• Title/Summary/Keyword: GAP

Search Result 14,309, Processing Time 0.046 seconds

Effect of Different Soil Managements on Physical Properties and Microbial Activities in Citrus Orchard Soil (초생재배가 감귤원 토양의 물리성과 미생물 활성에 미치는 영향)

  • Joa , Jae-Ho;Lee , Jong-Hee;Won , Hung-Yon;Han , Seung-Gap;Lim , Han-Cheol
    • Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
    • /
    • v.41 no.5
    • /
    • pp.279-284
    • /
    • 2008
  • This study was performed to investigate effect of different soil managements on physical properties and microbial activities in volcanic ash citrus orchard soil. Experiment plots had managed to control weeds on soil for 4 years with clean cultivation (CCM) used with herbicide, natural sod cultivation (NSCM), kentucky blue grass sod cultivation (KBG). Soil samples were taken on October, in both 1998 and 2000 from 3 experimental plots. In NSCM, Soil hardness was lower at 11.8 mm than in CCM. And water stable Aggregation coefficient(>0.5 mm) was high at 26.7% compared with CCM. Soil bulk density and porosity showed no significant among the treatments. Soil acid phosphatase was high in sod cultivation plots and the amount of microbial biomass C was about twice higher at $525.4mg\;kg^{-1}$ in KBG than in CCM. Conclusionally, Sod cultivation improved soil physical properties such as aggregation, hardness and increased microbial activities compared with clean cultivation in citrus orchard soil. Soil total PLFA, acid phosphatase, and microbial biomass C contents were investigated on May in nonvolcanic ash citrus soil. Soil samples were collected at 5 sites each; convention cultivation grown with herbicide, natural sod cultivation grown with 1/2 chemicals, organic cultivation. That sites have been managed for 5 years over. PLFA contents were two times higher at $112.2n\;mol\;g^{-1}$ in organic cultivation than in convention cultivation. According to the PLFA indicator, Gram negative bacteria and actinomycetes in organic cultivation were high compared with convention cultivation, which were at 15.1%, 6.6%, respectively. Soil microbial biomass C contents was about twice higher in organic cultivation than in convention cultivation. Soil acid phosphatase was high at 17.6% in organic cultivation compared with convention cultivation.

The Effects of e-Business on Business Performance - In the home-shopping industry - (e-비즈니스가 경영성과에 미치는 영향 -홈쇼핑을 중심으로-)

