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Abstract: Increasing our understanding of typhoon movements remains a priority in the western North Pacific. In this study, the trajectories of typhoons that affected Taiwan between 1986 and 2010 are used for clustering, where each trajectory consists of 6-hourly latitude-longitude positions over two days. We compare the performance of four statistical clustering methods, namely, k-means clustering, fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering, hierarchical clustering, and normalized cut techniques. The results show that the FCM technique provides sufficient cluster efficiency with a relatively high degree of goodness of fit. FCM identifies six clusters according to the minimum coefficients of variation (CV). The hotspots of the typhoon centers in each cluster are determined by kernel density estimation (KDE). Moreover, the typhoon track belongs to six clusters with different membership degrees in FCM. The typhoon track density map is estimated by combining the KDE hotspot maps associated with the FCM weights. The information could be used in planning for disaster management. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Finding an efficient method to detect counterfeit banknotes is an imperative task in business transactions. In this paper, we propose a system based on multiple-kernel support vector machines for counterfeit banknote recognition. A support vector machine (SVM) to minimize false rates is developed. Each banknote is divided into partitions and the luminance histograms of the partitions are taken as the input of the system. Each partition is associated with its own kernels. Linearly weighted combination is adopted to combine multiple kernels into a combined matrix. Optimal weights with kernel matrices in the combination are obtained through semi-definite programming (SDP) learning. Two strategies are adopted to reduce the amount of time and space required by the SDP method. One strategy assumes the non-negativity of the kernel weights, and the other one is to set the sum of the weights to be unity. Experiments with Taiwanese banknotes show that the proposed approach outperforms single-kernel SVMs, standard SVMs with SDP, and multiple-SVM classifiers. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]