Implementation of Sensors and Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Hazards Assessment in Urban, Agriculture and Forestry Systems

The implementation of artificial intelligence (AI), together with robotics, sensors, sensor networks, Internet of Things (IoT), and machine/deep learning modeling, has reached the forefront of research activities, moving towards the goal of increasing the efficiency in a multitude of applications and purposes related to environmental sciences. The development and deployment of AI tools requires specific considerations, approaches, and methodologies for their effective and accurate applications. This Special Issue focused on the applications of AI to environmental systems related to hazard assessment in urban, agriculture, and forestry areas

The impact of macroeconomic leading indicators on inventory management

Forecasting tactical sales is important for long term decisions such as procurement and informing lower level inventory management decisions. Macroeconomic indicators have been shown to improve the forecast accuracy at tactical level, as these indicators can provide early warnings of changing markets while at the same time tactical sales are sufficiently aggregated to facilitate the identification of useful leading indicators. Past research has shown that we can achieve significant gains by incorporating such information. However, at lower levels, that inventory decisions are taken, this is often not feasible due to the level of noise in the data. To take advantage of macroeconomic leading indicators at this level we need to translate the tactical forecasts into operational level ones. In this research we investigate how to best assimilate top level forecasts that incorporate such exogenous information with bottom level (at Stock Keeping Unit level) extrapolative forecasts. The aim is to demonstrate whether incorporating these variables has a positive impact on bottom level planning and eventually inventory levels. We construct appropriate hierarchies of sales and use that structure to reconcile the forecasts, and in turn the different available information, across levels. We are interested both at the point forecast and the prediction intervals, as the latter inform safety stock decisions. Therefore the contribution of this research is twofold. We investigate the usefulness of macroeconomic leading indicators for SKU level forecasts and alternative ways to estimate the variance of hierarchically reconciled forecasts. We provide evidence using a real case study

Classifiers for modeling of mineral potential

[Extract] Classification and allocation of land-use is a major policy objective in most countries. Such an undertaking, however, in the face of competing demands from different stakeholders, requires reliable information on resources potential. This type of information enables policy decision-makers to estimate socio-economic benefits from different possible land-use types and then to allocate most suitable land-use. The potential for several types of resources occurring on the earth's surface (e.g., forest, soil, etc.) is generally easier to determine than those occurring in the subsurface (e.g., mineral deposits, etc.). In many situations, therefore, information on potential for subsurface occurring resources is not among the inputs to land-use decision-making [85]. Consequently, many potentially mineralized lands are alienated usually to, say, further exploration and exploitation of mineral deposits. Areas with mineral potential are characterized by geological features associated genetically and spatially with the type of mineral deposits sought. The term 'mineral deposits' means .accumulations or concentrations of one or more useful naturally occurring substances, which are otherwise usually distributed sparsely in the earth's crust. The term 'mineralization' refers to collective geological processes that result in formation of mineral deposits. The term 'mineral potential' describes the probability or favorability for occurrence of mineral deposits or mineralization. The geological features characteristic of mineralized land, which are called recognition criteria, are spatial objects indicative of or produced by individual geological processes that acted together to form mineral deposits. Recognition criteria are sometimes directly observable; more often, their presence is inferred from one or more geographically referenced (or spatial) datasets, which are processed and analyzed appropriately to enhance, extract, and represent the recognition criteria as spatial evidence or predictor maps. Mineral potential mapping then involves integration of predictor maps in order to classify areas of unique combinations of spatial predictor patterns, called unique conditions [51] as either barren or mineralized with respect to the mineral deposit-type sought

Genomic selection in aquaculture: application, limitations and opportunities with special reference to marine shrimp and pearl oysters

Within aquaculture industries, selection based on genomic information (genomic selection) has the profound potential to change genetic improvement programs and production systems. Genomic selection exploits the use of realized genomic relationships among individuals and information from genome-wide markers in close linkage disequilibrium with genes of biological and economic importance. We discuss the technical advances, practical requirements, and commercial applications that have made genomic selection feasible in a range of aquaculture industries, with a particular focus on molluscs (pearl oysters, Pinctada maxima) and marine shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei and Penaeus monodon). The use of low-cost genome sequencing has enabled cost-effective genotyping on a large scale and is of particular value for species without a reference genome or access to commercial genotyping arrays. We highlight the pitfalls and offer the solutions to the genotyping by sequencing approach and the building of appropriate genetic resources to undertake genomic selection from first-hand experience. We describe the potential to capture large-scale commercial phenotypes based on image analysis and artificial intelligence through machine learning, as inputs for calculation of genomic breeding values. The application of genomic selection over traditional aquatic breeding programs offers significant advantages through being able to accurately predict complex polygenic traits including disease resistance; increasing rates of genetic gain; minimizing inbreeding; and negating potential limiting effects of genotype by environment interactions. Further practical advantages of genomic selection through the use of large-scale communal mating and rearing systems are highlighted, as well as presenting rate-limiting steps that impact on attaining maximum benefits from adopting genomic selection. Genomic selection is now at the tipping point where commercial applications can be readily adopted and offer significant short- and long-term solutions to sustainable and profitable aquaculture industries

