Predictive Liability Models and Visualizations of High Dimensional Retail Employee Data

Employee theft and dishonesty is a major contributor to loss in the retail industry. Retailers have reported the need for more automated analytic tools to assess the liability of their employees. In this work, we train and optimize several machine learning models for regression prediction and analysis on this data, which will help retailers identify and manage risky employees. Since the data we use is very high dimensional, we use feature selection techniques to identify the most contributing factors to an employee's assessed risk. We also use dimension reduction and data embedding techniques to present this dataset in a easy to interpret format

Weakly Interacting Stable Pions

An unbroken discrete symmetry, analogous to G-parity in QCD, exists in standard model extensions with vector-like coupling of electroweak SU(2) to "hidden sector" fermions that are confined by a strong gauge force. For an irreducible SU(2) representation of the hidden sector fermions, the lightest hidden sector states form an isotriplet of "pions" with calculable mass splittings and couplings to standard model fields. The parity can be extended to fermions in real representations of color SU(3), and can provide dark matter candidates with distinct collider signatures.Comment: 5 pages; final version in PR

Fast Simulation of Skin Sliding

Skin sliding is the phenomenon of the skin moving over underlying layers of fat, muscle and bone. Due to the complex interconnections between these separate layers and their differing elasticity properties, it is difficult to model and expensive to compute. We present a novel method to simulate this phenomenon at real--time by remeshing the surface based on a parameter space resampling. In order to evaluate the surface parametrization, we borrow a technique from structural engineering known as the force density method which solves for an energy minimizing form with a sparse linear system. Our method creates a realistic approximation of skin sliding in real--time, reducing texture distortions in the region of the deformation. In addition it is flexible, simple to use, and can be incorporated into any animation pipeline

On the road to recovery, soft patches turn up often

Business cycles ; Economic conditions