This paper provides a unified setting for factor models applied to panels of qualitative observations. This setting includes as special cases the single risk factor model and its multiple factor extensions used in credit risk analysis, the stochastic migration models used for rating dynamics, and the factor models for prospective mortality tables. We consider the behavior of these models when t...

in despite of all progress in technology in mining industry, still labor is one of the key factors in mining operation. this paper presents a system dynamics approach to evaluate the mining labor productivity. therefore, after the identification of main effective variables, two quantitative and qualitative models were built. the qualitative model illustrates the complex interrelated structure o...

Most geometric models are quantitative, making it diffiiult to abstract the underlying spatial information needed for tasks such as planning, learning or vision. Furthermore, the precision used in a typical quantitative system often exceeds the actual accuracy of the data. In this work we describe a systematic representation that builds spatial maps based on local qualitative relations between ...

Building qualitative models is a crucial task for modelbased diagnosis. This paper discusses the techniques to automatically transform a quantitative model in CAD environment into a qualitative model, under the cases that the real numbered landmarks are known and unknown. With known landmarks, the abstraction is through the discretization process where the simulation data is discretized accordi...