM to predict the probability of the GC and its related deaths with an accuracy of 98% and 90% to predict the GC and its associated deaths, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, breast cancer has become one of the leading causes of mortality among women. This disease is not preventable because of its unknown causes; however, its early diagnosis increases patients' recovery chances. Machine learning (ML) can be utilized to improve treatment outcomes in healthcare operations while diminishing costs and time. In this research, we suggest two novel feature selection (FS) methods based upon an imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) and a bat algorithm (BA) and their combination with ML algorithms. This study aims to enhance diagnostic models' efficiency and present a comprehensive analysis to help clinical physicians make more precise and reliable decisions. K-nearest neighbors (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), decision tree (DT), Naive Bayes, AdaBoost (AB), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), random forest (RF), logistic regression (LR), and artificial neural network (ANN) are some of the methods employed. Sensitivity, accuracy, precision, mean absolute error F-score, root mean square error, Kappa, and relative absolute error calculated the performance of the methods. This paper applied a distinctive integration of evaluation measures and ML algorithms using the wrapper feature selection based on ICA (WFSIC) and BA (WFSB) separately. We compared two proposed approaches for the performance of the classifiers. Also, we compared our best diagnostic model with previous works reported in the literature survey. Experimentations were performed on the Wisconsin diagnostic breast cancer (WDBC) dataset. Results reveal that the proposed framework that uses the BA with an accuracy of 99.12% surpasses the framework using the ICA and most previous works. Additionally, the RF classifier in the approach of FS based on BA emerges as the best model and outperforms others regarding its criteria. Besides, the results illustrate the role of our techniques in reducing the dataset dimensions up to 90% and increasing the performance of diagnostic models by over 99%. Moreover, the result demonstrates that there are more critical features than the optimum dataset obtained by proposed FS approaches that have been selected by most ML models, including the standard error of area, concavity, smoothness, perimeter, the worst of texture, compactness, radius, symmetry, smoothness, concavity, and the mean of concave points, fractal dimension, compactness, concavity that can remarkably affect the efficiency of breast cancer prediction. This study illustrates the role of our approaches in enhancing treatment outcomes in healthcare operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimization models typically seek to maximize overall benefit or minimize total cost. Yet fairness is an important element of many practical decisions, and it is much less obvious how to express it mathematically. We provide a critical survey of various schemes that have been proposed for formulating ethics-related criteria, including those that integrate efficiency and fairness concerns. The survey covers inequality measures, Rawlsian maximin and leximax criteria, convex combinations of fairness and efficiency, alpha fairness and proportional fairness (also known as the Nash bargaining solution), Kalai–Smorodinsky bargaining, and recently proposed utility-threshold and fairness-threshold schemes for combining utilitarian with maximin or leximax criteria. The paper also examines group parity metrics that are popular in machine learning. We present what appears to be the best practical approach to formulating each criterion in a linear, nonlinear, or mixed integer programming model. We also survey axiomatic and bargaining derivations of fairness criteria from the social choice literature while taking into account interpersonal comparability of utilities. Finally, we cite relevant philosophical and ethical literature where appropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes tools for spatial performance analysis in basketball. In detail, we aim at representing maps of the court visualizing areas with different levels of scoring probability of the analysed player or team. To do that, we propose the adoption of algorithmic modeling techniques. Firstly, following previous studies, we examine CART, highlighting strengths and weaknesses. With respect to what done in the past, here we propose the use of polar coordinates, which are more consistent with the basketball court geometry. In order to overcome CART's drawbacks while maintaining its points of force, we propose to resort to CART-based ensemble learning algorithms, namely to Random Forest and Extremely Randomized Trees, which are shown to be able to give excellent results in terms of interpretation and robustness. Finally, an index is defined in order to measure the map's graphical goodness, which can be used—jointly with measures of the out-of-sample error—to tune the algorithm's parameters. The functioning of the proposed approaches is shown by the analysis of real data of the NBA regular season 2020/2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fantasy Sports allows individuals to assemble a virtual team to participate in free or paid tournaments and earn rewards. Selecting a good team forms a crucial decision in fantasy cricket. Existing team selection methods cater only to professional cricket and are not suited well to accommodate the differences between fantasy cricket and the on-field game. This paper proposes a two-step methodology for player assessment and team selection in fantasy cricket. Player assessment is carried out using recursive feature elimination in random forest, in which context relevant player metrics are considered and the selection of players is based on modified genetic algorithm. We illustrate the efficacy of the proposed method on Dream11, a popular fantasy sports application. The results show that the proposed method outshines the traditional team selection process in