  • Kim, Sae-Jung;Ahn, Seon-Sook
    • Management & Information Systems Review
    • /
    • v.22
    • /
    • pp.137-165
    • /
    • 2007
  • It seems high time to increase productivity by adopting e-business to overcome challenges posed by both external factors including the appreciation of Korean won, oil hikes and fierce global competition and domestic issues represented by disparities between large corporations and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), Seoul metropolitan and local cities, and export and domestic demand all of which weaken future growth engines in the Korean economy. The demands of the globalization era are for innovative changes in businessprocess and industrial structure aiming for creating new values. To this end, e-business is expected to play a core role in the sophistication of the Korean economy through new values and innovation. In order to examine business performance in e-business-adopting industries, this study analyzed the home shopping industry by closely looking into the financial ratios including the ratio of net profit to sales, the ratio of operation income to sales, the ratio of gross cost to sales cost, the ratio of gross cost to selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expense, and return of investment (ROI). This study, for best outcome, referred to corporate financial statements as a main resource to calculate financial ratios by utilizing Data Analysis, Retrieval and Transfer System (DART) of the Financial Supervisory Service, one of the Korea's financial supervisory authorities. First of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of net profit to sales is as following. CJ Home Shopping has registered a remarkable increase in its ratio of net profit rate to sales since 2002 while its competitors find it hard to catch up with CJ's stunning performances. This is partly due to the efficient management compared to CJ's value of capital. Such significance, if the current trend continues, will make the front-runner assume the largest market share. On the other hand, GS Home Shopping, despite its best organized system and largest value of capital among others, lacks efficiency in management. Second of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of operation income to sales is as following. Both CJ Home Shopping and GS Home Shopping have, until 2004, recorded similar growth trend. However, while CJ Home Shopping's operating income continued to increase in 2005, GS Home Shopping observed its operating income declining which resulted in the increasing income gap with CJ Home Shopping. While CJ Home Shopping with the largest market share in home shopping industryis engaged in aggressive marketing, GS Home Shopping due to its stability-driven management strategies falls behind CJ again in the ratio of operation income to sales in spite of its favorable management environment including its large capital. Companies in the Group B were established in the same year of 2001. NS Home Shopping was the first in the Group B to shift its loss to profit. Woori Home Shopping has continued to post operating loss for three consecutive years and finally was sold to Lotte Group in 2007, but since then, has registered a continuing increase in net income on sales. Third of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of gross cost to sales cost is as following. Since home shopping falls into sales business, its cost of sales is much lower than that of other types of business such as manufacturing industry. Since 2002 in gross costs including cost of sales, SG&A expense, and non-operating expense, cost of sales turned out to have remarkably decreased. Group B has also posted a notable decline in the same sector since 2002. Fourth of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of gross cost to SG&A expense is as following. Due to its unique characteristics, the home shopping industry usually posts ahigh ratio of SG&A expense. However, more than 80% of SG&A expense means the result of lax management and at the same time, a sharp lower net income on sales than other industries. Last but not least, the result of the trend analysis on ROI is as following. As for CJ Home Shopping, the curve of ROI looks similar to that of its investment on fixed assets. As it turned out, the company's ratio of fixed assets to operating income skyrocketed in 2004 and 2005. As far as GS Home Shopping is concerned, its fixed assets are not as much as that of CJ Home Shopping. Consequently, competition in the home shopping industry, at the moment, is among CJ, GS, Hyundai, NS and Woori Home Shoppings, and all of them need to more thoroughly manage their costs. In order for the late-comers of Group B and other home shopping companies to advance further, the current lax management should be reformed particularly on their SG&A expense sector. Provided that the total sales volume in the Internet shopping sector is projected to grow over 20 trillion won by the year 2010, it is concluded that all the participants in the home shopping industry should put strategies on efficient management on costs and expenses as their top priority rather than increase revenues, if they hope to grow even further after 2007.

  • PDF

A Reappraisal of Rural Public Service Location: the Case of Postal Facilities (農村地域의 郵政施設 立地問題)

  • Huh, Woo-Kung
    • Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
    • /
    • v.31 no.1
    • /
    • pp.1-18
    • /
    • 1996
  • This study examines the spatial characteristics of postal office patronage in rural areas. in the light of future possible relocation and closures of the postal facilities. Most of private services have flown out small rural central places due to the decrease of supporting population, and there consequently remain only a few public services including government-run post offices at the Myon seats, the lowest level among rural central places in Korea. The small local population and its further decline undermine the rationale for maintaining such public services in depleted rural areas. For the worse of it, the government recently plans to transform the postal system to a quasi-private, corporational structure. One can fear that the profit-seeking nature of the new postal corporation will inevitably force to close many of such small rural facilities. The study first analysed nation-wide censuses of postal offices for the years of 1986 and 1992. The postal services examined are per capita number of postal stamps and revenue stamps sold, and letters, parcels, telegrams and monetary transactions handled at the post offices. It is found that, while the usage of postal services has increased substantially throughout the nation during the period of 1986-1992, the increment has largely been occurred by urban post offices rather than by those in Gun seats (i.e., rural counties); and that the gap of the service levels between urban and rural post offices is ever widening. The study further examined the service differentials among the post offices within rural counties to find that those post offices adjacent to the county (Gun) seats and larger urban centers rendered less amount of services than remote rural post offices, indicating that rural residents tend to partonize larger centers more and more than local Myon seats. At the second stage of the study, questionnaire surveys were conducted in Muju, Kimpo, and Hongsung-Gun's. These three counties are meant to represent respectively the remote, suburban, and intermediary counties in Korea. The analyses of survey data reveal that the postal hinterlands of the county seats extend to much of nearby Myons, the subdivisions of a Gun. It is also found that the extent of postal hinterlands of the three counties and the magnitude of patronage and quite different from each other depending upon the topography, population density, and the propinquity of the counties to metropolitan centers. The findings suggest to reappraise the current flat allocation scheme of public facilites to each of rural subdivisions throughout the nation. A detailed analysis on the travel behavior of the survey respondents yields that age is the most salient variable to distinguish activity spaces of rural residents. The activity spaces of older respondents tend to be more limited within their Myon, whereas those of younger respondents extend across the Myon boundary, toward the central towns and even distant larger cities. The very existence of several activity spaces in rural areas calls for an attention in the future locational decisions of public facilities. The locational criteria, employed by the Ministry of Communication of Korean government to establish a post office, are the size of hinterland population and the distance from adjacent postal facilities. The present study findings suggest two additional criteria: the order in rural central place hierarchy and the propinquity to the upper-level centers of the central hierarchy. These old and new criteria are complementary each other in that the former criteria are employed to determine new office locations, whereas the latter are appropriate to determine facility relocation and closures.

