14,792 research outputs found
Financial crises and bank failures: a review of prediction methods
In this article we analyze financial and economic circumstances associated with the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis and the global financial turmoil that has led to severe crises in many countries. We suggest that the level of cross-border holdings of long-term securities between the United States and the rest of the world may indicate a direct link between the turmoil in the securitized market originated in the United States and that in other countries. We provide a summary of empirical results obtained in several Economics and Operations Research papers that attempt to explain, predict, or suggest remedies for financial crises or banking defaults; we also extensively outline the methodologies used in them. The intent of this article is to promote future empirical research for preventing financial crises.Subprime mortgage ; Financial crises
Named Entity Recognition in Electronic Health Records Using Transfer Learning Bootstrapped Neural Networks
Neural networks (NNs) have become the state of the art in many machine
learning applications, especially in image and sound processing [1]. The same,
although to a lesser extent [2,3], could be said in natural language processing
(NLP) tasks, such as named entity recognition. However, the success of NNs
remains dependent on the availability of large labelled datasets, which is a
significant hurdle in many important applications. One such case are electronic
health records (EHRs), which are arguably the largest source of medical data,
most of which lies hidden in natural text [4,5]. Data access is difficult due
to data privacy concerns, and therefore annotated datasets are scarce. With
scarce data, NNs will likely not be able to extract this hidden information
with practical accuracy. In our study, we develop an approach that solves these
problems for named entity recognition, obtaining 94.6 F1 score in I2B2 2009
Medical Extraction Challenge [6], 4.3 above the architecture that won the
competition. Beyond the official I2B2 challenge, we further achieve 82.4 F1 on
extracting relationships between medical terms. To reach this state-of-the-art
accuracy, our approach applies transfer learning to leverage on datasets
annotated for other I2B2 tasks, and designs and trains embeddings that
specially benefit from such transfer.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 8 table
Fair comparison of skin detection approaches on publicly available datasets
Skin detection is the process of discriminating skin and non-skin regions in
a digital image and it is widely used in several applications ranging from hand
gesture analysis to track body parts and face detection. Skin detection is a
challenging problem which has drawn extensive attention from the research
community, nevertheless a fair comparison among approaches is very difficult
due to the lack of a common benchmark and a unified testing protocol. In this
work, we investigate the most recent researches in this field and we propose a
fair comparison among approaches using several different datasets. The major
contributions of this work are an exhaustive literature review of skin color
detection approaches, a framework to evaluate and combine different skin
detector approaches, whose source code is made freely available for future
research, and an extensive experimental comparison among several recent methods
which have also been used to define an ensemble that works well in many
different problems. Experiments are carried out in 10 different datasets
including more than 10000 labelled images: experimental results confirm that
the best method here proposed obtains a very good performance with respect to
other stand-alone approaches, without requiring ad hoc parameter tuning. A
MATLAB version of the framework for testing and of the methods proposed in this
paper will be freely available from https://github.com/LorisNann
Data mining in soft computing framework: a survey
The present article provides a survey of the available literature on data mining using soft computing. A categorization has been provided based on the different soft computing tools and their hybridizations used, the data mining function implemented, and the preference criterion selected by the model. The utility of the different soft computing methodologies is highlighted. Generally fuzzy sets are suitable for handling the issues related to understandability of patterns, incomplete/noisy data, mixed media information and human interaction, and can provide approximate solutions faster. Neural networks are nonparametric, robust, and exhibit good learning and generalization capabilities in data-rich environments. Genetic algorithms provide efficient search algorithms to select a model, from mixed media data, based on some preference criterion/objective function. Rough sets are suitable for handling different types of uncertainty in data. Some challenges to data mining and the application of soft computing methodologies are indicated. An extensive bibliography is also included
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