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In this paper, we use the multi-stage network slacks-based measure model under uncertainty to evaluate the performance of Taiwanese financial holding companies (FHCs) from 2007 to 2012. We conceptualize the value creation process to be a two-stage framework, as the profitability and the marketability stages with a serial-linkage relationship, in order to solicit more information from the value creation process of FHCs. Under this framework, the profitability stage can be further divided into banking, insurance, and securities profitability sub-stages. In addition, we further extend the proposed model mentioned above to not only incorporate the NPLs as the undesirable output in the banking profitability stage but also use the fuzzy set approach to process its uncertainty. Results indicate that the discriminatory ability of our model is higher when we simplify the variables in the model specification. We also find that all Taiwanese FHCs in that particular period were "inefficient performers", which is mainly attributed to the weak profitability performance, especially in banking service. We postulate that the global financial crisis, the US subprime crisis in particular, had a negative effect on the value creation performance of Taiwanese FHCs; however, they gradually recovered and improved their performance after the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection of fraudulent financial statements (FFS) is an important and challenging issue that has served as the impetus for many academic studies over the past three decades. Although nonfinancial ratios are generally acknowledged as the key factor contributing to the FFS of a corporation, they are usually excluded from early detection models. The objective of this study is to increase the accuracy of FFS detection by integrating the rough set theory (RST) and support vector machines (SVM) approaches, while adopting both financial and nonfinancial ratios as predictive variables. The results showed that the proposed hybrid approach (RST+SVM) has the best classification rate as well as the lowest occurrence of Types I and II errors, and that nonfinancial ratios are indeed valuable information in FFS detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ovarian cancer is the deadliest gynaecological disease because of the high mortality rate and there is no any symptom in cancer early stage. It was often the terminal cancer period when patients were diagnosed with ovarian cancer and thus delays a good opportunity of treatment. The current common method for detecting ovarian cancer is blood testing for analyzing the tumor marker CA-125 of serum. However, specificity and sensitivity of CA-125 are insufficient for early detection. Therefore, it has become an urgent issue to look for an efficient method which precisely detects the tumor markers for ovarian cancer. This study aims to find the target genes of ovarian cancer by different algorithms of information science. Feature selection and decision tree were applied to analyze 9600 ovarian cancer-related genes. After screening the target genes, candidate genes will be analyzed by Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA) software to create a genetic pathway model and to understand the interactive relationship in the different pathological stages of ovarian cancer. Finally, this research found 9 oncogenes associated with ovarian cancer and some genes had not been discovered in previous studies. This system will assist medical staffs in diagnosis and treatment at cancer early stage and improve the patient's survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]