An Attribute-Centre Based Decision Tree Classification Algorithm

Decision tree algorithms have very important place at classification model of data mining. In literature, algorithms use entropy concept or gini index to form the tree. The shape of the classes and their closeness to each other some of the factors that affect the performance of the algorithm. In this paper we introduce a new decision tree algorithm which employs data (attribute) folding method and variation of the class variables over the branches to be created. A comparative performance analysis has been held between the proposed algorithm and C4.5.

An Improved Algorithm for Calculation of the Third-order Orthogonal Tensor Product Expansion by Using Singular Value Decomposition

As a method of expanding a higher-order tensor data to tensor products of vectors we have proposed the Third-order Orthogonal Tensor Product Expansion (3OTPE) that did similar expansion as Higher-Order Singular Value Decomposition (HOSVD). In this paper we provide a computation algorithm to improve our previous method, in which SVD is applied to the matrix that constituted by the contraction of original tensor data and one of the expansion vector obtained. The residual of the improved method is smaller than the previous method, truncating the expanding tensor products to the same number of terms. Moreover, the residual is smaller than HOSVD when applying to color image data. It is able to be confirmed that the computing time of improved method is the same as the previous method and considerably better than HOSVD.

Progressive AAM Based Robust Face Alignment

AAM has been successfully applied to face alignment, but its performance is very sensitive to initial values. In case the initial values are a little far distant from the global optimum values, there exists a pretty good possibility that AAM-based face alignment may converge to a local minimum. In this paper, we propose a progressive AAM-based face alignment algorithm which first finds the feature parameter vector fitting the inner facial feature points of the face and later localize the feature points of the whole face using the first information. The proposed progressive AAM-based face alignment algorithm utilizes the fact that the feature points of the inner part of the face are less variant and less affected by the background surrounding the face than those of the outer part (like the chin contour). The proposed algorithm consists of two stages: modeling and relation derivation stage and fitting stage. Modeling and relation derivation stage first needs to construct two AAM models: the inner face AAM model and the whole face AAM model and then derive relation matrix between the inner face AAM parameter vector and the whole face AAM model parameter vector. In the fitting stage, the proposed algorithm aligns face progressively through two phases. In the first phase, the proposed algorithm will find the feature parameter vector fitting the inner facial AAM model into a new input face image, and then in the second phase it localizes the whole facial feature points of the new input face image based on the whole face AAM model using the initial parameter vector estimated from using the inner feature parameter vector obtained in the first phase and the relation matrix obtained in the first stage. Through experiments, it is verified that the proposed progressive AAM-based face alignment algorithm is more robust with respect to pose, illumination, and face background than the conventional basic AAM-based face alignment algorithm.

Infrared Face Recognition Using Distance Transforms

In this work we present an efficient approach for face recognition in the infrared spectrum. In the proposed approach physiological features are extracted from thermal images in order to build a unique thermal faceprint. Then, a distance transform is used to get an invariant representation for face recognition. The obtained physiological features are related to the distribution of blood vessels under the face skin. This blood network is unique to each individual and can be used in infrared face recognition. The obtained results are promising and show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Highlighting Document's Structure

In this paper, we present symbolic recognition models to extract knowledge characterized by document structures. Focussing on the extraction and the meticulous exploitation of the semantic structure of documents, we obtain a meaningful contextual tagging corresponding to different unit types (title, chapter, section, enumeration, etc.).

Effect of Heat Treatment on the Portevin-Le Chatelier Effect of Al-2.5%Mg Alloy

An experimental study is presented on the effect of microstructural change on the Portevin-Le Chatelier effect behaviour of Al-2.5%Mg alloy. Tensile tests are performed on the as received and heat treated (at 400 ºC for 16 hours) samples for a wide range of strain rates. The serrations observed in the stress-time curve are investigated from statistical analysis point of view. Microstructures of the samples are characterized by optical metallography and X-ray diffraction. It is found that the excess vacancy generated due to heat treatment leads to decrease in the strain rate sensitivity and the increase in the number of stress drop occurrences per unit time during the PLC effect. The microstructural parameters like domain size, dislocation density have no appreciable effect on the PLC effect as far as the statistical behavior of the serrations is considered.

Optimization of a Triangular Fin with Variable Fin Base Thickness

A triangular fin with variable fin base thickness is analyzed and optimized using a two-dimensional analytical method. The influence of fin base height and fin base thickness on the temperature in the fin is listed. For the fixed fin volumes, the maximum heat loss, the corresponding optimum fin effectiveness, fin base height and fin tip length as a function of the fin base thickness, convection characteristic number and dimensionless fin volume are represented. One of the results shows that the optimum heat loss increases whereas the corresponding optimum fin effectiveness decreases with the increase of fin volume.