Risk prediction of product-harm events using rough sets and multiple classifier fusion:an experimental study of listed companies in China

With the increasing of frequency and destructiveness of product-harm events, study on enterprise crisis management becomes essentially important, but little literature thoroughly explores the risk prediction method of product-harm event. In this study, an initial index system for risk prediction was built based on the analysis of the key drivers of the product-harm event's evolution; ultimately, nine risk-forecasting indexes were obtained using rough set attribute reduction. With the four indexes of cumulative abnormal returns as the input, fuzzy clustering was used to classify the risk level of a product-harm event into four grades. In order to control the uncertainty and instability of single classifiers in risk prediction, multiple classifier fusion was introduced and combined with self-organising data mining (SODM). Further, an SODM-based multiple classifier fusion (SB-MCF) model was presented for the risk prediction related to a product-harm event. The experimental results based on 165 Chinese listed companies indicated that the SB-MCF model improved the average predictive accuracy and reduced variation degree simultaneously. The statistical analysis demonstrated that the SB-MCF model significantly outperformed six widely used single classification models (e.g. neural networks, support vector machine, and case-based reasoning) and other six commonly used multiple classifier fusion methods (e.g. majority voting, Bayesian method, and genetic algorithm)

Improving genomic prediction accuracy for meat tenderness in Nellore cattle using artificial neural networks.

The goal of this study was to compare the predictive performance of artificial neural networks (ANNs) with Bayesian ridge regression, Bayesian Lasso, Bayes A, Bayes B and Bayes Cπ in estimating genomic breeding values for meat tenderness in Nellore cattle. The animals were genotyped with the Illumina Bovine HD Bead Chip (HD, 777K from 90 samples) and the GeneSeek Genomic Profiler (GGP Indicus HD, 77K from 485 samples). The quality control for the genotypes was applied on each Chip and comprised removal of SNPs located on non‐autosomal chromosomes, with minor allele frequency 0.8. The FImpute program was used for genotype imputation. Pedigree‐based analyses indicated that meat tenderness is moderately heritable (0.35), indicating that it can be improved by direct selection. Prediction accuracies were very similar across the Bayesian regression models, ranging from 0.20 (Bayes A) to 0.22 (Bayes B) and 0.14 (Bayes Cπ) to 0.19 (Bayes A) for the additive and dominance effects, respectively. ANN achieved the highest accuracy (0.33) of genomic prediction of genetic merit. Even though deep neural networks are recognized to deliver more accurate predictions, in our study ANN with one single hidden layer, 105 neurons and rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function was sufficient to increase the prediction of genetic merit for meat tenderness. These results indicate that an ANN with relatively simple architecture can provide superior genomic predictions for meat tenderness in Nellore cattl

Quantitative Genetik von Genomassemblierungen bis zur genomischen Vorhersage von phänotypischen Merkmalen mit Hilfe von künstlichen neuronalen Netzwerken

Quantitative genetics is the study of continuously distributed traits and their ge- netic components. Recent developments in DNA sequencing technologies and computational systems allow researchers to conduct large scale in silico studies. However, going from raw DNA reads to genomic prediction of quantitative traits with the help of neural networks is a long and error-prone process. In the course of this thesis, many steps involved in this process will be assessed in depth. Chap- ter 2 will feature a study that compares the landscape of chloroplast genome as- sembly tools. Chapter 3 will present a software to perform genome-wide associa- tion studies using modern tools, which allow GWAS-Flow to outperform current state of the art software packages. Chapter 4 will give an in depth introduc- tion to machine learning and the nature of quantitative traits and will combine those to genomic prediction with artificial neural networks and compares the re- sults to those of algorithms based on linear mixed models. Finally, in Chapter 5 the results from the previous chapters are summarized and used to elucidate the complex nature of studies concerning quantitative genetics.Quantitative Genetik beschäftigt sich mit kontinuierlich verteilten Merkmalen und deren genetischer Komponenten. In den letzten Jahren gab es vielfältige Entwicklungen in der Computertechnik und der Genomik, insbesondere der DNA Sequenzierung, was Forschern erlaubt großflächig angelegte in silico Studien durchzuführen. Jedoch ist es ein komplexer Prozess von rohen Sequenzdaten bis zur genomischen Vorhersage mit Hilfe von neuronalen Netzwerken zu kommen. Im Rahmen der vorliegenden Studien werden viele Schritte, die an diesem Prozess beteiligt sind beleuchtet. Kapitel 2 wird einen Vergleich zwischen einer Vielzahl an Werkzeugen zur Assemblierung von Chloroplasten Genomen ziehen. Kapitel 3 stellt eine neu entwickelte Software zur genom-weiten Assoziationskartierung vor, die bisherigen Programmen überlegen ist. Kapitel 4 stellt maschinelles Lernen und die genetischen Komponenten von quantitativen Merkmalen vor und bringt diese im Kontext der genomischen Vorhersagen zusammen. Zum Schluss in Kapitel 5 werden die vorherigen Ergebnisse im Gesamtkontext der quantitativen Genetik erläutert