  • PDF

Hardware Approach to Fuzzy Inference―ASIC and RISC―

  • Watanabe, Hiroyuki
    • Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems Conference
    • /
    • 1993.06a
    • /
    • pp.975-976
    • /
    • 1993
  • This talk presents the overview of the author's research and development activities on fuzzy inference hardware. We involved it with two distinct approaches. The first approach is to use application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) technology. The fuzzy inference method is directly implemented in silicon. The second approach, which is in its preliminary stage, is to use more conventional microprocessor architecture. Here, we use a quantitative technique used by designer of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) to modify an architecture of a microprocessor. In the ASIC approach, we implemented the most widely used fuzzy inference mechanism directly on silicon. The mechanism is beaded on a max-min compositional rule of inference, and Mandami's method of fuzzy implication. The two VLSI fuzzy inference chips are designed, fabricated, and fully tested. Both used a full-custom CMOS technology. The second and more claborate chip was designed at the University of North Carolina(U C) in cooperation with MCNC. Both VLSI chips had muliple datapaths for rule digital fuzzy inference chips had multiple datapaths for rule evaluation, and they executed multiple fuzzy if-then rules in parallel. The AT & T chip is the first digital fuzzy inference chip in the world. It ran with a 20 MHz clock cycle and achieved an approximately 80.000 Fuzzy Logical inferences Per Second (FLIPS). It stored and executed 16 fuzzy if-then rules. Since it was designed as a proof of concept prototype chip, it had minimal amount of peripheral logic for system integration. UNC/MCNC chip consists of 688,131 transistors of which 476,160 are used for RAM memory. It ran with a 10 MHz clock cycle. The chip has a 3-staged pipeline and initiates a computation of new inference every 64 cycle. This chip achieved an approximately 160,000 FLIPS. The new architecture have the following important improvements from the AT & T chip: Programmable rule set memory (RAM). On-chip fuzzification operation by a table lookup method. On-chip defuzzification operation by a centroid method. Reconfigurable architecture for processing two rule formats. RAM/datapath redundancy for higher yield It can store and execute 51 if-then rule of the following format: IF A and B and C and D Then Do E, and Then Do F. With this format, the chip takes four inputs and produces two outputs. By software reconfiguration, it can store and execute 102 if-then rules of the following simpler format using the same datapath: IF A and B Then Do E. With this format the chip takes two inputs and produces one outputs. We have built two VME-bus board systems based on this chip for Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The board is now installed in a robot at ORNL. Researchers uses this board for experiment in autonomous robot navigation. The Fuzzy Logic system board places the Fuzzy chip into a VMEbus environment. High level C language functions hide the operational details of the board from the applications programme . The programmer treats rule memories and fuzzification function memories as local structures passed as parameters to the C functions. ASIC fuzzy inference hardware is extremely fast, but they are limited in generality. Many aspects of the design are limited or fixed. We have proposed to designing a are limited or fixed. We have proposed to designing a fuzzy information processor as an application specific processor using a quantitative approach. The quantitative approach was developed by RISC designers. In effect, we are interested in evaluating the effectiveness of a specialized RISC processor for fuzzy information processing. As the first step, we measured the possible speed-up of a fuzzy inference program based on if-then rules by an introduction of specialized instructions, i.e., min and max instructions. The minimum and maximum operations are heavily used in fuzzy logic applications as fuzzy intersection and union. We performed measurements using a MIPS R3000 as a base micropro essor. The initial result is encouraging. We can achieve as high as a 2.5 increase in inference speed if the R3000 had min and max instructions. Also, they are useful for speeding up other fuzzy operations such as bounded product and bounded sum. The embedded processor's main task is to control some device or process. It usually runs a single or a embedded processer to create an embedded processor for fuzzy control is very effective. Table I shows the measured speed of the inference by a MIPS R3000 microprocessor, a fictitious MIPS R3000 microprocessor with min and max instructions, and a UNC/MCNC ASIC fuzzy inference chip. The software that used on microprocessors is a simulator of the ASIC chip. The first row is the computation time in seconds of 6000 inferences using 51 rules where each fuzzy set is represented by an array of 64 elements. The second row is the time required to perform a single inference. The last row is the fuzzy logical inferences per second (FLIPS) measured for ach device. There is a large gap in run time between the ASIC and software approaches even if we resort to a specialized fuzzy microprocessor. As for design time and cost, these two approaches represent two extremes. An ASIC approach is extremely expensive. It is, therefore, an important research topic to design a specialized computing architecture for fuzzy applications that falls between these two extremes both in run time and design time/cost. TABLEI INFERENCE TIME BY 51 RULES {{{{Time }}{{MIPS R3000 }}{{ASIC }}{{Regular }}{{With min/mix }}{{6000 inference 1 inference FLIPS }}{{125s 20.8ms 48 }}{{49s 8.2ms 122 }}{{0.0038s 6.4㎲ 156,250 }} }}

