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Purpose: Taiwan experiences frequent seismic activity. Major earthquakes in recent history have seriously damaged the school buildings. School buildings in Taiwan are intended to serve both as places of education and as temporary shelters in the aftermath of major earthquakes. Therefore, the seismic performance assessments of school buildings are critical issues that deserve investigation. Design/methodology/approach: This paper develops a methodology that uses principal component analysis to generalize the seismic factors from the basic seismic parameters of school buildings, uses data mining to cluster different school building sizes and uses grey theory to analyze the relationship between seismic factors and the seismic performance of school buildings. Additionally, this paper employs the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to deduce the seismic assessment model for school buildings. Finally, it adopts support vector machine to validate the ANN's deductive results. Findings: An empirical study was conducted on 326 school buildings in the central area of Taichung City, Taiwan, to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Results show that thickness of wall and width of middle-row column relate significantly with school-building seismic performance. Originality/value: This paper provides a model that structural engineers or architects may use to design school buildings that are adequately resistant to earthquakes as well as a reference for future academic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent studies, artificial intelligence models have been developed for the prediction of nitrogen oxide emissions from thermal power plants. This research utilizes an artificial intelligence prediction model with more coal input features than boiler features, including volatility, ash content, sulfur content, fixed carbon, total moisture, calorific value, grinding rate, fuel ratio, coal feeding rate, boiler efficiency, total air volume, and excess air volume. The paper delves into the importance analysis of input features for artificial intelligence models. Moreover, feature importance analysis is not only a prerequisite for predicting nitrogen oxide emissions but also a study providing insights into model performance. An artificial neural networks (ANN) regression model is employed to predict nitrogen oxide emissions, and the results demonstrate that the number of feature importance significantly impacts model performance. The best model performance is achieved with eight specific input features. Finally, after the training and validation processes, the ANN model yields the optimal coefficient of determination (R2) value. • Development of an artificial intelligence prediction model for nitrogen oxide emissions from thermal power plants. • A comprehensive set of input features is utilized for emissions prediction. • Importance analysis of input features significantly impacts model performance. • Optimal model performance was achieved with eight specific input features. • The robust coefficient of determination (R2) value demonstrates the accuracy of the ANN model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: It is essential to forecast the variation of storm surge in coastal areas during the typhoon attacks. Conventional investigations of storm surge often used the method of numerical hydrodynamic models or empirical formula. In this paper, the back-propagation neural network (BPN) is applied to predict the short-term typhoon surge and surge deviation in order to overcome the problem of exclusive and nonlinear relationships. The observations obtained during three typhoons of Taichung harbor in Taiwan are verified by the present model. From the comparison with numerical methods, it can be found that the short-term storm surge and surge deviation can be efficiently predicted 1 to 6h ahead using BPN. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]