Through the collection of related literature, we point out the six major factors influencing China's forestry enterprises' financing: insufficient national support; regulations and institutional environmental factors; narrow channels of financing; inappropriate existing mortgage-backed approach;...

Technology evaluation has been increasingly important because of the pressing needs of new product introduction in a competitive global market. To select the most appropriate technology, a firm needs to have a robust technology evaluation framework to evaluate several technology candidates based...

The demands for alternative energy resources have been increasing exponentially in the 21st century due to continuous industrial development, depletion of fossil fuels and emerging environmental consciousness. Renewable energy sources, including wind energy, hydropower energy, geothermal energy,...

We examine the role of a common cognitive heuristic in unsupervised learning of Bayesian probability networks from data. Human beings perceive a larger association between causal than diagnostic relationships. This psychological principal can be used to orient the arcs within Bayesian networks...

Severe constraints imposed by the nature of endless sequences of data collected from unstable phenomena have pushed the understanding and the development of automated analysis strategies, such as data clustering techniques. However, current clustering validation approaches are inadequate to data...

<Para ID="Par1">Machine learning is a very interesting and important branch of artificial intelligence. Among many learning models, the support vector machine is a popular model with high classification ability which can be trained by mathematical programming methods. Since the model was originally formulated...</para>

Learning from imbalanced data, where the number of observations in one class is significantly larger than the ones in the other class, has gained considerable attention in the machine learning community. Assuming the difficulty in predicting each class is similar, most standard classifiers will...

Assuming a binomial distribution for word occurrence, we propose computing a standardized Z score to define the specific vocabulary of a subset compared to that of the entire corpus. This approach is applied to weight terms (character n-gram, word, stem, lemma or sequence of them) which...

Automatic environmental monitoring networks enforced by wireless communication technologies provide large and ever increasing volumes of data nowadays. The use of this information in natural hazard research is an important issue. Particularly useful for risk assessment and decision making are...

This research presents a model that simultaneously forecasts required water releases 1 and 2 days ahead from two reservoirs that are in series. In practice, multiple reservoir system operation is a difficult process that involves many decisions for real-time water resources management. The...