7,656 research outputs found
ALBERT HIRSCHMAN IN LATIN AMERICA: NOTES ON HIRSCHMAN'S TRILOGY ON ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
This paper discusses Albert Hirschman's writings that resulted from his professional experience in Colombia, Brazil, Chile and other Latin American countries during the 1950s and 1960s. The focus is on the trilogy written by Hirschman in the field of development economics, which comprises: The Strategy of Economic Development (1958), Journeys Toward Progress (1963) and Development Projects Observed (1967). Some methodological aspects of those writings, which tend to be recurrent throughout the author's whole intelectual career, are emphasized.
The role of voluntary disclosure in listed company: an alternative model
The aim of this paper is to propose a model of social reporting that allows improving the communication of sociability and quantify the sociability. The research approach follows a qualitative methodology, applying a single method approach. The observations are the result of an empirical analysis carried out on the Italian-Stock-Exchange listed companies that have an independent social or sustainability balance sheet. The findings of this research are based, first, on collection of data about the sample, in order to identify the strong and weak points in terms of its management and economic evaluation, and secondly on the introduction of an alternative method of social accounting, with the objective of measuring the sociability of company communication
Training Echo State Networks with Regularization through Dimensionality Reduction
In this paper we introduce a new framework to train an Echo State Network to
predict real valued time-series. The method consists in projecting the output
of the internal layer of the network on a space with lower dimensionality,
before training the output layer to learn the target task. Notably, we enforce
a regularization constraint that leads to better generalization capabilities.
We evaluate the performances of our approach on several benchmark tests, using
different techniques to train the readout of the network, achieving superior
predictive performance when using the proposed framework. Finally, we provide
an insight on the effectiveness of the implemented mechanics through a
visualization of the trajectory in the phase space and relying on the
methodologies of nonlinear time-series analysis. By applying our method on well
known chaotic systems, we provide evidence that the lower dimensional embedding
retains the dynamical properties of the underlying system better than the
full-dimensional internal states of the network
Local Short Term Electricity Load Forecasting: Automatic Approaches
Short-Term Load Forecasting (STLF) is a fundamental component in the
efficient management of power systems, which has been studied intensively over
the past 50 years. The emerging development of smart grid technologies is
posing new challenges as well as opportunities to STLF. Load data, collected at
higher geographical granularity and frequency through thousands of smart
meters, allows us to build a more accurate local load forecasting model, which
is essential for local optimization of power load through demand side
management. With this paper, we show how several existing approaches for STLF
are not applicable on local load forecasting, either because of long training
time, unstable optimization process, or sensitivity to hyper-parameters.
Accordingly, we select five models suitable for local STFL, which can be
trained on different time-series with limited intervention from the user. The
experiment, which consists of 40 time-series collected at different locations
and aggregation levels, revealed that yearly pattern and temperature
information are only useful for high aggregation level STLF. On local STLF
task, the modified version of double seasonal Holt-Winter proposed in this
paper performs relatively well with only 3 months of training data, compared to
more complex methods
Bidirectional deep-readout echo state networks
We propose a deep architecture for the classification of multivariate time
series. By means of a recurrent and untrained reservoir we generate a vectorial
representation that embeds temporal relationships in the data. To improve the
memorization capability, we implement a bidirectional reservoir, whose last
state captures also past dependencies in the input. We apply dimensionality
reduction to the final reservoir states to obtain compressed fixed size
representations of the time series. These are subsequently fed into a deep
feedforward network trained to perform the final classification. We test our
architecture on benchmark datasets and on a real-world use-case of blood
samples classification. Results show that our method performs better than a
standard echo state network and, at the same time, achieves results comparable
to a fully-trained recurrent network, but with a faster training
Time Series Cluster Kernel for Learning Similarities between Multivariate Time Series with Missing Data
Similarity-based approaches represent a promising direction for time series
analysis. However, many such methods rely on parameter tuning, and some have
shortcomings if the time series are multivariate (MTS), due to dependencies
between attributes, or the time series contain missing data. In this paper, we
address these challenges within the powerful context of kernel methods by
proposing the robust \emph{time series cluster kernel} (TCK). The approach
taken leverages the missing data handling properties of Gaussian mixture models
(GMM) augmented with informative prior distributions. An ensemble learning
approach is exploited to ensure robustness to parameters by combining the
clustering results of many GMM to form the final kernel.
We evaluate the TCK on synthetic and real data and compare to other
state-of-the-art techniques. The experimental results demonstrate that the TCK
is robust to parameter choices, provides competitive results for MTS without
missing data and outstanding results for missing data.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure
Time series kernel similarities for predicting Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation from ECGs
We tackle the problem of classifying Electrocardiography (ECG) signals with
the aim of predicting the onset of Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation (PAF). Atrial
fibrillation is the most common type of arrhythmia, but in many cases PAF
episodes are asymptomatic. Therefore, in order to help diagnosing PAF, it is
important to design procedures for detecting and, more importantly, predicting
PAF episodes. We propose a method for predicting PAF events whose first step
consists of a feature extraction procedure that represents each ECG as a
multi-variate time series. Successively, we design a classification framework
based on kernel similarities for multi-variate time series, capable of handling
missing data. We consider different approaches to perform classification in the
original space of the multi-variate time series and in an embedding space,
defined by the kernel similarity measure. We achieve a classification accuracy
comparable with state of the art methods, with the additional advantage of
detecting the PAF onset up to 15 minutes in advance
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