1,065 research outputs found
Loss Distribution Approach for Operational Risk Capital Modelling under Basel II: Combining Different Data Sources for Risk Estimation
The management of operational risk in the banking industry has undergone
significant changes over the last decade due to substantial changes in
operational risk environment. Globalization, deregulation, the use of complex
financial products and changes in information technology have resulted in
exposure to new risks very different from market and credit risks. In response,
Basel Committee for banking Supervision has developed a regulatory framework,
referred to as Basel II, that introduced operational risk category and
corresponding capital requirements. Over the past five years, major banks in
most parts of the world have received accreditation under the Basel II Advanced
Measurement Approach (AMA) by adopting the loss distribution approach (LDA)
despite there being a number of unresolved methodological challenges in its
implementation. Different approaches and methods are still under hot debate. In
this paper, we review methods proposed in the literature for combining
different data sources (internal data, external data and scenario analysis)
which is one of the regulatory requirement for AMA
Student Modeling in Intelligent Tutoring Systems
After decades of development, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) have become a common learning environment for learners of various domains and academic levels. ITSs are computer systems designed to provide instruction and immediate feedback, which is customized to individual students, but without requiring the intervention of human instructors. All ITSs share the same goal: to provide tutorial services that support learning. Since learning is a very complex process, it is not surprising that a range of technologies and methodologies from different fields is employed. Student modeling is a pivotal technique used in ITSs. The model observes student behaviors in the tutor and creates a quantitative representation of student properties of interest necessary to customize instruction, to respond effectively, to engage students¡¯ interest and to promote learning. In this dissertation work, I focus on the following aspects of student modeling. Part I: Student Knowledge: Parameter Interpretation. Student modeling is widely used to obtain scientific insights about how people learn. Student models typically produce semantically meaningful parameter estimates, such as how quickly students learn a skill on average. Therefore, parameter estimates being interpretable and plausible is fundamental. My work includes automatically generating data-suggested Dirichlet priors for the Bayesian Knowledge Tracing model, in order to obtain more plausible parameter estimates. I also proposed, implemented, and evaluated an approach to generate multiple Dirichlet priors to improve parameter plausibility, accommodating the assumption that there are subsets of skills which students learn similarly. Part II: Student Performance: Student Performance Prediction. Accurately predicting student performance is one of the most desired features common evaluations for student modeling. for an ITS. The task, however, is very challenging, particularly in predicting a student¡¯s response on an individual problem in the tutor. I analyzed the components of two common student models to determine which aspects provide predictive power in classifying student performance. I found that modeling the student¡¯s overall knowledge led to improved predictive accuracy. I also presented an approach, which, rather than assuming students are drawn from a single distribution, modeled multiple distributions of student performances to improve the model¡¯s accuracy. Part III: Wheel-spinning: Student Future Failure in Mastery Learning. One drawback of the mastery learning framework is its possibility to leave a student stuck attempting to learn a skill he is unable to master. We refer to this phenomenon of students being given practice with no improvement as wheel-spinning. I analyzed student wheel-spinning across different tutoring systems and estimated the scope of the problem. To investigate the negative consequences of see what wheel-spinning could have done to students, I investigated the relationships between wheel-spinning and two other constructs of interest about students: efficiency of learning and ¡°gaming the system¡±. In addition, I designed a generic model of wheel-spinning, which uses features easily obtained by most ITSs. The model can be well generalized to unknown students with high accuracy classifying mastery and wheel-spinning problems. When used as a detector, the model can detect wheel-spinning in its early stage with satisfying satisfactory precision and recall
Recommended from our members
Assessing the reliability of diverse fault-tolerant software-based systems