High Level Characterization and Optimization of Switched-Current Sigma-Delta Modulators with VHDL-AMS

Today, design requirements are extending more and more from electronic (analogue and digital) to multidiscipline design. These current needs imply implementation of methodologies to make the CAD product reliable in order to improve time to market, study costs, reusability and reliability of the design process. This paper proposes a high level design approach applied for the characterization and the optimization of Switched-Current Sigma- Delta Modulators. It uses the new hardware description language VHDL-AMS to help the designers to optimize the characteristics of the modulator at a high level with a considerably reduced CPU time before passing to a transistor level characterization.

Block Activity in Metric Neural Networks

The model of neural networks on the small-world topology, with metric (local and random connectivity) is investigated. The synaptic weights are random, driving the network towards a chaotic state for the neural activity. An ordered macroscopic neuron state is induced by a bias in the network connections. When the connections are mainly local, the network emulates a block-like structure. It is found that the topology and the bias compete to influence the network to evolve into a global or a block activity ordering, according to the initial conditions.

The Influence of Voltage Flicker for the Wind Generator upon Distribution System

One of the most important power quality issues is voltage flicker. Nowadays this issue also impacts the power system all over the world. The fact of the matter is that the more and the larger capacity of wind generator has been installed. Under unstable wind power situation, the variation of output current and voltage have caused trouble to voltage flicker. Hence, the major purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of wind generator on voltage flicker of power system. First of all, digital simulation and analysis are carried out based on wind generator operating under various system short circuit capacity, impedance angle, loading, and power factor of load. The simulation results have been confirmed by field measurements.

Development of Monitoring and Simulation System of Human Tracking System Based On Mobile Agent Technologies

In recent years, the number of the cases of information leaks is increasing. Companies and Research Institutions make various actions against information thefts and security accidents. One of the actions is adoption of the crime prevention system, including the monitoring system by surveillance cameras. In order to solve difficulties of multiple cameras monitoring, we develop the automatic human tracking system using mobile agents through multiple surveillance cameras to track target persons. In this paper, we develop the monitor which confirms mobile agents tracing target persons, and the simulator of video picture analysis to construct the tracking algorithm.

Low Pressure Binder-Less Densification of Fibrous Biomass Material using a Screw Press

In this study, the theoretical relationship between pressure and density was investigated on cylindrical hollow fuel briquettes produced of a mixture of fibrous biomass material using a screw press without any chemical binder. The fuel briquettes were made of biomass and other waste material such as spent coffee beans, mielie husks, saw dust and coal fines under pressures of 0.878-2.2 Mega Pascals (MPa). The material was densified into briquettes of outer diameter of 100mm, inner diameter of 35mm and 50mm long. It was observed that manual screw compression action produces briquettes of relatively low density as compared to the ones made using hydraulic compression action. The pressure and density relationship was obtained in the form of power law and compare well with other cylindrical solid briquettes made using hydraulic compression action. The produced briquettes have a dry density of 989 kg/m3 and contain 26.30% fixed carbon, 39.34% volatile matter, 10.9% moisture and 10.46% ash as per dry proximate analysis. The bomb calorimeter tests have shown the briquettes yielding a gross calorific value of 18.9MJ/kg.

Experimental Study of Dynamic Characteristics of the Electromagnet Actuators with Linear Movement

An approach for experimental measurement of the dynamic characteristics of linear electromagnet actuators is presented. It uses accelerometer sensor to register the armature acceleration. The velocity and displacement of the moving parts can be obtained by integration of the acceleration results. The armature movement of permanent magnet linear actuator is acquired using this technique. The results are analyzed and the performance of the supposed approach is compared with the most commonly used experimental setup where the displacement of the armature vs. time is measured instead of its acceleration.

Identification of Printed Punjabi Words and English Numerals Using Gabor Features

Script identification is one of the challenging steps in the development of optical character recognition system for bilingual or multilingual documents. In this paper an attempt is made for identification of English numerals at word level from Punjabi documents by using Gabor features. The support vector machine (SVM) classifier with five fold cross validation is used to classify the word images. The results obtained are quite encouraging. Average accuracy with RBF kernel, Polynomial and Linear Kernel functions comes out to be greater than 99%.

