The widespread use of the Internet has significantly changed the behavior of homebuyers. Using information technology, homebuyers can rapidly find an appropriate house that meets their needs. Although online real estate agents can screen out first based on homebuyers’ requirements, however, most of current online housing systems are of limited abilities, particularly without considering homebuy...

Fuzzy logic techniques have been widely used in civil and earthquake engineering applications in the past four decades. However, no thorough research studies were conducted to use them for deriving attenuation relationships for peak ground accelerations (PGA). This paper is an attempt to fill this gap by employing a fuzzy approach with fuzzy sets for earthquake magnitude and distance from sourc...

In this paper, we first give a direct proof of the existence of Edgeworth equilibria for exchange economies with (possibly) unbounded below consumption sets. The key assumption is that the individually rational utility set is compact. It is worth noticing that the statement of this result and its proof do not depend on the dimension or the particular structure of the commodity space. In a secon...

This paper proposes a novel approach to decision analysis with uncertainty based on integrated case-based inference and approximate reasoning. The strength of case-based inference is utilized for building a situation dependent decision model without complete domain knowledge. This is achieved by deriving states probabilities and general utility estimates from the subset of retrieved cases and t...

Load forecasting allows for the utilities to plan their operations to serve their customers with more reliable and economical electric power. With the developments in computer and information technology new techniques to accurately forecast power system loading are emerging. This research culminates in development of modified algorithms for short-term load forecasting (STLF) of a utility grade ...

Sensor networks introduce new resource allocation problems in which sensors need to be assigned to the tasks they best help. Such problems have been previously studied in simplified models in which utility from multiple sensors is assumed to combine additively. In this paper we study more complex utility models, focusing on two particular applications: event detection and target localization. W...

In this paper, we propose automatic feature engineering for Italian QA systems. Our approach only requires a shallow syntactic representation of the questions and the answer passages. We apply Support Vector Machines using tree kernels to such trees for automatically generating relational syntactic patters, which significantly improve on BM25 retrieval models.

OBJECTIVE: Increasing the awareness of how incomplete data affects learning and classification accuracy has led to increasing numbers of missing data techniques. This paper investigates the robustness and accuracy of seven popular techniques for tolerating incomplete training and test data for different patters of missing data; different proportions and mechanisms of missing data on resulting t...