Fuzzy regression methods have commonly been used to develop consumer preferences models which correlate the engineering characteristics with consumer preferences regarding a new product; the consumer preferences models provide a platform whereby product developers can decide the engineering characteristics in order to satisfy consumer preferences prior to developing the products. Recent researc...

Survey data of food consumption were analyzed utilizing stepwise logistic regression to investigate factors affecting consumer choice of shrimp as the most frequently consumed non-fish seafood in Taiwan. Demographic factors, consumer attention to food attributes, and consumer preferences for fish were considered in modeling. Results showed more people preferring shrimp than actually choosing sh...

Total Quality Management is not just an admirable phenomenon but it is any client’s right and can be done through contribution of the staff and the managers as well as the client’s of an organization. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the feasibility of TQM model and the attitude of the managers of health field of Yazd medical sciences university towards it. The present study w...

In this paper we continue our study on adaptive genetic programming. We use Stepwise Adaptation of Weights (saw) to boost performance of a genetic programming algorithm on simple symbolic regression problems. We measure the performance of a standard gp and two variants of saw extensions on two different symbolic regression problems from literature. Also, we propose a model for randomly generati...

BACKGROUND Cancer Related Fatigue (CRF) and circadian rhythm have a great impact on the quality of life (HRQL) of patients with breast (BC) and colon cancer (CRC). Other patient related outcomes in oncology are measured by new instruments focusing on adaptive characteristics such as sense of coherence or self-regulation, which could be more appropriate as a prognostic tool than classical HRQL. ...

Hedonic pricing models attempt to model a relationship between object attributes and the object’s price. Traditional hedonic pricing models are often parametric models that suffer from misspecification. In this paper we create these models by means of boosted CART models. The method is explained in detail and applied to various datasets. Empirically, we find substantial reduction of errors on o...

The objective of this paper was to develop a useful framework for estimating demand for tourism in emerging markets. Tourism has become one of the most crucial sectors in a large number of emerging countries. Moreover, the tourism industry in such markets is forecasted to keep increasing in the next decade. Hence, understanding and accurately forecast demand in the industry is essential in orde...

0957-4174/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. A doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2010.04.077 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +852 2616 8245; fax: E-mail addresses: [email protected] (G. Cui), mlw [email protected] (G. Zhang). Selecting good variables to build forecasting models is a major challenge for direct marketing given the increasing amount and variety of data. This study adopts the Bayesian variable sel...