A New Technique for Solar Activity Forecasting Using Recurrent Elman Networks

In this paper we present an efficient approach for the prediction of two sunspot-related time series, namely the Yearly Sunspot Number and the IR5 Index, that are commonly used for monitoring solar activity. The method is based on exploiting partially recurrent Elman networks and it can be divided into three main steps: the first one consists in a “de-rectification" of the time series under study in order to obtain a new time series whose appearance, similar to a sum of sinusoids, can be modelled by our neural networks much better than the original dataset. After that, we normalize the derectified data so that they have zero mean and unity standard deviation and, finally, train an Elman network with only one input, a recurrent hidden layer and one output using a back-propagation algorithm with variable learning rate and momentum. The achieved results have shown the efficiency of this approach that, although very simple, can perform better than most of the existing solar activity forecasting methods.

Parallelization and Optimization of SIFT Feature Extraction on Cluster System

Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) has been widely applied, but extracting SIFT feature is complicated and time-consuming. In this paper, to meet the demand of the real-time applications, SIFT is parallelized and optimized on cluster system, which is named pSIFT. Redundancy storage and communication are used for boundary data to improve the performance, and before representation of feature descriptor, data reallocation is adopted to keep load balance in pSIFT. Experimental results show that pSIFT achieves good speedup and scalability.

The Influences of Marketing Mix on Customer Purchasing Behavior at Chatuchak Plaza Market

The objective of this research was to study the influence of marketing mix on customers purchasing behavior. A total of 397 respondents were collected from customers who were the patronages of the Chatuchak Plaza market. A questionnaire was utilized as a tool to collect data. Statistics utilized in this research included frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, and multiple regression analysis. Data were analyzed by using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. The findings revealed that the majority of respondents were male with the age between 25-34 years old, hold undergraduate degree, married and stay together. The average income of respondents was between 10,001-20,000 baht. In terms of occupation, the majority worked for private companies. The research analysis disclosed that there were three variables of marketing mix which included price (X2), place (X3), and product (X1) which had an influence on the frequency of customer purchasing. These three variables can predict a purchase about 30 percent of the time by using the equation; Y1 = 6.851 + .921(X2) + .949(X3) + .591(X1). It also found that in terms of marketing mixed, there were two variables had an influence on the amount of customer purchasing which were physical characteristic (X6), and the process (X7). These two variables are 17 percent predictive of a purchasing by using the equation: Y2 = 2276.88 + 2980.97(X6) + 2188.09(X7).

Cellular Phone Users- Willingness to Shop Online

This study aims to identify cellular phone users- shopping motivating factors towards online shopping. 100 university students located in Klang Valley, Malaysia were involved as the respondents. They were required to complete a set of questionnaire and had to own a cellular phone in order to be selected as sample in this study. Three from five proposed hypotheses were supported: purchasing information, shopping utilities and service quality. As a result, marketers and retailers should concentrate more on the less important factors in order to encourage and create willingness of the consumers to purchase online. Recommendation for future research is also presented.

Odor Discrimination Using Neural Decoding of Olfactory Bulbs in Rats

This paper presents a novel method for inferring the odor based on neural activities observed from rats- main olfactory bulbs. Multi-channel extra-cellular single unit recordings were done by micro-wire electrodes (tungsten, 50μm, 32 channels) implanted in the mitral/tufted cell layers of the main olfactory bulb of anesthetized rats to obtain neural responses to various odors. Neural response as a key feature was measured by substraction of neural firing rate before stimulus from after. For odor inference, we have developed a decoding method based on the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation. The results have shown that the average decoding accuracy is about 100.0%, 96.0%, 84.0%, and 100.0% with four rats, respectively. This work has profound implications for a novel brain-machine interface system for odor inference.

Antioxidant Components of Fumaria Species(Papaveraceae)

The genus Fumaria L. (Papaveraceae) in Iran comprises 8 species with a vast medicinal use in Asian folk medicine. These herbs are considered to be useful in the treatment of gastrointestinal disease and skin disorders. Antioxidant activities of alkaloids and phenolic extracts of these species had been studied previously. These species are: F. officinalis, F. parviflora, F. asepala, F. densiflora, F. schleicheri, F. vaillantii and F. indica. More than 50 populations of Fumaria species were sampled from nature. In this study different fatty acids are extracted. Their picks were recorded by GC technique. This species contain some kind of fatty acids with antioxidant effects. A part of these lipids are phospholipids. As these are unsaturated fatty acids they may have industrial use as natural additive to cosmetics, dermal and oral medicines. The presences of different materials are discussed. Our studies for antioxidant effects of these substances are continued.