In this paper we learn a dissimilarity measure for categorical data, for effective classification of the data points. Each categorical feature (with values taken from a finite set of symbols) is mapped onto a continuous feature whose values are real numbers. Guided by the classification error based on a nearest neighbor based technique, we repeatedly update the assignment of categorical symbols...

Qualitative business survey data are used widely to provide indicators of economic activity ahead of the publication of official data. Traditional indicators exploit only aggregate survey information, namely the proportions of respondents who report “up” and “down”. This paper examines disaggregate or firm-level survey responses. It considers how the responses of the individual firms should be ...

abstract production is a process by which a productive activity will require some conditions (before and after the start of the production). one of the most important pre-required factors for start up a production unit is suitable business environment. one of the most important factors that must be provided after the start of production -during the production process and the time to market and ...

abstract o ur basic aim in this paper concerns the question that if overusing the information technology by service and manufacturing firms can increase the total productivity resulting from this kind of technology regarding the iran's economic structure and conditions. for this purpose, we primarily evaluate the productivity resulting from the rate of firms' use of it for the differe...

JEL Classification Code(s): J 31, J 71) "Perceptions of Discrimination, Effort to Obtain Psychological Balance, and Relative Wages: Can We Infer a Happiness Gradient?" There is a substantial literature that finds a linkage between happiness and relative economic well being as measured by earnings or wages. There is also a well documented racial gap in wages. One explanation for this is disparat...

Clustering is the problem of identifying the distribution of patterns and intrinsic correlations in large data sets by partitioning the data points into similarity classes. In this paper, we study on the problem of clustering categorical data, where data objects are made up of non-numerical attributes. We propose MECC (Minimum Error Classification Clustering), an alternative technique for categ...

The twospotted spider mite, Tetranychus urticae Koch, is among the most economically important pests in strawberries (Fragaria spp.). As T. urticae feeds, it ingests mesophyll cells that contain pigments essential for physiologic function and alters radiant energy use of the leaf tissue, severely compromising plant health and productivity. In our study, diffuse reflectance spectroscopy in the v...

We evaluated the MIC Strip Isavuconazole test against EUCAST E.Def 9.3 by using 40 wild-type and 39 CYP51A mutant Aspergillus fumigatus strains. The strip full inhibition endpoint (FIE) and 80% growth inhibition endpoint were determined by two independent readers, reader 1 (R1) and R2. The essential (within ±0, ±1, and ±2 twofold dilutions) and categorical agreements were best with the FIE (for...

Many Data Mining techniques use the whole features space in the classification process. This feature space might contain irrelevant, or redundant, features that could reduce the accuracy of classification. This paper presents an approach to select a subset of features that are most relevant to the classification application. We use a wrapper approach to search for relevant subset of features, w...