Multicriteria Analysis of Neural Network Forecasting Models: An Application to German Regional Labour Markets

This paper develops a flexible multi-dimensional assessment method for the comparison of different statistical-econometric techniques based on learning mechanisms with a view to analysing and forecasting regional labour markets. The aim of this paper is twofold. A first major objective is to explore the use of a standard choice tool, namely Multicriteria Analysis (MCA), in order to cope with the intrinsic methodological uncertainty on the choice of a suitable statistical-econometric learning technique for regional labour market analysis. MCA is applied here to support choices on the performance of various models -based on classes of Neural Network (NN) techniques-that serve to generate employment forecasts in West Germany at a regional/district level. A second objective of the paper is to analyse the methodological potential of a blend of approaches (NN-MCA) in order to extend the analysis framework to other economic research domains, where formal models are not available, but where a variety of statistical data is present. The paper offers a basis for a more balanced judgement of the performance of rival statistical tests

Binary interaction algorithms for the simulation of flocking and swarming dynamics

Microscopic models of flocking and swarming takes in account large numbers of interacting individ- uals. Numerical resolution of large flocks implies huge computational costs. Typically for $N$ interacting individuals we have a cost of $O(N^2)$. We tackle the problem numerically by considering approximated binary interaction dynamics described by kinetic equations and simulating such equations by suitable stochastic methods. This approach permits to compute approximate solutions as functions of a small scaling parameter $\varepsilon$ at a reduced complexity of O(N) operations. Several numerical results show the efficiency of the algorithms proposed