fantasy sports, which is based on hit and trial. Furthermore, we provide a typology to analyse the proposed algorithm along the dimensions of reward distribution and entry fee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid model that extends prior work involving ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) by using fuzzy entropy and extreme learning machine (ELM) methods. We demonstrate this 3-stage model by applying it to forecast carbon futures prices which are characterized by chaos and complexity. First, we employ the EEMD method to decompose carbon futures prices into a couple of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and one residue. Second, the fuzzy entropy and K-means clustering methods are used to reconstruct the IMFs and the residue to obtain three reconstructed components, specifically a high frequency series, a low frequency series, and a trend series. Third, the ARMA model is implemented for the stationary high and low frequency series, while the extreme learning machine (ELM) model is utilized for the non-stationary trend series. Finally, all the component forecasts are aggregated to form final forecasts of the carbon price for each model. The empirical results show that the proposed reconstruction algorithm can bring more than 40% improvement in prediction accuracy compared to the traditional fine-to-coarse reconstruction algorithm under the same forecasting framework. The hybrid forecasting model proposed in this paper also well captures the direction of the price changes, with strong and robust forecasting ability, which is significantly better than the single forecasting models and the other hybrid forecasting models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze the green efficiency performance of the logistics industry in China's 30 provinces from 2008 to 2017. We first evaluate the green efficiency of the logistics industry through the non-directional distance function method. Then, we use the functional clustering method funHDDC, which is one of the popular machine learning methods, to divide 30 provinces into 4 clusters and analyze the similarities and differences in green efficiency performance patterns among different groups. Further, we explore the driving factors of dynamic changes in green efficiency through the decomposition method. The main conclusions of this paper are as follows: (1) in general, the level of green efficiency is closely related to the geographical location. From the clustering results, we can find that most of the eastern regions belong to the cluster with higher green efficiency, while most of the western regions belong to the cluster with lower green efficiency. However, the green efficiency performance in several regions with high economic levels, such as Beijing and Shanghai, is not satisfactory. (2) Based on the analysis of decomposition results, the innovation effect of China's logistics industry is the most obvious, but the efficiency change still needs to be improved, and technical leadership should be strengthened. Based on these conclusions, we further propose some policy recommendations for the green development of the logistics industry in China. [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]

Support vector machine (SVM) is one of the most important class of machine learning models and algorithms, and has been successfully applied in various fields. Nonlinear optimization plays a crucial role in SVM methodology, both in defining the machine learning models and in designing convergent and efficient algorithms for large-scale training problems. In this paper we present the convex programming problems underlying SVM focusing on supervised binary classification. We analyze the most important and used optimization methods for SVM training problems, and we discuss how the properties of these problems can be incorporated in designing useful algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As stock data is characterized by highly noisy and non-stationary, stock price prediction is regarded as a knotty problem. In this paper, we propose new two-stage ensemble models by combining empirical mode decomposition (EMD) (or variational mode decomposition (VMD)), extreme learning machine (ELM) and improved harmony search (IHS) algorithm for stock price prediction, which are respectively named EMD–ELM–IHS and VMD–ELM–IHS. Furthermore, to demonstrate the efficiency and performance of the proposed models, the results were compared with those obtained by other methods, including EMD based ELM (EMD–ELM), VMD based ELM (VMD–ELM), autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), ELM, multi-layer perception (MLP), support vector regression (SVR), and long short-term memory (LSTM) models. The results show that the proposed models have superior performance in terms of its accuracy and stability as compared to the other models. Also, we find that the sizes of sliding window and training set have a significant impact on the predictive performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study champions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance among the U.S. publicly traded firms and their common characteristics by utilizing machine learning algorithms to identify predictors of firms’ CSR activity. We contribute to the CSR and leadership determinants literature by introducing the first comprehensive framework for analyzing the factors associated with corporate engagement with socially responsible behaviors by grouping all relevant predictors into four broad categories: corporate governance, managerial incentives, leadership, and firm characteristics. We find that strong corporate governance characteristics, as manifested in board member heterogeneity and managerial incentives, are the top predictors of CSR performance. Our results suggest policy implications for providing incentives and fostering characteristics conducive to firms “doing good.” [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]