  • PDF

CIA-Level Driven Secure SDLC Framework for Integrating Security into SDLC Process (CIA-Level 기반 보안내재화 개발 프레임워크)

  • Kang, Sooyoung;Kim, Seungjoo
    • Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
    • /
    • v.30 no.5
    • /
    • pp.909-928
    • /
    • 2020
  • From the early 1970s, the US government began to recognize that penetration testing could not assure the security quality of products. Results of penetration testing such as identified vulnerabilities and faults can be varied depending on the capabilities of the team. In other words none of penetration team can assure that "vulnerabilities are not found" is not equal to "product does not have any vulnerabilities". So the U.S. government realized that in order to improve the security quality of products, the development process itself should be managed systematically and strictly. Therefore, the US government began to publish various standards related to the development methodology and evaluation procurement system embedding "security-by-design" concept from the 1980s. Security-by-design means reducing product's complexity by considering security from the initial phase of development lifecycle such as the product requirements analysis and design phase to achieve trustworthiness of product ultimately. Since then, the security-by-design concept has been spread to the private sector since 2002 in the name of Secure SDLC by Microsoft and IBM, and is currently being used in various fields such as automotive and advanced weapon systems. However, the problem is that it is not easy to implement in the actual field because the standard or guidelines related to Secure SDLC contain only abstract and declarative contents. Therefore, in this paper, we present the new framework in order to specify the level of Secure SDLC desired by enterprises. Our proposed CIA (functional Correctness, safety Integrity, security Assurance)-level-based security-by-design framework combines the evidence-based security approach with the existing Secure SDLC. Using our methodology, first we can quantitatively show gap of Secure SDLC process level between competitor and the company. Second, it is very useful when you want to build Secure SDLC in the actual field because you can easily derive detailed activities and documents to build the desired level of Secure SDLC.

Prevalence and Management of Dyslipidemia Among Korean Adults: KNHANES 2010-2012 (한국 성인의 이상지질혈증 유병률과 관리: 국민건강영양조사 2010-2012)

