study of economic efficiency is of particular significance in evaluation of the public sector of the economy. there two alternative critorias for the measurement of efficiency: namely ratio analysis, and frontier 'analysis. the first criteria takes the ratio of inputs as compared to the outputs. the second criteria, however.first attempts to stablisb the product and cost efficiency frontie...

Kernel based−methods using color histogram approach are recently used for visual tracking due to their efficiency and robustness. However, a color histogram suffers from the inability to encode spatial image information, thus images with very different appearances can have similar color histograms. This problem is especially critical in various applications such as retrieval for image and video...

The paper presents a multi-factor decision-making approach for prioritizing failure modes as an alternative to traditional approach of failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA). The approach is based on the ‘technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution’ (TOPSIS). The priority ranking is formulated on the basis of six parameters (failure occurrence, non-detection, maintainability...

A robust approach should be considered when estimating regression coefficients in multi-response problems. Many models are derived from the least squares method. Because the presence of outlier data is unavoidable in most real cases and because the least squares method is sensitive to these types of points, robust regression approaches appear to be a more reliable and suitable method for addres...

in more recent years, it has become increasingly recognized that r&d; (research and development) is a key driver of economic growth, a source of innovation and change, and as such stimulates improvements in productivity and economic competitiveness. it is closely associated with knowledge and flexibility, two factors that have gained new significance as a source of competitiveness in an increas...

In this paper we report the results from a detailed investigation of the shifts of the world production frontier function over the period 1980-2010. Analogous to a radar we implement a novel measurement approach for these shifts using nonparametrically computed productivity measures to scan the frontier shifts across the entire input-output space. The shifts of the frontier function measured in...

the scarcity of water resources and supply resources limitation, have caused an increasing gap between water supply and demand specially in recent decades in almost all regions of the globe. one of the best known solutions proposed by the economists is using the different water pricing approaches thereby obtaining the optimal allocation and social justice. to this purpose, this paper uses the p...

Many real life problems require the classification of items into naturally ordered classes. These problems are traditionally handled by conventional methods intended for the classification of nominal classes where the order relation is ignored. This paper introduces a new machine learning paradigm intended for multi-class classification problems where the classes are ordered. The theoretical de...