This paper reviews real estate price estimation in France, a market that has received little attention. We compare seven popular machine learning techniques by proposing a different approach that quantifies the relevance of location features in real estate price estimation with high and fine levels of granularity. We take advantage of a newly available open dataset provided by the French government that contains 5 years of historical data of real estate transactions. At a high level of granularity, we obtain important differences regarding the models' prediction powers between cities with medium and high standards of living (precision differences beyond 70% in some cases). At a low level of granularity, we use geocoding to add precise geographical location features to the machine learning algorithm inputs. We obtain important improvements regarding the models' forecasting powers relative to models trained without these features (improvements beyond 50% for some forecasting error measures). Our results also reveal that neural networks and random forest techniques particularly outperform other methods when geocoding features are not accounted for, while random forest, adaboost and gradient boosting perform well when geocoding features are considered. For identifying opportunities in the real estate market through real estate price prediction, our results can be of particular interest. They can also serve as a basis for price assessment in revenue management for durable and non-replenishable products such as real estate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection is a fundamental preprocessing step for many machine learning and pattern recognition systems. Notably, some mutual-information-based and correlation-based feature selection problems can be formulated as fractional programs with a single ratio of polynomial 0–1 functions. In this paper, we study approaches that ensure globally optimal solutions for these feature selection problems. We conduct computational experiments with several real datasets and report encouraging results. The considered solution methods perform well for medium- and reasonably large-sized datasets, where the existing mixed-integer linear programs from the literature fail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although data mining problems require a flat mining table as input, in many real-world applications analysts are interested in finding patterns in a relational database. To this end, new methods and software have been recently developed that automatically add attributes (or features) to a target table of a relational database which summarize information from all other tables. When attributes are automatically constructed by these methods, selecting the important attributes is particularly difficult, because a large number of the attributes are highly correlated. In this setting, attribute selection techniques such as the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (lasso), elastic net, and other machine learning methods tend to under-perform. In this paper, we introduce a novel attribute selection procedure, where after an initial screening step, we cluster the attributes into different groups and apply the group lasso to select both the true attributes groups and then the true attributes. The procedure is particularly suited to high dimensional data sets where the attributes are highly correlated. We test our procedure on several simulated data sets and a real-world data set from a marketing database. The results show that our proposed procedure obtains a higher predictive performance while selecting a much smaller set of attributes when compared to other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we adopt an ensemble machine learning framework—a Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) and develop an algorithmic credit rating prediction model by innovatively incorporating firms’ extra supply chain information both from suppliers and customers. By utilizing data from listed firms in North America from 2006 to 2020, our results find that the accuracy of the prediction improves by incorporating supply chain information in the previous year, compared to the inclusion of supply chain information in the current year. Besides, we identify the most important factors the stakeholders should pay attention to. Interestingly, we show that the models utilizing the current year’s information perform better after the strike of the COVID-19, indicating that the epidemics may have accelerated the spread of credit risk along the supply chain. Furthermore, supplier information is found to be more valuable than customer information in predicting the focal firm’s credit rating. A comparison of our framework with the existing methods vindicates the robustness of our main results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the utilization of artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions and systems is on the ascent. These technologies offer significant potential for optimizing services in today's interconnected world. AI and nature-inspired algorithms have emerged as promising approaches to tackle various challenges in WSNs, including enhancing network lifespan, data aggregation, connectivity, and achieving optimal coverage of the targeted area. Coverage optimization poses a significant problem in WSNs, and numerous algorithms have been proposed to address this issue. However, as the number of sensor nodes within the sensor range increases, these algorithms often encounter difficulties in escaping local optima. Hence, exploring alternative global metaheuristic and bio-inspired algorithms that can be adapted and combined to overcome local optima and achieve global optimization in resolving wireless sensor network coverage problems is crucial. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the current state-of-the-art literature on wireless sensor networks, coverage optimization, and the application of machine learning and nature-inspired algorithms to address coverage problems in WSNs. Additionally, we present unresolved research questions and propose new avenues for future investigations. By conducting bibliometric analysis, we have identified that binary and probabilistic sensing model are widely employed, target and k-barrier coverage are the most extensively studied coverage scenarios in WSNs, and genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization are the most commonly used nature-inspired algorithms for coverage problem analysis. This review aims to assist researchers in exploring coverage problems by harnessing the potential of nature-inspired and machine-learning algorithms. It provides valuable insights into the existing literature, identifies research gaps, and offers guidance for future studies in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognizing underprivileged students is a significant challenge in education. Machine learning algorithms have been increasingly used to develop reliable methods for identifying such students, but practical implementations are rarely reported. This paper explores a combination of the PSO algorithm and LightGBM algorithm, providing insights into the complete development process and comparing different machine learning techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model exhibits excellent performance in terms of training efficiency, requiring fewer resources than existing models. Furthermore, the model achieves high prediction accuracy and performs well on various evaluation metrics, such as MAE, MSE, RMSE, and R2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$R^{2}$$\end{document}. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new decomposition approach by separating realized covariation into components based on signs (positive and negative) and magnitudes (continuous, small jump, and large jump). The motivation behind this decomposition is that certain variation components can be more useful in forecasting than others. Including only “information-rich” components in realized (co)-variation forecasting models can improve predictive accuracy. Using various machine learning models, the marginal predictive content of each variation components can be assessed. The empirical exercise is based on all constituent of S &P 500 stocks between 2010 and 2019. We find that standard machine learning methods without the more granular variation measures offer limited improvement to out-of-sample fit (likely due to low signal-to-noise ratios) relative to benchmark HAR-type forecasting models. However, sparse models, which are specified using predictors selected using a first “variable selection” yield significant improvements in predictive accuracy when the decomposed variation measures are included. These predictive gains can be traced to the identification of short-lived pricing signals associated with co-jumps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of Industry 4.0, a wide range of sensors are extensively deployed to gather production and equipment operation data, while also connecting human workforce information through the industrial Internet of Things technology. This integration enables effective improvements in sustainable, human-centric, and resilient productivity by leveraging industrial process control and automation. In this paper, we propose an intelligent information system for analyzing large point cloud data sets from depth sensors, which are used for detecting, representing, locating, and shaping monitored objects. To address privacy concerns, our system only considers de-identified information during analysis, using a newly proposed dynamic clustering method based on multivariate mixture Student’s t-distribution for monitoring human motions. The information system consists of two main blocks: segmentation and dynamic clustering for monitoring or tracking. The segmentation algorithm, utilizing a multivariate mixture Student’s t-distribution, groups points into homogeneous partitions based on spatial proximity and surface normal similarity, without relying on any semantic indicator or pre-determined shape. The dynamic clustering algorithm, powered by an online learning state-space model, efficiently incorporates and updates the centroid position and velocity of the object being monitored. To evaluate the reliability of our proposed method, we introduce two time-consistent measures that account for different illumination levels, drastic limb movements, and partial or full occlusions during object motion processing. We conduct empirical experiments using a large point cloud data set, comparing our method with several alternative methods. The results highlight the superiority of our proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every year agribusinesses develop and market new seed varieties with traits desirable for different planting environments. When agribusinesses experiment the new varieties at different farms, data is generated about the performance of these new seed varieties. However, farmers do not have a decision support tool to process the vast amount of yield performance data to make an informed seed variety selection decision for their farm. An informed decision requires accurate estimation of yield performances of seed varieties on the targeted farmland and balancing trade-offs between the expected yield and the risk associated with the seed varieties selected to grow. This research uses a real data set provided by Syngenta—an agribusiness—to create a decision-support tool. The data set used in this research contains yield information of different soybean varieties experimented at different farms located in the Midwest of the US, as well as information on location, soil, and weather conditions prevailing in those farms. In addition to this data, we also surveyed soybean farmers to understand their preferences and current practices in choosing seed varieties to grow in their farms. We are the first to capture and document farmers’ preferences and practices in selecting and growing soybean varieties. The data collected from the survey enabled us to compare the results emerging from the proposed methodology with the status quo practices. Using the Syngenta data and survey responses, this paper proposes an analytics framework that integrates machine learning, clustering, simulation, and portfolio optimization to optimally select soybean varieties to grow at the target farm. We choose a machine learning model, which simulates