Fair trade in insurance industry: Premium determination of Taiwan automobile insurance

This paper examines premium determination of voluntary automobile insurance policy and risk classification under a heavily regulated rating system in Taiwan. We investigate the distribution of actual premium and pure premium, based on unique data to test if premium reflect appropriate gender-age factor. The reasonableness of loading and the difference in driving exposure between policyholder and driver are investigated for three different types of policy. An adjustment of gender-age premium coefficients is called for

Mycobacterium tuberculosis and M. bovis infection in Feedlot Deer (Cervus unicolor swinhoei and C. nippon taiouanus) in Taiwan

Background/purposeMycobacterium bovis frequently infects wild and farm deer species with tuberculosis. This study investigated mycobacterial infection in two native deer species Cervus unicolor swinhoei (Formosan Sambar, Sambar) and C. nippon taiouanus (Formasan Sika, Sika).MethodsBased on different sampling sources of 19 intradermal tuberculin test (ITT) Sambar, mycobacterial infection and/or species were detected by acid-fast stain, duplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and multiplex nested PCR (mnPCR) methods, traditional mycobacterial culture and gross lesion. Blood samples of 167 Sambar deer and 147 Sika deer were then tested by duplex PCR and mnPCR methods to investigate the prevalence of mycobacterial infection. Sequence variations of these mycobacterial species were analyzed as well.ResultsDuplex PCR and mnPCR assays could differentiate between MTBC (M. bovis and M. tuberculosis) and M. avium, as well as between M. bovis and M. tuberculosis, respectively. These PCR methods showed a higher detection rate than traditional culture and matched the gross lesions examined in 19 ITT-examined Sambar. Therefore, the mycobacterial infection in blood samples of 314 deer samples was detected using these PCR methods. Duplex PCR and mnPCR showed an identical prevalence of 16.1% in Sambar and 8.2% in Sika and a significant difference in prevalence between these two deer species. M. bovis and M. tuberculosis were the species detected in feedlot Sambar and Sika. M. tuberculosis was found only and first in Sambar fed in central Taiwan. Sequence analysis revealed diverse genetic variations in M. bovis and M. tuberculosis associated with deer subspecies.ConclusionMultiplex PCR methods were established, and M. bovis and M. tuberculosis were identified in feedlot deer in Taiwan. Sequence variations indicated diverse sources of both mycobacterial species

A Temporal Usage Pattern-based Tag Recommendation Approach

While social tagging can benefit Internet users managing their resources, it suffers the problems such as diverse and/or unchecked vocabulary and unwillingness to tag. Use of freely new tags and/or reuse of frequent tags have degraded coherence of corresponding resources of each tag that further frustrates people in retrieving information due to cognitive dissonance. Tag recommender systems can recommend users the most relevant tags to the resource they intend to annotate, and drastically transfer the tagging process from generation to recognition to reduce user’s cognitive effort and time. Prior research on tag recommendation has addressed the time-dependence issues of tags by applying a time decaying measure to determine the recurrence probability of a tag according to its recency instead of its usage pattern. In response, this study intends to propose the temporal usage pattern-based tag recommendation technique to consider the usage patterns and temporal characteristic of tags for making recommendations

D4AM: A General Denoising Framework for Downstream Acoustic Models

The performance of acoustic models degrades notably in noisy environments. Speech enhancement (SE) can be used as a front-end strategy to aid automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. However, existing training objectives of SE methods are not fully effective at integrating speech-text and noisy-clean paired data for training toward unseen ASR systems. In this study, we propose a general denoising framework, D4AM, for various downstream acoustic models. Our framework fine-tunes the SE model with the backward gradient according to a specific acoustic model and the corresponding classification objective. In addition, our method aims to consider the regression objective as an auxiliary loss to make the SE model generalize to other unseen acoustic models. To jointly train an SE unit with regression and classification objectives, D4AM uses an adjustment scheme to directly estimate suitable weighting coefficients rather than undergoing a grid search process with additional training costs. The adjustment scheme consists of two parts: gradient calibration and regression objective weighting. The experimental results show that D4AM can consistently and effectively provide improvements to various unseen acoustic models and outperforms other combination setups. Specifically, when evaluated on the Google ASR API with real noisy data completely unseen during SE training, D4AM achieves a relative WER reduction of 24.65% compared with the direct feeding of noisy input. To our knowledge, this is the first work that deploys an effective combination scheme of regression (denoising) and classification (ASR) objectives to derive a general pre-processor applicable to various unseen ASR systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/ChangLee0903/D4AM

Web Usage Mining to Extract Knowledge for Modelling Users of Taiwan Travel Recommendation Mobile APP

This work presents the design of a web mining system to understand the navigational behavior of passengers in developed Taiwan travel recommendation mobile app that provides four main functions including recommend by location , hot topic , nearby scenic spots information , my favorite and 2650 scenic spots. To understand passenger navigational patterns, log data from actual cases of app were collected and analysed by web mining system. This system analysed 58981 sessions of 1326 users for the month of June, 2014. Sequential profiles for passenger navigational patterns were captured by applying sequence-based representation schemes in association with Markov models and enhanced K-mean clustering algorithms for sequence behavior mining cluster patterns. The navigational cycle, time, function numbers, and the depth and extent (range) of app were statistically analysed. The analysis results can be used improved the passengers\u27 acceptance of app and help generate potential personalization recommendations for achieving an intelligent travel recommendation service

Carbon monoxide may enhance bile secretion by increasing glutathione excretion and Mrp2 expression in rats

AbstractBackgroundNitric oxide (NO) donors have been reported to induce choleresis via an increased excretion of glutathione. The effects of another gas molecule, carbon monoxide (CO), on bile formation are, however, inconsistent among previous reports. We investigated the sequential changes of bile output and the biliary contents in rats with or without CO supplementation to elucidate the mechanism of CO on bile excretion.MethodsDichloromethane (DCM) was gastrically fed to male Sprague–Dawley rats to yield CO by liver biotransformation. The rats were divided into DCM-treated (n = 7), DCM plus L-NAME-treated (n = 6), and corn oil-treated-(n = 8) groups. Bile samples were collected hourly to examine the flow rate and bile content. Serum levels of nitrite and nitrate 4 hours after DCM supplementation with or without NO synthase (NOS) inhibition were measured by capillary electrophoresis. The expression of hepatic inducible NOS was evaluated by Western blotting 6 hours after DCM administration.ResultsLevels of carboxyhemoglobin rose to around 10% at 4 hours after DCM supplementation and were maintained until the end of the experiments. Bile flow increased after DCM supplementation and was associated with a concomitant increase of biliary glutathione and higher hepatic multidrug resistance-associated protein 2 (Mrp2) expression. Hepatic inducible NOS expression and serum nitrate/nitrite levels were also increased. Treatment with an NOS inhibitor (L-NAME) abolished the CO-induced glutathione excretion and choleresis, but not Mrp2 expression.ConclusionThe present study demonstrated that CO enhanced biliary output in conjunction with NO by increasing the biliary excretion of glutathione. The increment in biliary glutathione was associated with an increased expression of hepatic Mrp2