43,646 research outputs found
Managing Interacting Criteria: Application to Environmental Evaluation Practices
The need for organizations to evaluate their environmental practices has been recently increasing. This fact has led to the development of many approaches to appraise such practices. In this paper, a novel decision model to evaluate companyâs environmental practices is proposed to improve traditional evaluation process in different facets. Firstly, different reviewersâ collectives related to the companyâs activity are taken into account in the process to increase company internal efficiency and external legitimacy. Secondly, following the standard ISO 14031, two general categories of environmental performance indicators, management and operational, are considered. Thirdly, since the assumption of independence among environmental indicators is rarely verified in environmental context, an aggregation operator to bear in mind the relationship among such indicators in the evaluation results is proposed. Finally, this new model integrates quantitative and qualitative information with different scales using a multi-granular linguistic model that allows to adapt diverse evaluation scales according to appraisersâ knowledge
Evidential relational clustering using medoids
In real clustering applications, proximity data, in which only pairwise
similarities or dissimilarities are known, is more general than object data, in
which each pattern is described explicitly by a list of attributes.
Medoid-based clustering algorithms, which assume the prototypes of classes are
objects, are of great value for partitioning relational data sets. In this
paper a new prototype-based clustering method, named Evidential C-Medoids
(ECMdd), which is an extension of Fuzzy C-Medoids (FCMdd) on the theoretical
framework of belief functions is proposed. In ECMdd, medoids are utilized as
the prototypes to represent the detected classes, including specific classes
and imprecise classes. Specific classes are for the data which are distinctly
far from the prototypes of other classes, while imprecise classes accept the
objects that may be close to the prototypes of more than one class. This soft
decision mechanism could make the clustering results more cautious and reduce
the misclassification rates. Experiments in synthetic and real data sets are
used to illustrate the performance of ECMdd. The results show that ECMdd could
capture well the uncertainty in the internal data structure. Moreover, it is
more robust to the initializations compared with FCMdd.Comment: in The 18th International Conference on Information Fusion, July
2015, Washington, DC, USA , Jul 2015, Washington, United State
Evidential Communities for Complex Networks
Community detection is of great importance for understand-ing graph structure
in social networks. The communities in real-world networks are often
overlapped, i.e. some nodes may be a member of multiple clusters. How to
uncover the overlapping communities/clusters in a complex network is a general
problem in data mining of network data sets. In this paper, a novel algorithm
to identify overlapping communi-ties in complex networks by a combination of an
evidential modularity function, a spectral mapping method and evidential
c-means clustering is devised. Experimental results indicate that this
detection approach can take advantage of the theory of belief functions, and
preforms good both at detecting community structure and determining the
appropri-ate number of clusters. Moreover, the credal partition obtained by the
proposed method could give us a deeper insight into the graph structure
Sharp and fuzzy observables on effect algebras
Observables on effect algebras and their fuzzy versions obtained by means of
confidence measures (Markov kernels) are studied. It is shown that, on effect
algebras with the (E)-property, given an observable and a confidence measure,
there exists a fuzzy version of the observable. Ordering of observables
according to their fuzzy properties is introduced, and some minimality
conditions with respect to this ordering are found. Applications of some
results of classical theory of experiments are considered.Comment: 23 page
Toward a multilevel representation of protein molecules: comparative approaches to the aggregation/folding propensity problem
This paper builds upon the fundamental work of Niwa et al. [34], which
provides the unique possibility to analyze the relative aggregation/folding
propensity of the elements of the entire Escherichia coli (E. coli) proteome in
a cell-free standardized microenvironment. The hardness of the problem comes
from the superposition between the driving forces of intra- and inter-molecule
interactions and it is mirrored by the evidences of shift from folding to
aggregation phenotypes by single-point mutations [10]. Here we apply several
state-of-the-art classification methods coming from the field of structural
pattern recognition, with the aim to compare different representations of the
same proteins gathered from the Niwa et al. data base; such representations
include sequences and labeled (contact) graphs enriched with chemico-physical
attributes. By this comparison, we are able to identify also some interesting
general properties of proteins. Notably, (i) we suggest a threshold around 250
residues discriminating "easily foldable" from "hardly foldable" molecules
consistent with other independent experiments, and (ii) we highlight the
relevance of contact graph spectra for folding behavior discrimination and
characterization of the E. coli solubility data. The soundness of the
experimental results presented in this paper is proved by the statistically
relevant relationships discovered among the chemico-physical description of
proteins and the developed cost matrix of substitution used in the various
discrimination systems.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, 46 reference
Median evidential c-means algorithm and its application to community detection
Median clustering is of great value for partitioning relational data. In this
paper, a new prototype-based clustering method, called Median Evidential
C-Means (MECM), which is an extension of median c-means and median fuzzy
c-means on the theoretical framework of belief functions is proposed. The
median variant relaxes the restriction of a metric space embedding for the
objects but constrains the prototypes to be in the original data set. Due to
these properties, MECM could be applied to graph clustering problems. A
community detection scheme for social networks based on MECM is investigated
and the obtained credal partitions of graphs, which are more refined than crisp
and fuzzy ones, enable us to have a better understanding of the graph
structures. An initial prototype-selection scheme based on evidential
semi-centrality is presented to avoid local premature convergence and an
evidential modularity function is defined to choose the optimal number of
communities. Finally, experiments in synthetic and real data sets illustrate
the performance of MECM and show its difference to other methods
Weights in multidimensional indices of well-being: an overview
Multidimensional indices are becoming increasingly important instruments to assess the well-being of societies. They move beyond the focus on a single indicator and yet, are easy to present and communicate. A crucial step in the construction of a multidimensional index of well-being is the selection of the relative weights for the different dimensions. The aim of this paper is to study the role of these weights and to critically survey eight different approaches to set them. We categorize the approaches in three classes: data-driven, normative and hybrid weighting, and compare their respective advantages and drawbacks.composite indicator, multidimensional well-being index, weights.
- âŠ