An Advanced Decision Making Framework via Joint Utilization of Context-Dependent Data Envelopment Analysis and Sentimental Messages

Compared to widely examined topics in the related literature, such as financial crises/difficulties in accurate prediction, studies on corporate performance forecasting are quite scarce. To fill the research gap, this study introduces an advanced decision making framework that incorporates context-dependent data envelopment analysis (CD-DEA), fuzzy robust principal component analysis (FRPCA), latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), and stochastic gradient twin support vector machine (SGTSVM) for corporate performance forecasting. Ratio analysis with the merits of easy-to-use and intuitiveness plays an essential role in performance analysis, but it typically has one input variable and one output variable, which is unable to appropriately depict the inherent status of a corporate’s operations. To combat this, we consider CD-DEA as it can handle multiple input and multiple output variables simultaneously and yields an attainable target to analyze decision making units (DMUs) when the data present great variations. To strengthen the discriminant ability of CD-DEA, we also conduct FRPCA, and because numerical messages based on historical principles normally cannot transmit future corporate messages, we execute LDA to decompose the accounting narratives into many topics and preserve those topics that are relevant to corporate operations. Sequentially, the process matches the preserved topics with a sentimental dictionary to exploit the hidden sentiments in each topic. The analyzed data are then fed into SGTSVM to construct the forecasting model. The result herein reveals that the introduced decision making framework is a promising alternative for performance forecasting.

Five-Year Project-Level Statewide Pavement Performance Forecasting Using a Two-Stage Machine Learning Approach Based on Long Short-Term Memory

An accurate pavement performance forecasting model is essential for transportation agencies to perform pavement maintenance, rehabilitation, and reconstruction (MR&R) in a predictive and cost-effective manner. Although some forecasting methods have been successful in forecasting short-term (e.g., 1–2 year) pavement conditions at either the project level or network level, accurately forecasting long-term (e.g., 3–5 year) pavement conditions at both project level and network level under real-world conditions is still challenging. Thus, the goal of this paper is to propose a two-stage machine learning approach based on long short-term memory (LSTM) to achieve not only the short-term, but also the long-term, forecasting accuracy at both the project level and network level. The proposed method involves LSTM in the first stage and an artificial neural network (ANN) in the second stage, resulting into a two-stage model. The LSTM first learns the pattern of pavement deterioration based on sequential data (e.g., historical pavement conditions). Then, the ANN further learns the impacts of roadway factors (e.g., traffic parameter, pavement surface type, working district) to adjust the final forecasting results. The accuracy of the proposed two-stage model has been compared with baseline machine learning methods in 2016 on a large, statewide Florida dataset at both the project level and network level to demonstrate the superior capability of the proposed method. In addition, the proposed method has been tested further to forecast future (5-year) pavement conditions (2016–2020). Results show a promising forecasting accuracy for both the short-term and long-term in comparison with the ground truth.

Soccer Team Performance Forecasting using artificial neural network

Recently a large effort was spent on forecasting the outcome of sporting events. Due to forecasting perspective, the presence of competition introduces particular modeling challenges, which in turn limit the applicability of standard techniques. The objective of this study is to create a soccer team performance-forecasting model based on Artificial Neural networks that is capable of forecasting soccer players’ performance depending on teams’ history and behavior in previous matches as an input. The proposed model was trained and tested using a dataset including the features of Egypt Telecommunications club 15 years soccer team participating in the Egyptian Football Association Youth Dorian. Simulation results indicated that the proposed model could be classified as a stable predication model especially for soccer team’s status and performance, achieving high accuracy rate up to 95%.

A Benchmarking application on Workload and Performance forecasting of micro services

Micro services are increasingly understood as the ideal architectural framework for building large cloud applications within and beyond organizational boundaries. These micro services architectures scale up the application, but are expensive to work on, so pay attention to workflow planning and workflow planning. However, this issue is not very clear. In this work, we are developing independent micro services workflows suitable for modeling and prediction methods and designing three-step game models for based applications. Solved the problem of designing micro services based applications to reduce end-to-end delays under user-specific limitations (MAWS-BC) and recommended micro services routing algorithms. The design process and estimation methods are improved and adequate. The experimental results produced by a well-known micro service bank cover a wide variety of statistical analyzes and the production utility of graphic design is shown by a large comparison copy compared to current algorithms.

Forecasting Key Retail Performance Indicators Using Interpretable Regression

Foot traffic, conversion rate, and total sales during a period of time may be considered to be important indicators of store performance. Forecasting them may allow for business managers plan stores operation in the near future in an efficient way. This work presents a regression method that is able to predict these three indicators based on previous data. The previous data includes values for the indicators in the recent past; therefore, it is a requirement to have gathered them in a suitable manner. The previous data also considers other values that are easily obtained, such as the day of the week and hour of the day of the indicators. The novelty of the approach that is presented here is that it provides a confidence interval for the predicted information and the importance of each parameter for the predicted output values, without additional processing or analysis. Real data gathered by Follow Up, a customer experience company, was used to test the proposed method. The method was tried for making predictions for up to one month in the future. The results of the experiments show that the proposed method has a comparable performance to the best methods proposed in the past that do not provide confidence intervals or parameter rankings. The method obtains RMSE of 0.0713 for foot traffic prediction, 0.0795 for conversion rate forecasting, and 0.0757 for sales prediction.

An Operational High-Performance Forecasting System for City-Scale Pluvial Flash Floods in the Southwestern Plain Areas of Taiwan

A pluvial flash flood is rapid flooding induced by intense rainfall associated with a severe weather system, such as thunderstorms or typhoons. Additionally, topography, ground cover, and soil conditions also account for the occurrence of pluvial flash floods. Pluvial flash floods are among the most devastating natural disasters that occur in Taiwan, and these floods always /occur within a few minutes or hours of excessive rainfall. Pluvial flash floods usually threaten large plain areas with high population densities; therefore, there is a great need to implement an operational high-performance forecasting system for pluvial flash flood mitigation and evacuation decisions. This study developed a high-performance two-dimensional hydrodynamic model based on the finite-element method and unstructured grids. The operational high-performance forecasting system is composed of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM), a two-dimensional hydrodynamic model, and a map-oriented visualization tool. The forecasting system employs digital elevation data with a 1-m resolution to simulate city-scale pluvial flash floods. The extent of flooding during historical inundation events derived from the forecasting system agrees well with the surveyed data for plain areas in southwestern Taiwan. The entire process of the operational high-performance forecasting system prediction of pluvial flash floods in the subsequent 24 h is accomplished within 8–10 min, and forecasts are updated every six hours.