Adaptive management, international co-operation and planning for marine conservation hotspots in a changing climate

Acknowledgements This work received funding from the MASTS pooling initiative (The Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland) and their support is gratefully acknowledged. MASTS is funded by the Scottish Funding Council (Grant reference HR09011) and contributing institutions.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Fuzzy decision making in complex frameworks with generalized aggregation operators

[EN] This article presents a new aggregation system applied to fuzzy decision making. The fuzzy generalized unified aggregation operator (FGUAO) is a system that integrates many operators by adding a new aggregation process that considers the relevance that each operator has in the analysis. It also deals with an uncertain environment where the information is studied with fuzzy numbers. A wide range of particular cases and properties are studied. This approach is further extended by using quasi-arithmetic means. The paper ends studying the applicability in decision making problems regarding the European Union decisions. For doing so, the work uses a multi-person aggregation process obtaining the multi-person - FGUAO operator. An example concerning the fixation of the interest rate by the European Central Bank is presented. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.We would like to thank the associate editor and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments that have improved the quality of the paper. Support from the Chilean Government through the Fondecyt Regular program (project number 1160286), the University of Chile, the project PIEF-GA-2011-300062 of the European Commission and the Distinguished Scientist Fellowship Program of the King Saud University (Saudi Arabia), is gratefully acknowledged.Merigó -Lindahl, JM.; Gil-Lafuente, AM.; Yu, D.; Llopis Albert, C. (2018). Fuzzy decision making in complex frameworks with generalized aggregation operators. Applied Soft Computing. 68:314-321. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2018.04.002S3143216

Understanding and Comparing Scalable Gaussian Process Regression for Big Data

As a non-parametric Bayesian model which produces informative predictive distribution, Gaussian process (GP) has been widely used in various fields, like regression, classification and optimization. The cubic complexity of standard GP however leads to poor scalability, which poses challenges in the era of big data. Hence, various scalable GPs have been developed in the literature in order to improve the scalability while retaining desirable prediction accuracy. This paper devotes to investigating the methodological characteristics and performance of representative global and local scalable GPs including sparse approximations and local aggregations from four main perspectives: scalability, capability, controllability and robustness. The numerical experiments on two toy examples and five real-world datasets with up to 250K points offer the following findings. In terms of scalability, most of the scalable GPs own a time complexity that is linear to the training size. In terms of capability, the sparse approximations capture the long-term spatial correlations, the local aggregations capture the local patterns but suffer from over-fitting in some scenarios. In terms of controllability, we could improve the performance of sparse approximations by simply increasing the inducing size. But this is not the case for local aggregations. In terms of robustness, local aggregations are robust to various initializations of hyperparameters due to the local attention mechanism. Finally, we highlight that the proper hybrid of global and local scalable GPs may be a promising way to improve both the model capability and scalability for big data.Comment: 25 pages, 15 figures, preprint submitted to KB