We discuss a problem in the safety assessment of automatic control and protection systems. There is an increasing dependence on software for performing safety-critical functions, like the safety shut-down of dangerous plants. Software brings increased risk of design defects and thus systematic failures; redundancy with diversity between redundant channels is a possible defence. While diversity techniques can improve the dependability of software-based systems, they do not alleviate the difficulties of assessing whether such a system is safe enough for operation. We study this problem for a simple safety protection system consisting of two diverse channels performing the same function. The problem is evaluating its probability of failure in demand. Assuming failure independence between dangerous failures of the channels is unrealistic. One can instead use evidence from the observation of the whole system's behaviour under realistic test conditions. Standard inference procedures can then estimate system reliability, but they take no advantage of a system’s fault-tolerant structure. We show how to extend these techniques to take account of fault tolerance by a conceptually straightforward application of Bayesian inference. Unfortunately, the method is computationally complex and requires the conceptually difficult step of specifying 'prior' distributions for the parameters of interest. This paper presents the correct inference procedure, exemplifies possible pitfalls in its application and clarifies some non-intuitive issues about reliability assessment for fault-tolerant software
A role for the developing lexicon in phonetic category acquisition
Infants segment words from fluent speech during the same period when they are learning phonetic categories, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition typically ignore information about the words in which sounds appear. We use a Bayesian model to illustrate how feedback from segmented words might constrain phonetic category learning by providing information about which sounds occur together in words. Simulations demonstrate that word-level information can successfully disambiguate overlapping English vowel categories. Learning patterns in the model are shown to parallel human behavior from artificial language learning tasks. These findings point to a central role for the developing lexicon in phonetic category acquisition and provide a framework for incorporating top-down constraints into models of category learning
Assessing the Reliability of Diverse Fault-Tolerant Systems
Design diversity between redundant channels is a way of improving the dependability of software-based systems, but it does not alleviate the difficulties of dependability assessment
Bayesian hierarchical clustering for studying cancer gene expression data with unknown statistics
Clustering analysis is an important tool in studying gene expression data. The Bayesian hierarchical clustering (BHC) algorithm can automatically infer the number of clusters and uses Bayesian model selection to improve clustering quality. In this paper, we present an extension of the BHC algorithm. Our Gaussian BHC (GBHC) algorithm represents data as a mixture of Gaussian distributions. It uses normal-gamma distribution as a conjugate prior on the mean and precision of each of the Gaussian components. We tested GBHC over 11 cancer and 3 synthetic datasets. The results on cancer datasets show that in sample clustering, GBHC on average produces a clustering partition that is more concordant with the ground truth than those obtained from other commonly used algorithms. Furthermore, GBHC frequently infers the number of clusters that is often close to the ground truth. In gene clustering, GBHC also produces a clustering partition that is more biologically plausible than several other state-of-the-art methods. This suggests GBHC as an alternative tool for studying gene expression data. The implementation of GBHC is available at https://sites.
google.com/site/gaussianbhc
Bayesian inversion for finite fault earthquake source models I—theory and algorithm
The estimation of finite fault earthquake source models is an inherently underdetermined
problem: there is no unique solution to the inverse problem of determining the rupture history
at depth as a function of time and space when our data are limited to observations at
the Earth’s surface. Bayesian methods allow us to determine the set of all plausible source
model parameters that are consistent with the observations, our a priori assumptions about the
physics of the earthquake source and wave propagation, and models for the observation errors
and the errors due to the limitations in our forward model. Because our inversion approach
does not require inverting any matrices other than covariance matrices, we can restrict our
ensemble of solutions to only those models that are physically defensible while avoiding the
need to restrict our class of models based on considerations of numerical invertibility. We
only use prior information that is consistent with the physics of the problem rather than some
artefice (such as smoothing) needed to produce a unique optimal model estimate. Bayesian inference
can also be used to estimate model-dependent and internally consistent effective errors
due to shortcomings in the forward model or data interpretation, such as poor Green’s functions
or extraneous signals recorded by our instruments. Until recently, Bayesian techniques
have been of limited utility for earthquake source inversions because they are computationally
intractable for problems with as many free parameters as typically used in kinematic
finite fault models. Our algorithm, called cascading adaptive transitional metropolis in parallel
(CATMIP), allows sampling of high-dimensional problems in a parallel computing framework.
CATMIP combines the Metropolis algorithm with elements of simulated annealing and
genetic algorithms to dynamically optimize the algorithm’s efficiency as it runs. The algorithm
is a generic Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler; it works independently of the
model design, a priori constraints and data under consideration, and so can be used for a wide
variety of scientific problems. We compare CATMIP’s efficiency relative to several existing
sampling algorithms and then present synthetic performance tests of finite fault earthquake
rupture models computed using CATMIP
- …