Genetic Algorithm-based Feature Selection for Auditing Decisions

When examining a firm’s financial statements, independent auditors seek to render opinions on their fairness, accuracy, presence of fraud, and going concern, among others. This research focuses on the going concern, and the ability to predict when the going concern is flagged based on an array of accounting measures. It seeks to determine a parsimonious set of measures that can accurately predict when the going concern is raised, when using a linear kernel support vector machine for prediction. A genetic algorithm is employed to effectively reduce the set of measures without compromising accuracy of prediction. Using data from audits of public firms, a parsimonious model is created utilizing only 8 measures from a set of 35 available measures. The model exhibits 98.6% accuracy, and outperforms several other machine learning techniques

Towards Bidirectional Hierarchical Representations for Attention-Based Neural Machine Translation

This paper proposes a hierarchical attentional neural translation model which focuses on enhancing source-side hierarchical representations by covering both local and global semantic information using a bidirectional tree-based encoder. To maximize the predictive likelihood of target words, a weighted variant of an attention mechanism is used to balance the attentive information between lexical and phrase vectors. Using a tree-based rare word encoding, the proposed model is extended to sub-word level to alleviate the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem. Empirical results reveal that the proposed model significantly outperforms sequence-to-sequence attention-based and tree-based neural translation models in English-Chinese translation tasks.Comment: Accepted for publication at EMNLP 201

Functionality and design influence on fitness fashion

The growing debate between design and functionality dominates within the sportswear industry. Consumers purchase sportswear indirectly due to personal and social intrinsic attributes. Sportswear should be functional, comfortable and safe, developed in line with the performance needs of a person. Hence this study aims to explore the intrinsic factors of consumers purchase intention towards fitness fashion. The conceptual model which is an integration of Social Cognition and Enclothed Cognition theories was analysed using double mediation and reveals that personal and social factors affect perceived importance on functionality and design. While most research claims extrinsic values as main factors of purchase, other perceptions of consumers could come into play which would be beneficial for sportswear brands to identify with and leverage on. The results of this research can assist companies to gain prominence, leveraging on the growing popularity of active lifestyles by designing clothing that match those perceptions

Influence of Isentropic Mixing on Seasonal Ozone Variations in the Lower Stratosphere and Upper Troposphere

[1] The isentropic cross-tropopause ozone transport has been estimated in both hemispheres in 1999 based on the potential vorticity mapping of Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment II ozone measurements and contour advection calculations using the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Global and Modeling Assimilation Office analysis. The estimated net isentropic stratosphere-to-troposphere ozone flux is ∼118 ± 61 × 109 kg yr−1 globally within the layer between 330 and 370 K in 1999; 60% of it is found in the Northern Hemisphere, and 40% is found in the Southern Hemisphere. The monthly average ozone fluxes are strongest in summer and weakest in winter in both hemispheres. The seasonal variations of ozone in the lower stratosphere (LS) and upper troposphere (UT) have been analyzed using ozonesonde observations from ozonesonde stations in the extratropics and subtropics, respectively. It is shown that observed ozone levels increase in the UT over subtropical ozonesonde stations and decrease in the LS over extratropical stations in late spring/early summer and that the ozone increases in the summertime subtropical UT are unlikely to be explained by photochemical ozone production and diabatic transport alone. We conclude that isentropic transport is a significant contributor to ozone levels in the subtropical upper troposphere, especially in summer