  • Jang, Sungok;Lee, Jongseok
    • Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
    • /
    • v.16 no.11
    • /
    • pp.7978-7989
    • /
    • 2015
  • Dyslipidemia is a major risk factor for cardio-cerebrovascular disease. Although the prevalence among Korean adults is very high, its management is known to be poor. The aim of this study was to access the prevalence, awareness, treatment, and control rates of dyslipidemia according to treatment guideline rather than diagnostic criteria. The risk factors for cardio-cerebrovascular disease were evaluated to apply the appropriate risk-based threshold of the lipid treatment targets according to risk category. Analysis was done using nationally representative data (n = 16,263) collected from adults aged 20 years and older participating the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANS) 2010-2012. The age-standardized prevalence rate of dyslipidemia according to treatment criteria was 34.1%. Of these prevalent cases, however, only 19.2% were aware; 9.5% treated; and 8.7% controlled. The age-standardized control rate among treated persons was 47.5%. Men had a significantly higher prevalence than women (39.7% vs. 28.8%), but a significantly lower rate of awareness, treatment, and control (16.0% vs. 22.3%, 7.7% vs. 11.3%, and 6.1% vs. 11.2%, respectively). As the higher risk category, the prevalence rate was higher but the control rate was lower. The prevalence of patients with diabetes was 82.5% when applying the treatment criteria (LDL-cholesterol level of ${\geq}100mg/dL$ and triglyceride level of ${\geq}200mg/dL$). However, only 11.9 % of these were controlled, whose LDL-cholesterol and triglycerides were lower than the treatment goals. Our findings suggest that effective strategies are required to decrease the gap between the prevalence of dyslipidemia and the following treatment. It would be worthwhile to strengthen the follow-up management of patients with dyslipidemia in the National Health Screening Program, especially in the high risk group of cardio-cerebrovascular disease.

Growth and Opto-electric Characterization of ZnSe Thin Film by Chemical Bath Deposition (CBD(Chemical Bath Deposition)방법에 의한 ZnSe 박막성장과 광전기적 특성)

  • Hong, K.J.;You, S.H.
    • Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
    • /
    • v.10 no.1
    • /
    • pp.62-70
    • /
    • 2001
  • The ZnSe sample grown by chemical bath deposition (CBD) method were annealed in Ar gas at $45^{\circ}C$. Using extrapolation method of X-ray diffraction pattern, it was found to have zinc blend structure whose lattice parameter $a_o$ was $5.6687\;{\AA}$. From Hall effect, the mobility was likely to be decreased by impurity scattering at temperature range from 10 K to 150 K and by lattice scattering at temperature range from 150 K to 293 K. The band gap given by the transmission edge changed from $2.700{\underline{5}}\;eV$ at 293 K to $2.873{\underline{9}}\;eV$ at 10 K. Comparing photocurrent peak position with transmission edge, we could find that photocurrent peaks due to excition electrons from valence band, ${\Gamma}_8$ and ${\Gamma}_7$ and to conduction band ${\Gamma}_6$ were observed at photocurrent spectrum. From the photocurrent spectra by illumination of polarized light on the ZnSe thin film, we have found that values of spin orbit coupling splitting ${\Delta}so$ is $0.098{\underline{1}}\;eV$. From the PL spectra at 10K, the peaks corresponding to free bound excitons and D-A pair and a broad emission band due to SA is identified. The binding energy of the free excitons are determined to be $0.061{\underline{2}}\;eV$ and the dissipation energy of the donor -bound exciton and acceptor-bound exciton to be $0.017{\underline{2}}\;eV$, $0.031{\underline{0}}\;eV$, respectively.

  • PDF

A Numerical and Experimental Study for Fry-drying of Various Sludge (슬러지 유중 건조에 대한 전산 해석 및 실험적 연구)

  • Shin, Mi-Soo;Kim, Hey-Suk;Kim, Byeong-Gap;Hwang, Min-Jeong;Jang, Dong-Soon;Ohm, Tae-In
    • Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
    • /
    • v.32 no.4
    • /
    • pp.341-348
    • /
    • 2010
  • The basic principle of fry drying process of sludge lies in the rapid pressure change of sludge material caused by the change of temperature between oil and moisture due to the difference of specific heat. Therefore, the rapid increase of pressure in drying sludge induces the efficient moisture escape through sludge pores toward heating oil media. The object of this study is to carry out a systematic investigation of the influence of various parameters associated with the sludge fry drying processes on the drying efficiency. To this end, a series of parametric experimental investigation has been made together with the numerical calculation in order to obtain typical drying curves as function of important parameters such as drying temperature, sludge diameter, oil type and sludge type. In the aspect of frying temperature, especially it is found that the operation higher than $140^{\circ}C$ was favorable in drying efficiency regardless of type of waste oil employed in this study. The same result was also noted consistently in the investigation of numerical calculation, that is, in that the sludge particle drying was efficiently made over $140^{\circ}C$ irrespective of the change of particle diameter. As expected, in general, the decrease of diameter in sludge was found efficient both experiment and numerical calculation in drying due to the increased surface area per unit volume. In the investigation of oil type and property, the effect of the viscosity of waste oil was found to be more influential in drying performance. In particular, when the oil with high viscosity, a visible time delay was noticed in moisture evaporation especially in the early stage of drying. However, the effect of high viscosity decreased significantly over the temperature of $140^{\circ}C$. There was no visible difference observed in the study of sludge type but the sewage sludge with a slightly better efficiency. The numerical study is considered to be a quite useful tool to assist in experiment with more detailed empirical modeling as further work.

