Structural Agnostic Modeling: Adversarial Learning of Causal Graphs

A new causal discovery method, Structural Agnostic Modeling (SAM), is presented in this paper. Leveraging both conditional independencies and distributional asymmetries in the data, SAM aims at recovering full causal models from continuous observational data along a multivariate non-parametric setting. The approach is based on a game between $d$ players estimating each variable distribution conditionally to the others as a neural net, and an adversary aimed at discriminating the overall joint conditional distribution, and that of the original data. An original learning criterion combining distribution estimation, sparsity and acyclicity constraints is used to enforce the end-to-end optimization of the graph structure and parameters through stochastic gradient descent. Besides the theoretical analysis of the approach in the large sample limit, SAM is extensively experimentally validated on synthetic and real data

Financial Risk, Financial Risk Management Practices and Performance of Sri Lankan SMEs: Special Reference to Anuradhapura District

All type of business organizations need to have careful monitoring of current expenses and forecast potential costs, which could be caused by risky actions. Risk is inherent in all business functions and in every kind of activities. This is especially true for Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) that are most exposed to the harmful effects of the risks, due to limited resources and structural features. Therefore, the objective of this study is to identify the relationship and impact of financial risk and quality of financial risk management towards performance of SMEs in Anuradhapura district. There are around 5000 registered SMEs in district which have been registered under divisional secretarial office and chamber of commerce branch. From them, 30 SMEs were selected by using purposive sampling method. Financial risk such as Capital Structure risk, Insolvency risk, and Liquidity risk and quality of financial risk management are the independent variables and performance of SMEs is the dependent variable. Data were collected from financial statements to calculate financial risk and some qualitative data were collected to measure quality of financial risk management through questionnaire. Collected data were analyzed by mean testing, correlation and regression analysis. The results reveal that there is no any significance relationship between financial risk and performance of the SMEs and there is a strong positive relationship between quality of financial risk and performance of the SMEs. Keywords: Small and Medium size Enterprises, capital structure risk, insolvency risk, liquidity risk, profitability growth rat

4-(3-Eth­oxy-4-hydroxy­styr­yl)-1-methyl­pyridinium tosyl­ate monohydrate

In the title compound, C16H18NO2 +·C7H7O3S−·H2O, the dihedral angle between the pyridyl and benzene rings of the pyridinium cation is 0.2 (1)°. The benzene ring of the tosyl­ate anion makes a dihedral angle of 4.8 (2)° with the best mean plane of the pyridinium cation. The pyridinium cation and the tosyl­ate anion are hydrogen bonded to the water mol­ecule, and the crystal packing is further stabilized by inter­molecular C—H⋯O and π–π inter­actions [centroid–centroid separations of 3.648 (3) and 3.594 (2) Å

Magnetic properties of (Bi1-xLax)(Fe,Co)O-3 films fabricated by a pulsed DC reactive sputtering and demonstration of magnetization reversal by electric field

(Bi1-xLax)(Fe,Co)O-3 multiferroic magnetic film were fabricated using pulsed DC (direct current) sputtering technique and demonstrated magnetization reversal by applied electric field. The fabricated (Bi0.41La0.59)(Fe0.75Co0.25)O-3 films exhibited hysteresis curves of both ferromagnetic and ferroelectric behavior. The saturated magnetization (M-s) of the multiferroic film was about 70 emu/cm(3). The squareness (S) (=remanent magnetization (M-r)/M-s) and coercivity (H-c) of perpendicular to film plane are 0.64 and 4.2 kOe which are larger compared with films in parallel to film plane of 0.5 and 2.5 kOe. The electric and magnetic domain structures of the (Bi0.41La0.59)(Fe0.75Co0.25)O-3 film analyzed by electric force microscopy (EFM) and magnetic force microscopy (MFM) were clearly induced with submicron scale by applying a local electric field. This magnetization reversal indicates the future realization of high performance magnetic device with low power consumption