Interactive visual exploration of association rules with rule-focusing methodology

International audienceOn account of the enormous amounts of rules that can be produced by data mining algorithms, knowledge post-processing is a difficult stage in an association rule discovery process. In order to find relevant knowledge for decision making, the user (a decision maker specialized in the data studied) needs to rummage through the rules. To assist him/her in this task, we here propose the rule-focusing methodology, an interactive methodology for the visual post-processing of association rules. It allows the user to explore large sets of rules freely by focusing his/her attention on limited subsets. This new approach relies on rule interestingness measures, on a visual representation, and on interactive navigation among the rules. We have implemented the rule-focusing methodology in a prototype system called ARVis. It exploits the user's focus to guide the generation of the rules by means of a specific constraint-based rule-mining algorithm

Assessing Indonesia's sustainable development: long-run trend, impact of the crisis, and adjustment during the recovery period.

We adopt the definition of sustainability as “non-declining welfare per capita”, and measure genuine savings and change in wealth per capita as indicator of weak sustainability. The results suggests that the overall trend in sustainability as measured by changes in wealth per capita had shown that the Indonesian economy during the last twenty years had not been on a sustainable path. Despite this, sustainability had been on an improving long-run trend due to the restructuring of the economy away from oil and gas sector, towards more reliant on secondary and tertiary economic activities. However, the need for more appropriate approach in managing mineral, forest resources depletion, as well as environmental degradation caused by industrial sector’s pollution is called for as they had rapidly becoming a growing problem. Measures of sustainability during the economic crisis and its adjustment period clearly show that the crisis had adversely affected the positive trend in sustainability through a combination of reduction in savings rate and increases in natural resources depletion. This has rephrased the importance of economic growth in the context of sustainable development, and provided empirical evidence that economic crisis had created incentives for more rapid natural resources extraction that could endanger sustainable development. Relevant policies to help address both problems are discussed.Genuine Savings, Changes in Wealth per Capita, Sustainable Development, Indonesia.

Natural resources and institutions: the “natural resources curse” revisited

The present paper deals with the role of political authorities and institutions in explaining growth failures. We aim to search answers for three related questions: is there a natural resources curse? Are all types of natural resources exposed to a curse? Can good institutions, measured by a single indicator, avoid this “curse”? Although the estimates presented are supportive of negative relation between growth and relative resources abundance, and of the idea that good institutions enhance growth, our investigation do not demonstrated that if the curse exists it only appears in countries with inferior institutions. So, the key conclusion is that there is no justification for the pessimistic conviction that certain countries will remain caught up in a low growth trap constrained with institutions that impede their growth. At the international level, the main policy implication is that, the support to countries with a high share of natural resources in its exports should be directed towards improving specific areas of control fault, such as public budget and improving organizational systems, rather than imposing on aid-recipient countries wide-ranging global governance measures, that are usually measured by a cross-section general used, but subjective, index.economic growth; institutions; natural resources curse; resource dependence; rent seeking

M-COMMERCE VS. E-COMMERCE: EXPLORING WEB SESSION BROWSING BEHAVIOR

With the growing popularity of mobile commerce (m-commerce), it becomes vital for both researchers and practitioners to understand m-commerce usage behavior. \ \ In this study, we investigate browsing behavior patterns based on the analysis of clickstream data that is recorded in server-side log files. We compare consumers\u27 browsing behaviors in the m-commerce channel against the traditional e-commerce channel. For the comparison, we offer an integrative web usage mining approach, combining visualization graphs, association rules and classification models to analyze the Web server log files of a large Internet retailer in Israel, who introduced m-commerce to its existing e-commerce offerings. \ \ The analysis is expected to reveal typical m-commerce and e-commerce browsing behavior, in terms of session timing and intensity of use and in terms of session navigation patterns. The obtained results will contribute to the emerging research area of m-commerce and can be also used to guide future development of mobile websites and increase their effectiveness. Our preliminary findings are promising. They reveal that browsing behaviors in m-commerce and e-commerce are different

Objective novelty of association rules: measuring the confidence boost

On sait bien que la confiance des régles d’association n’est pas vraiment satisfaisant comme mésure d’interêt. Nous proposons, au lieu de la substituer par des autres mésures (soit, en l’employant de façon conjointe a des autres mésures), évaluer la nouveauté de chaque régle par comparaison de sa confiance par rapport á des régles plus fortes qu’on trouve au même ensemble de données. C’est á dire, on considère un seuil “relative” de confiance au lieu du seuil absolute habituel. Cette idée se précise avec la magnitude du “confidence boost”, mésurant l’increment rélative de confiance prés des régles plus fortes. Nous prouvons que nôtre proposte peut remplacer la “confidence width” et le blockage de régles employés a des publications précedentes.Postprint (author’s final draft