The Use of Rough Set Theory in Determining the Preferences of the Customers of an Insurance Agency

In today’s market environment a fierce competition is being experienced. It can be clearly stated that the businesses that determine the customer profiles well and manufacture related products in accordance with the requests/needs of the customers gain superiority over their rivals. Within this scope, this fact is also an important issue for the companies that are trying to keep up with other competitors in the insurance sector. In this study, this critical problem of EPD which is an agency of Allianz Insurance was solved by using Rough Set Theory (RST) method. Ten condition attributes (i.e. age, gender, etc.) were examined in the study. Decision attribute is the variable of the insurance type which includes individual retirement, health and life insurances. With the method of RST, a set of rules were identified which may help in developing strategies that will bring in new customers to EPD while keeping present ones. The attained results were presented to the executives of EPD. The executives have re-determined their marketing strategies in compliance with these results and exercised these strategies accordingly. Feedbacks from the executives indicated that the RST helps in facilitating the development of marketing strategies based on the characteristics of the customers and determining their profiles. Keywords: Rough set theory, customer’s profile, insurance, decision rule

Justice and development party at the Helm: resurgence of islam or restitution of right of center predominant party?

General elections of July 22, 2007 witnessed a very rare occasion in Turkish politics. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), which had been in government since the 2002 elections managed to increase its votes dramatically and obtain an overwhelming majority in the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA). It was a first since the 1954 elections in the country. The leader and the front bench of the AKP have come from the political Islamist National Outlook (Milli Gorus) movement. With immaculate Islamist credentials the electoral victories of the AKP in the 2000s have been interpreted as the demise of secularism and resurgence of Islam in Turkey. Has 47 percent of the Turkish electorate voted for political Islam in the July 22, 2007 elections? Is it religious credentials of the AKP or its leader and the front bench that have attracted the voters in droves to the support of that party at the polls, or are there some other factors at play? This paper sets out to examine and compare the voter profiles in the 2002 and 2007 elections, with the objective of determining the profiles of the voters who supported the AKP versus its main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), the champion of secularism in Turkish politics. The paper sets out to ascertain whether the voter profiles of the Turkish parties have changed between 2002 and 2007, and how? The nationally representative election surveys of 2002 and 2007 will be used to analyze such individual level characteristics of attitudes, beliefs and values of the Turkish voters, and assess the role played by religiosity, economic expectations and the performance of the economy, foreign policy, and in specific EU – Turkey relations, parochialism, and nationalist feelings in determining the preferences of the voters across the left – right spectrum in Turkey. Such an analysis will enable us to unearth the importance of religiosity in the voters’ choices, and the extent to which Turkish voters have shunned away from secularism per se

Possible Histories: A way to model Context-Aware Preferences

Nowadays more and more information becomes available in digital form. To be able to guide users through this wealth of information, a possibility is to only provide the user with relevant information, where relevancy is determined by the preferences of the user. To determine the precise relation between relevancy and preferences, we somehow need to formalize both concepts. This paper proposes a way to formalize the preferences of a user by grounding them in possible histories of the user. We explore this technique and its relations to other possible models

Selection mechanisms affect volatility in evolving markets

Financial asset markets are sociotechnical systems whose constituent agents are subject to evolutionary pressure as unprofitable agents exit the marketplace and more profitable agents continue to trade assets. Using a population of evolving zero-intelligence agents and a frequent batch auction price-discovery mechanism as substrate, we analyze the role played by evolutionary selection mechanisms in determining macro-observable market statistics. In particular, we show that selection mechanisms incorporating a local fitness-proportionate component are associated with high correlation between a micro, risk-aversion parameter and a commonly-used macro-volatility statistic, while a purely quantile-based selection mechanism shows significantly less correlation.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, to appear in proceedings of GECCO 2019 as a full pape

BGP-like TE Capabilities for SHIM6

In this paper we present a comprehensive set of mechanisms that restore to the site administrator the capacity of enforcing traffic engineering (TE) policies in a multiaddressed IPv6 scenario. The mechanisms rely on the ability of SHIM6 to securely perform locator changes in a transparent fashion to transport and application layers. Once an outgoing path has been selected for a communication by proper routing configuration in the site, the source prefix of SHIM6 data packets is rewritten by the site routers to avoid packet discarding due to ingress filtering. The SHIM6 locator preferences exchanged in the context establishment phase are modified by the site routers to influence in the path used for receiving traffic. Scalable deployment is ensured by the stateless nature of these mechanisms.Publicad

On the Causal Relationship between Government Expenditure and Tax Revenue in Pakistan

This paper applies the technique of Granger Causality to determine the relationship between total government expenditures and total tax revenue using annual revised estimates. The analysis discovers a firm unidirectional effect from expenditure to revenue suggesting the preference of controlling the spending decisions to reduce the tax revenue-expenditure deficit.Expenditure, Tax Revenue, Causality

Budapest Bridges Benchmarking

This paper is concerned with the comparison of different scaling methods which are applied to a complex bridge evaluation problem. It is shown that both tangible and intangible data and satisfaction of multiple criteria are essential to the success of such projects. Some new inconsistency measures for the matrices emerging in the decision making process are also used. A detailed numerical analysis of the results is presented.

Remote operation of CeCi social robot

This paper presents a validation methodology for a remote system with its objective focused on a social robot. The research process starts with the customization of an application for smartphones, achieving a simple method of connection and attachment to the robot. This customization allows remote operation of the robot’s movements and an additional level of autonomy for the displacements in previously known locations. One of several teleoperations methods is the direct teleoperations method, which is used in master–slave control mode via a wireless network. Next, the article focuses on proposing a validation methodology for social robot applications design. Under this approach, two tests are performed to validate the designed application. The first one seeks to find the response speed of the communication between the robot and the mobile device wherein 10 devices with different characteristics and capabilities are used. This test is critical since a delay outside the allowable range invalidates the use of the application. The second test measures the application’s usability through a user survey, which allows for determining the preferences that people may have when using this type of application. This second test is essential to consider the overall acceptability of the social robot.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Allocation of Foreign Aid in a Segmented International Context

Research on the topic of distribution of foreign aid among recipients is regaining momentum. This is understandable in the light of the knowledge that presently the richest 40 percent of the developing world receives twice as much aid per capita as the poorest 40 percent [UNDP (1994)], while once upon a time foreign aid was sought to accomplish exactly the opposite. The distribution of official development assistance (ODA) is conventionally studied in terms of two models: the ‘recipient needs’ model and the ‘donor interest’ model. In the first, foreign aid flows are seen to satisfy the socio-economic needs of the recipient countries. In the second, national interests of donors, whether these are military, political or commercial, are seen to determine the direction and size of the foreign aid. Empirical studies were made to ascertain and understand whether, on balance, foreign aid is motivated by recipient need or donor interest. There is one class of studies, for example, Mcgillivray (1989), which estimates for donors a compound measure of their allocation bias. The other class of studies, i.e., Maizels and Nissanke (1984) and Grilli and Riess (1992), employs regression analysis to explain allocation of foreign aid by representative variables of recipient need and donor interest. Because the primary pursuit of these studies was to give an overall judgement on foreign aid motivations, insufficient attention was given to differentiations among donors, between recipients, and over time. The allocation policies of donors can be observed to differ between large donors and small donors, whereby the two types of donors are often tied to different groups of recipient countries. Moreover, other arguments than recipient need and donor interest, such as historic and geographical ties and the changing world political order, play important roles.