the yield performance of soybean varieties under different plausible weather scenarios derived from the neighborhood of the target farm. The simulated yields are then used to estimate parameters in a portfolio optimization formulation that selects the optimal portfolio of seed varieties to grow at the target farm. The main methodological contribution of this research is in the development of an approach that integrates machine learning, clustering, simulation, and portfolio optimization to help farmers make an important decision. Specifically, we introduce a novel data-driven simulation-based approach to estimate the parameters needed to solve a portfolio optimization problem. Our analysis indicates that an average farmer will gain as much as $177,369 per year in revenue by utilizing the analytics framework introduced in this research. The methodology developed in this research can be applied to variety selection decisions for other crops and influence farming practice positively. By embracing the machine learning and analytics powered framework introduced in this paper, agribusinesses can position themselves as the innovation leader and create business value by unleashing the potential of the scientific discoveries of agronomy to offer tailored farming decision support to individual farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rating prediction is a crucial element of business analytics as it enables decision-makers to assess service performance based on expressive customer feedback. Enhancing rating score predictions and demand forecasting through incorporating performance features from verbatim text fields, particularly in service quality measurement and customer satisfaction modelling is a key objective in various areas of analytics. A range of methods has been identified in the literature for improving the predictability of customer feedback, including simple bag-of-words-based approaches and advanced supervised machine learning models, which are designed to work with response variables such as Likert-based rating scores. This paper presents a dynamic model that incorporates values from topic membership, an outcome variable from Latent Dirichlet Allocation, with sentiment analysis in an Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model used for rating prediction. The results show that, by incorporating features from simple unsupervised machine learning approaches (LDA-based), an 86% prediction accuracy (AUC based) can be achieved on objective rating values. At the same time, a combination of polarity and single-topic membership can yield an even higher accuracy when compared with sentiment text detection tasks both at the document and sentence levels. This study carries significant practical implications since sentiment analysis tasks often require dictionary coverage and domain-specific adjustments depending on the task at hand. To further investigate this result, we used Shapley Additive Values to determine the additive predictability of topic membership values in combination with sentiment-based methods using a dataset of customer reviews from food delivery services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine learning and deep learning are powerful tools for quantitative investment. To examine the effectiveness of the models in different markets, this paper applies random forest and DNN models to forecast stock prices and construct statistical arbitrage strategies in five stock markets, including mainland China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan. Each model is applied to the price of major stock indices constituting stocks in these markets from 2005 to 2020 to construct a long-short portfolio with 20 selected stocks by the model. The results show that the a particular model obtains significantly different profits in different markets, among which DNN has the best performance, especially in the Chinese stock market. We find that DNN models generally perform better than other machine learning models in all markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twin support vector machine (TSVM) is an effective machine learning tool for classification problems. However, TSVM classifier works on empirical risk principle only and also while training, each sample contributes equally, even if it is a noise or an outlier. It does not incorporate the uncertainties associated with data into modeling and hence its generalization ability declines. To address these issues, intuitionistic fuzzy regularized least square twin support vector machine having intuitionistic fuzzy network has been proposed in this paper. The non-parallel classifiers are obtained by solving two systems of linear equations only rather than the solution of two quadratic programming problems as in TSVM, which leads to speed up the training process. Moreover, the method follows both structural risk and empirical risk minimization principles. In order to de-escalate the effect of pollutant patterns, their contribution of the patterns into learning the decision function has been made according to their importance in the classification. The significance of the training patterns is measured in terms of intuitionistic fuzzy numbers based on their geometrical locations and surroundings. The method is further extended to find non-parallel decision planes in the feature space using nonlinear kernel function, which also gives rise to the solution of two systems of linear equations. To show the efficacy of the proposed method, computer simulations on fourteen standard and six big UCI datasets using linear and Gaussian kernels are performed and their results have been compared with well-established methods in the literature. The experimental results are represented in terms of accuracy, computational time, F-measure, sensitivity and specificity rates. The outcomes demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods and is also feasible for big datasets. The comparison and statistical inferences using two non-parametric: Friedman and Nemenyi tests, conclude that the proposed approach is fast and yields better generalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]