Using a hybrid decision-making model to evaluate the sustainable development performance of high-tech listed companies

In this study, we use a triple bottom-line concept including economic, social and environmental performance as the sustainable development performance evaluation categories for companies. Moreover, an integrated model based on grey relational analysis, decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory, analytic network process and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution is proposed for solving a corporate sustainability performance evaluation and ranking problem. In order to verify the proposed model, we adopt 34 high-tech listed companies in Taiwan as the research object to measure companies’ sustainable development performance and ranking in 2013. The results can be used as an important basis for management decision-making, and can also serve as reference for banks and investors when developing investment strategy

A Comprehensive performance evaluation and ranking methodology under a sustainable development perspective

Under industry globalization and the intensely competitive environment, a company's competitiveness must constantly be upgraded in order to achieve the goal of sustainability. Therefore, the correct and valid evaluation of companies’ sustainable performance has become an important issue. The main purpose of this study is to discuss and establish a sustainable performance evaluation criteria and model for companies. First, the measurements of companies’ financial, credit risk, environmental and social responsibility are integrated to create sustainable business performance evaluation criteria. Then, we integrate grey relational analysis and an improved TOPSIS method to construct a sustainable performance evaluation model for companies. In order to verify the findings of this study, we adopt Taiwan's high-tech listed companies as the research object to explore sustainable operating performance and ranking in 2011. The empirical results will help companies to build future business strategies and can also be used as an important reference for investor and bank credit auditing

A global analysis of COVID-19 infection fatality rate and its associated factors during the Delta and Omicron variant periods: an ecological study

BackgroundThe Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is more highly infectious and transmissible than prior variants of concern. It was unclear which factors might have contributed to the alteration of COVID-19 cases and deaths during the Delta and Omicron variant periods. This study aimed to compare the COVID-19 average weekly infection fatality rate (AWIFR), investigate factors associated with COVID-19 AWIFR, and explore the factors linked to the increase in COVID-19 AWIFR between two periods of Delta and Omicron variants.Materials and methodsAn ecological study has been conducted among 110 countries over the first 12 weeks during two periods of Delta and Omicron variant dominance using open publicly available datasets. Our analysis included 102 countries in the Delta period and 107 countries in the Omicron period. Linear mixed-effects models and linear regression models were used to explore factors associated with the variation of AWIFR over Delta and Omicron periods.FindingsDuring the Delta period, the lower AWIFR was witnessed in countries with better government effectiveness index [β = −0.762, 95% CI (−1.238)–(−0.287)] and higher proportion of the people fully vaccinated [β = −0.385, 95% CI (−0.629)–(−0.141)]. In contrast, a higher burden of cardiovascular diseases was positively associated with AWIFR (β = 0.517, 95% CI 0.102–0.932). Over the Omicron period, while years lived with disability (YLD) caused by metabolism disorders (β = 0.843, 95% CI 0.486–1.2), the proportion of the population aged older than 65 years (β = 0.737, 95% CI 0.237–1.238) was positively associated with poorer AWIFR, and the high proportion of the population vaccinated with a booster dose [β = −0.321, 95% CI (−0.624)–(−0.018)] was linked with the better outcome. Over two periods of Delta and Omicron, the increase in government effectiveness index was associated with a decrease in AWIFR [β = −0.438, 95% CI (−0.750)–(−0.126)]; whereas, higher death rates caused by diabetes and kidney (β = 0.472, 95% CI 0.089–0.855) and percentage of population aged older than 65 years (β = 0.407, 95% CI 0.013–0.802) were associated with a significant increase in AWIFR.ConclusionThe COVID-19 infection fatality rates were strongly linked with the coverage of vaccination rate, effectiveness of government, and health burden related to chronic diseases. Therefore, proper policies for the improvement of vaccination coverage and support of vulnerable groups could substantially mitigate the burden of COVID-19

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

A generalized DEMATEL theory with a shrinkage coefficient for an indirect relation matrix

In this paper, a novel decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) theory with a shrinkage coefficient of indirect relation matrix is proposed, and a useful validity index, called Liu’s validity index, is also proposed for evaluating the performance of any DEMATEL model. If the shrinkage coefficient of an indirect relation matrix is equal to 1, then this new theory is identical to the traditional theory; in other words, it is a generalization of the traditional theory. Furthermore, the indirect relation is always considerably greater than the direct one in traditional DEMATEL theory, which is unreasonable and unfair because it overemphasizes the influence of the indirect relation. We prove in this paper that if the shrinkage coefficient is equal to 0.5, then the indirect relation is less than its direct relation. Because the shrinkage coefficient belongs to [0.5, 1], according to Liu’s validity index, we can find a more appropriate shrinkage coefficient to obtain a more efficient DEMATEL method. Some crucial properties of this new theory are discussed, and a simple example is provided to illustrate the advantages of the proposed theory

Integration between Real Estate Market and Stock Market:Evidence from Taiwan

[[abstract]]This paper investigates long-run equilibrium relationship between real estate market and stock market in Taiwan using real estate investment trust (REIT) index. Linear cointegration model and recently developed time-varying vector error correction model are applied to explore possible long-run linear and non-linear linkage between the two indexes. The results of both the cointegration tests point to the existence of neither linear nor non-linear cointegration, suggesting that REIT markets are segmented from stock markets. These findings have important implication for investors and policy makers.[[notice]]補正完