International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making

A new adaptive weighted deep forest algorithm which can be viewed as a modification of the confidence screening mechanism is proposed. The main idea underlying the algorithm is based on adaptive weigting of every training instance at each cascade level of the deep forest. The confidence screening mechanism for the deep forest proposed by Pang et al., strictly removes instances from training and testing processes to simplify the whole algorithm in accordance with the obtained random forest class probability distributions. This strict removal may lead to a very small number of training instances at the next levels of the deep forest cascade. The presented modification is more flexible and assigns weights to instances in order to differentiate their use in building decision trees at every level of the deep forest cascade. It overcomes the main disadvantage of the confidence screening mechanism. The proposed modification is similar to the AdaBoost algorithm to some extent. Numerical experiments illustrate the outperformance of the proposed modification in comparison with the original deep forest. It is also illustrated how the proposed algorithm can be extended for solving the transfer learning and distance metric learning problems.

Cloud security in finance is considered as the key importance, taking account of the aspect of critical data stored over cloud spaces within organizations all around the globe. They are chiefly relying on cloud computing to accelerate their business profitability and scale up their business processes with enhanced productivity coming through flexible work environments offered in cloud-run working systems. Hence, there is a prerequisite to contemplate cloud security in the entire financial service sector. Moreover, the main issue challenged by privacy and security is the presence of diverse chances to attack the sensitive data by cloud operators, which leads to double the user’s anxiety on the stored data. For solving this problem, the main intent of this paper is to develop an intelligent privacy preservation approach for data stored in the cloud sector, mainly the financial data. The proposed privacy preservation model involves two main phases: (a) data sanitization and (b) data restoration. In the sanitization process, the sensitive data is hidden, which prevents sensitive information from leaking on the cloud side. Further, the normal as well as the sensitive data is stored in a cloud environment. For the sanitization process, a key should be generated that depends on the new meta-heuristic algorithm called crossover improved-lion algorithm (CI-LA), which is inspired by the lion’s unique social behavior. During data restoration, the same key should be used for effectively restoring the original data. Here, the optimal key generation is done in such a way that the objective model involves the degree of modification, hiding rate, and information preservation rate, which effectively enhance the cyber security performance in the cloud.

Construction decision-making often involves several indefinite factors, and wrong decisions usually lead to many losses and may even cause the construction to fail. Correct policy making is very important. Construction decision making used to depend on managerial staff’ experience and subjective recognition, but this approach is likely to bring about wrong decisions because of an excessive number of factors involved or biased subjective recognition. To prevent such a situation, this study establishes a Hybrid Gaussian Process Inference Model (HGPIM), which uses a Gaussian process (GP) to sort out the mapping relationship between data input and output. It also uses Bayesian inference together with particle swarm optimization (PSO) to optimize the hyper-parameters of the covariance function in GP to obtain the best inference predictive ability. By predicting with the model and giving the events that need to be decided an expected value and a variance, we can establish the data’s confidence interval as a reference for making decisions. This study collects data from three construction projects to conduct the experiment and uses HGPIM to train, predict and retest these cases to prove HGPIMs predictive ability. It also shows that the model can be applied to various cases and data and thus can be applied to construction engineering.

Today, smartphones are being used to manage almost all aspects of our lives, ranging from personal to professional. Different users have different requirements and preferences while selecting a smartphone. There is ‘no one-size fits all’ remedy when it comes to smartphones. Additionally, the availability of a wide variety of smartphones in the market makes it difficult for the user to select the best one. The use of only product ratings to choose the best smartphone is not sufficient because the interpretation of such ratings can be quite vague and ambiguous. In this paper, reviews of products are incorporated into the decision-making process in order to select the best product for a recommendation. The top five different brands of smartphones are considered for a case study. The proposed system, then, analyses the customer reviews of these smartphones from two online platforms, Flipkart and Amazon, using sentiment analysis techniques. Next, it uses a hybrid MCDM approach, where characteristics of AHP and TOPSIS methods are combined to evaluate the best smartphones from a list of five alternatives and recommend the best product. The result shows that brand1 smartphone is considered to be the best smartphone among five smartphones based on four important decision criteria. The result of the proposed system is also validated by manually annotated customer reviews of the smartphone by experts. It shows that recommendation of the best product by the proposed system matches the experts’ ranking. Thus, the proposed system can be a useful decision support tool for the best smartphone recommendation.

Dynamic tasks are pervasive in organizational decision making. Improving managerial performance in dynamic tasks is an ongoing research endeavor. We report a laboratory experiment in which participants managed a dynamic task by playing the roles of fishing fleet managers. The two experimental groups used a computer simulation-based interactive learning environment (ILE) with an outcome-oriented debriefing and a process-oriented debriefing. To assess the users’ learning and performance, a comprehensive five-dimensional model was used to evaluate subjects’ task performance, decision time, decision strategy, structural knowledge, and heuristics knowledge. The results showed that process-oriented debriefing improved subjects’ task performance, helped users gain task knowledge, develop heuristics, and adapt to systematic-variable consistent strategies. Contrary to our hypothesis, the process-oriented debriefing group did not use less decision time. In contrast to the cost-benefit approach to decision making, a relatively more systematic effort is needed to perform better in dynamic tasks such as fisheries management.

Zadeh introduced the concept of Z-numbers in 2011 to deal with imprecise information. In this regard, many research works have been published in an attempt to introduce some basic theoretical concepts of Z-numbers to model real-world problems. To understand the current challenges when dealing with Z-numbers and the feasibility of using Z-number in solving real-world problems, a comprehensive review of the existing work on Z-number is paramount. This paper consists of an overview of existing literature on Z-number and identifies some of the key areas that are required for further improvement.

This study surveys the use of fuzzy numbers in classic optimization models, and its effects on making decisions. In a wide sense, mathematical programming is a collection of tools used in mathematical optimization to make good decisions. There are many sectors of economy that employ it. Finance and government, logistics and manufacturing, the distribution of the electrical power are worth to be first mentioned.

When real life problems are modeled mathematically, there is always a trade-off between model’s accuracy and complexity. By this survey, we aim to present in a concise form some mathematical models from the literature together with the methods to solve them. We will focus mainly on fuzzy fractional programming problems. We will also refer to but not describe in detail the multi-criteria decision-making problems involving fuzzy numbers and linear fractional programming models.

Owing to the large number of professional glossaries and unknown patent classification, analysts usually fail to collect and analyze patents efficiently. One solution to this problem is to conduct patent analysis using a patent classification system. However, in a corpus such as cloud patents, many keywords are common among different classes, making it difficult to classify the unknown class documents using the machine learning techniques proposed by previous studies. To remedy this problem, this study aims to establish an efficient classification system with a special focus on features extraction and application of extension theory. We first propose a compound method to determine the features, and then, we propose an extension-based classification method to develop an efficient patent classification system. Using cloud computing patents as the database, the experimental results show that our proposed scheme can outperform the classification quality of the traditional classifiers.