Proposing a Hybrid Approach to Predict, Schedule and Select the Most Robust Project Portfolio under Uncertainty

Suitable project portfolio selection in inconsistent economy that can reduce the portfolio risks and increasing utilities for investors has gained significant research attentions.   This article addresses the project portfolio selection in which conventional certain (1) prediction, (2) optimization and (3) clustering approaches cannot be used to face uncertainty. To predict the real value of affecting project risk parameters, neural network has been used; Then to determine the optimized sequences and procedures, the proposed model have been evaluated using the multi-objective shuffle frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) by robust optimization approach; To suggest different risk criteria, K-means algorithm utilized to categorize the candidate projects and differentiating the clusters.  As the proposed hybrid methodology is studied on 420 different construction projects in an Iranian construction company in two economic stable years and an instable year in Iran real estate market. The results show 96 percent prediction-optimization capability due to different desired criteria

Surface water flood warnings in England: overview, Assessment and recommendations based on survey responses and workshops

Following extensive surface water flooding (SWF) in England in summer 2007, progress has been made in improving the management and prediction of this type of flooding. A rainfall threshold-based extreme rainfall alert (ERA) service was launched in 2009 and superseded in 2011 by the surface water flood risk assessment (SWFRA). Through survey responses from local authorities (LAs) and the outcome of workshops with a range of flood professionals, this paper examines the understanding, benefits, limitations and ways to improve the current SWF warning service. The current SWFRA alerts are perceived as useful by district and county LAs, although their understanding of them is limited. The majority of LAs take action upon receipt of SWFRA alerts, and their reactiveness to alerts appears to have increased over the years and as SWFRA superseded ERA. This is a positive development towards increased resilience to SWF. The main drawback of the current service is its broad spatial resolution. Alternatives for providing localised SWF forecast and warnings were analysed, and a two-tier national-local approach, with pre-simulated scenario-based local SWF forecasting and warning systems, was deemed most appropriate by flood professionals given current monetary, human and technological resources

A smart resource management mechanism with trust access control for cloud computing environment

The core of the computer business now offers subscription-based on-demand services with the help of cloud computing. We may now share resources among multiple users by using virtualization, which creates a virtual instance of a computer system running in an abstracted hardware layer. It provides infinite computing capabilities through its massive cloud datacenters, in contrast to early distributed computing models, and has been incredibly popular in recent years because to its continually growing infrastructure, user base, and hosted data volume. This article suggests a conceptual framework for a workload management paradigm in cloud settings that is both safe and performance-efficient. A resource management unit is used in this paradigm for energy and performing virtual machine allocation with efficiency, assuring the safe execution of users' applications, and protecting against data breaches brought on by unauthorised virtual machine access real-time. A secure virtual machine management unit controls the resource management unit and is created to produce data on unlawful access or intercommunication. Additionally, a workload analyzer unit works simultaneously to estimate resource consumption data to help the resource management unit be more effective during virtual machine allocation. The suggested model functions differently to effectively serve the same objective, including data encryption and decryption prior to transfer, usage of trust access mechanism to prevent unauthorised access to virtual machines, which creates extra computational cost overhead

Applications in security and evasions in machine learning : a survey

In recent years, machine learning (ML) has become an important part to yield security and privacy in various applications. ML is used to address serious issues such as real-time attack detection, data leakage vulnerability assessments and many more. ML extensively supports the demanding requirements of the current scenario of security and privacy across a range of areas such as real-time decision-making, big data processing, reduced cycle time for learning, cost-efficiency and error-free processing. Therefore, in this paper, we review the state of the art approaches where ML is applicable more effectively to fulfill current real-world requirements in security. We examine different security applications' perspectives where ML models play an essential role and compare, with different possible dimensions, their accuracy results. By analyzing ML algorithms in security application it provides a blueprint for an interdisciplinary research area. Even with the use of current sophisticated technology and tools, attackers can evade the ML models by committing adversarial attacks. Therefore, requirements rise to assess the vulnerability in the ML models to cope up with the adversarial attacks at the time of development. Accordingly, as a supplement to this point, we also analyze the different types of adversarial attacks on the ML models. To give proper visualization of security properties, we have represented the threat model and defense strategies against adversarial attack methods. Moreover, we illustrate the adversarial attacks based on the attackers' knowledge about the model and addressed the point of the model at which possible attacks may be committed. Finally, we also investigate different types of properties of the adversarial attacks

The importance of Quality Assurance as a Data Scientist: Commom pitfalls, examples and solutions found while validationand developing supervised binary classification models

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced AnalyticsIn today’s information era, where Data galvanizes change, companies are aiming towards competitive advantage by mining this important resource to achieve actionable insights, knowledge, and wisdom. However, to minimize bias and obtain robust long-term solutions, the methodologies that are devised from Data Science and Machine Learning approaches benefit from being carefully validated by a Quality Assurance Data Scientist, who understands not only both business rules and analytics tasks, but also understands and recommends Quality Assurance guidelines and validations. Through my experience as a Data Scientist at EDP Distribuição, I identify and systematically report on seven key Quality Assurance guidelines that helped achieve more reliable products and provided three practical examples where validation was key in discerning improvements

Advanced analytical methods for fraud detection: a systematic literature review

The developments of the digital era demand new ways of producing goods and rendering services. This fast-paced evolution in the companies implies a new approach from the auditors, who must keep up with the constant transformation. With the dynamic dimensions of data, it is important to seize the opportunity to add value to the companies. The need to apply more robust methods to detect fraud is evident. In this thesis the use of advanced analytical methods for fraud detection will be investigated, through the analysis of the existent literature on this topic. Both a systematic review of the literature and a bibliometric approach will be applied to the most appropriate database to measure the scientific production and current trends. This study intends to contribute to the academic research that have been conducted, in order to centralize the existing information on this topic