Predicting Severity of Foreign Body Injuries in Children in Upper Airways: An Approach Based on Regression Trees

The entry of a small item into the upper airways is one of the leading causes of injuries in children up to 14 years old. The aim of this study is to characterize types of objects causing choking along with the features of the children involved in the accident and compare results with current standards. The European Survey on Foreign Bodies Injuries Study (ESFBI) collected data on foreign body injuries from 19 European countries. The data from ESFBI were selected according to the ICD-9-CM codes 933 (foreign body in the pharynx and larynx) and 934 (foreign body in the trachea, bronchi, and lungs). Both a classification tree and a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) have been set up to predict the probability that an injured child experiences a hospitalization. The classification tree provides flowchart-type decision rules and allows for analyzing the impact of the item features, the children characteristics, and the circumstances of the accidents on the severity of the foreign body injuries. Results showed that children younger than 3.5 who are involved in an accident have a high probability to experience a hospitalization.     

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.     

Urban tree cover: an ecological perspective

Analysis of urban tree cover is generally limited to inventories of tree structure and composition on public lands. This approach provided valuable information for resource management. However, it does not account for all tree cover within an urban landscape, thus providing insufficient information on ecological patterns and processes. We propose evaluating tree cover for an entire urban area that is based on patch dynamics. Treed patches are classified by their origin, structure, and management intensity. A patch approach enables ecologists to evaluate ecological patterns and processes for the entire urban landscape and to examine how social patterns influence these ecological patterns and processes.     

Multiobjective Decision-Tree Analysis1

Single-objective-based decision-tree analysis has been extensively and successfully used in numerous decision-making problems since its formal introduction by Howard Raiffa more than two decades ago. This paper extends the traditional methodology to incorporate multiple noncommensurate objective functions and use of the conditional expected value of the risk of extreme and catastrophic events. The proposed methodology considers the cases where (a) a finite number of actions are available at each decision node and (b) discrete or continuous states of nature can be presented at each chance node. The proposed extension of decision-tree analysis is introduced through an example problem that leads the reader step-by-step into the methodological procedure. The example problem builds on flood warning systems. Two noncommensurate objectives—the loss of lives and the loss of property (including monetary costs of the flood warning system)–are incorporated into the decision tree. In addition, two risk measures—the common expected value and the conditional expected value of extreme and catastrophic events—are quantified and are also incorporated into the decision-making process. Theoretical difficulties associated with the stage-wise calculation of conditional expected values are identified and certain simplifying assumptions are made for computational tractibility. In particular, it is revealed that decisions concerning experimentation have a very interesting impact on the noninferior solution set of options—a phenomenon that has no equivalence in the single-objective case.     

Nonparametric multiple expectile regression via ER-Boost

Expectile regression [Newey W, Powell J. Asymmetric least squares estimation and testing, Econometrica. 1987;55:819–847] is a nice tool for estimating the conditional expectiles of a response variable given a set of covariates. Expectile regression at 50% level is the classical conditional mean regression. In many real applications having multiple expectiles at different levels provides a more complete picture of the conditional distribution of the response variable. Multiple linear expectile regression model has been well studied [Newey W, Powell J. Asymmetric least squares estimation and testing, Econometrica. 1987;55:819–847; Efron B. Regression percentiles using asymmetric squared error loss, Stat Sin. 1991;1(93):125.], but it can be too restrictive for many real applications. In this paper, we derive a regression tree-based gradient boosting estimator for nonparametric multiple expectile regression. The new estimator, referred to as ER-Boost, is implemented in an R package erboost publicly available at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/erboost/index.html. We use two homoscedastic/heteroscedastic random-function-generator models in simulation to show the high predictive accuracy of ER-Boost. As an application, we apply ER-Boost to analyse North Carolina County crime data. From the nonparametric expectile regression analysis of this dataset, we draw several interesting conclusions that are consistent with the previous study using the economic model of crime. This real data example also provides a good demonstration of some nice features of ER-Boost, such as its ability to handle different types of covariates and its model interpretation tools.     

二十世纪日本学者对云南少数民族历史文化的研究

介绍和评析了鸟居龙藏等日本学者对云南的田野调查、华南民族史、傣族史、南诏和大理国史、倭族之源、照叶树林文化、神话、民间故事、民间信仰和民间祭祀等方面的研究成果,并系统地分析了日本学者对云南少数民族历史文化研究的全貌、学术研究的轨迹及新动向。     

基于滑动窗口的自适应网页预测模型

PPM模型广泛应用于Web预取技术,但大多数的PPM模型不具有自适应性,不能反映用户浏览模式的改变。通过对标准PPM模型的扩展,提出基于滑动窗口的自适应网页预测模型。该模型仅保留处于滑动窗口之内的最近访问序列,从而反映用户兴趣的变化,同时利用非压缩后缀树增量式添加新的用户请求和删除过时的浏览信息,以提高更新速度。实验表明,该模型能更准确地描述用户在Web上的浏览特征,在预取性能上明显地优于以往的模型。     

《槐花几时开》艺术形象的美学分析

《槐花几时开》是一首非常出名的四川宜宾民歌,其歌词朴实、凝练,旋律优美,词、曲结合完美,感情含蓄真切,唱起来非常动听感人,已成为很多歌唱家的保留曲目。在美学方面,这也是一部值得挖掘的作品。它蕴涵了多种形式和形态的美,同时也包容了很多美学思想。如何挖掘这一短小作品美的内涵是一个非常重要的课题。本文试从七个方面、两种形态入手,同时结合中、西方音乐美学思想来剖析该歌曲所蕴涵的艺术形象的美。     

肇庆市居住区绿化树种及其分析

通过对肇庆市居住区的实地调研与树种鉴定，记录了134种绿化树种，其中乔木75种。灌木53种，木质藤本6种。主要隶属于桑科、棕榈科、苏木科、大戟科、夹竹桃科、挑金娘科。经过分析，有针对性地对肇庆市居住区提出了绿化建议，建议多采用耐荫植物与景观植物，合理进行树种配置，可采用复式立体栽植及景观陪衬等绿化方式。