Statisticians Can Matter

Statisticians fall far short of their potential as guides to enlightened decision making in business. Two important explanations are: (1) Decision makers are often more easily convinced by concrete examples, however fragmentary and misleading, than by competent statistical analysis. (2) The effective use of statistics in the process of decision making requires hard thinking by decision makers, thinking that cannot be delegated entirely to the statistical specialist. Modern developments in interactive statistical computing may help to reduce the force of these limitations on exploitation of statistics; used properly, computing can encourage, almost force, the student or business user of statistics to think statistically.     

A new prototype system for optimized job shop scheduling

Optimal scheduling of shopfloor activities in an environment of discrete part manufacturing is discussed. The scheduling problem is a well known NP complete one. The main part, the sequencing problem, has been tackled using two techniques: virtual resources identification and taboo search heuristics. The first approach allowed the authors to reduce the complexity of the sequencing from a job shop to a general flow shop problem. On the other hand, the search for an optimal solution, with respect to a fixed strategy, has been achieved via the taboo search. A synthesis of the results of a large number of tests is presented as well as the results of an application to a real case. The latter is shown in comparison with the output of the system being presently used in the examined factory.     

Global Robustness with Respect to the Loss Function and the Prior

We propose a class [I,S] of loss functions for modeling the imprecise preferences of the decision maker in Bayesian Decision Theory. This class is built upon two extreme loss functions I and S which reflect the limited information about the loss function. We give an approximation of the set of Bayes actions for every loss function in [I,S] and every prior in a mixture class; if the decision space is a subset of , we obtain the exact set.     

经济效益综合评价中的简单方法──序时多属性决策方法

本文对序时多属性决策方法进行了研究,针对工业经济效益的综合评价,提出了二个简单的方法,它以简单加权法(SAW)的基础,能够自动确定各评价目标间的加权系数,对决策方案和评价目标没有任何数量要求和限制,决策结果不具有主观随意性,运用该方法对全国部分省市经济效益进行综合评价的结果表明；它与运用非序时多属性决策方法计算的结果基本一致,而后者的计算量大大多于前者。     

Decision Making Under Risk: A Comparison of Bayesian and Fuzzy Set Methods

A classical decision problem is considered where a decision maker is to choose one of a number of actions each offering different consequences. The outcome from a choice of action is uncertain because it depends on the existing state of Nature. Also, the outcome, once an action and state of Nature are specified, may be a vector or a random vector. The decision maker employs both Bayesian methods and fuzzy set techniques to handle the uncertainties. The decision maker is also allowed to use multiple, possibly conflicting, goals in order to determine his best strategy. The Bayesian method produces a set of undominated strategies to choose from, whereas the fuzzy set technique usually produces a unique optimal strategy.     

地州市领导科学决策的原则和方法

科学决策方法是科学决策的重要组成部分,它是实现科学决策目标重要的"桥"和"船",对实现决策目标具有重要的保证和服务作用。科学决策的方法虽然很多,但对领导干部而言最主要的是要学习和掌握调查研究的方法,群众路线的方法,专家评估的方法,民主决策和程序决策的方法。     

中国企业拓展国际市场的模式与策略研究--以荷兰中资企业的实证分析为例

在特定的国外市场选择正确的进入方式是企业国际化进程中最重要的决策之一,也是跨国公司拓展国际市场、实施全球战略的重要思路.本文以企业国际市场进入模式决策的相关理论探讨及模型构建为基础,通过对在荷兰中资企业的实证分析,探讨中国企业如何顺应世界潮流,实施"走出去"战略,选择拓展国际市场的适当模式,以及如何在全球范围内最有效地利用各种经营资源,以提升自己的竞争能力,在跨国竞争中求得生存和发展的相应策略.     

A graph coloring approach for image segmentation

In this paper we develop a segmentation scheme for digital images based upon an iterative binary coloring technique that takes into account changing behavior of adjacent pixels. The output is a hierarchical structure of images which allows a better understanding of complex images. In particular, we propose two algorithms that should be considered as image preprocessing techniques.     

Establishing decision tree-based short-term default credit risk assessment models

ABSTRACT

Traditional credit risk assessment models do not consider the time factor; they only think of whether a customer will default, but not the when to default. The result cannot provide a manager to make the profit-maximum decision. Actually, even if a customer defaults, the financial institution still can gain profit in some conditions. Nowadays, most research applied the Cox proportional hazards model into their credit scoring models, predicting the time when a customer is most likely to default, to solve the credit risk assessment problem. However, in order to fully utilize the fully dynamic capability of the Cox proportional hazards model, time-varying macroeconomic variables are required which involve more advanced data collection. Since short-term default cases are the ones that bring a great loss for a financial institution, instead of predicting when a loan will default, a loan manager is more interested in identifying those applications which may default within a short period of time when approving loan applications. This paper proposes a decision tree-based short-term default credit risk assessment model to assess the credit risk. The goal is to use the decision tree to filter the short-term default to produce a highly accurate model that could distinguish default lending. This paper integrates bootstrap aggregating (Bagging) with a synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) into the credit risk model to improve the decision tree stability and its performance on unbalanced data. Finally, a real case of small and medium enterprise loan data that has been drawn from a local financial institution located in Taiwan is presented to further illustrate the proposed approach. After comparing the result that was obtained from the proposed approach with the logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards models, it was found that the classifying recall rate and precision rate of the proposed model was obviously superior to the logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards models.     

Risk of Extreme Events in Multiobjective Decision Trees Part 1. Severe Events

Earlier work with decision trees identified nonseparability as an obstacle to minimizing the conditional expected value, a measure of the risk of extreme events, by the well-known method of averaging out and folding back. This first of two companion papers addresses the conditional expected value that is defined as the expected outcome assuming the exceedance of a threshold β, where β is preselected by the decision maker. An approach is proposed to overcome the need to evaluate all policies in order to identify the optimal policy. The approach is based on the insight that the conditional expected value is separable into two constituent elements of risk and can thus be optimized along with other objectives, including the unconditional expected value of the outcome, by using a multiobjective decision tree. An example of sequential decision making for improving highway capacity is given.