The Relations between Financial Constraints and Dividend Adjustment Speed of Innovative Kosdaq Enterprises (혁신형 코스닥기업의 재무적 제약과 배당조정속도간의 관계)

  • Shin, Min-Shik;Shin, Chan-Shik
    • Journal of Korea Technology Innovation Society
    • /
    • v.12 no.4
    • /
    • pp.687-714
    • /
    • 2009
  • In this paper, we study empirically the relations between financial constraints and dividend adjustment speed of innovative small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) listed on Kosdaq Market of Korea Exchange. The main results of this study can be summarized as follows. Determinants suggested by the major theories of dividends, namely, residual dividend theory, dividend signaling theory, agency theory, catering theory, and transactions cost theory explain significantly the dividend payout policy of Kosdaq SMEs. Lintner's dividend adjustment model indicates that Kosdaq SMEs have long run target payout ratio, and that Kosdaq SMEs adjust partially the gap between actual and target payout ratio each year. In the core variables of Lintner (1956) dividend adjustment model, past DPS has more effect than current EPS. These results suggest that Kosdaq SMEs maintain stable dividend policy which maintain past DPS level without corporate special reasons. Dividend adjustment speed of innovative Kosdaq SMEs is more fast than that of uninnovative Kosdaq SMEs, and dividend adjustment speed of financial unconstrained innovative Kosdaq SMEs is faster than that of financial constrained innovative Kosdaq SMEs. Futhermore, dividend adjustment speed of innovative Kosdaq SMEs classified by Small and Medium Business Administration is faster than that of unclassified innovative Kosdaq SMEs. The former is linked with financial policies and services like credit guaranteed service, venture investment fund, insurance program, and so on. In conclusion, past DPS and current EPS suggested by the Lintner's dividend adjustment model explain mainly dividend adjustment speed, and financial constraints explain also partially. Therefore, if managers of innovative Kosdaq SMEs can properly understand of the effects of financial constraints on dividend smoothing, they can maintain constantly dividend policy. This is encouraging result for Korea government as it has implemented many policies to commit to innovative Kosdaq SMEs.

  • PDF

Predictive Clustering-based Collaborative Filtering Technique for Performance-Stability of Recommendation System (추천 시스템의 성능 안정성을 위한 예측적 군집화 기반 협업 필터링 기법)

  • Lee, O-Joun;You, Eun-Soon
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
    • /
    • v.21 no.1
    • /
    • pp.119-142
    • /
    • 2015
  • With the explosive growth in the volume of information, Internet users are experiencing considerable difficulties in obtaining necessary information online. Against this backdrop, ever-greater importance is being placed on a recommender system that provides information catered to user preferences and tastes in an attempt to address issues associated with information overload. To this end, a number of techniques have been proposed, including content-based filtering (CBF), demographic filtering (DF) and collaborative filtering (CF). Among them, CBF and DF require external information and thus cannot be applied to a variety of domains. CF, on the other hand, is widely used since it is relatively free from the domain constraint. The CF technique is broadly classified into memory-based CF, model-based CF and hybrid CF. Model-based CF addresses the drawbacks of CF by considering the Bayesian model, clustering model or dependency network model. This filtering technique not only improves the sparsity and scalability issues but also boosts predictive performance. However, it involves expensive model-building and results in a tradeoff between performance and scalability. Such tradeoff is attributed to reduced coverage, which is a type of sparsity issues. In addition, expensive model-building may lead to performance instability since changes in the domain environment cannot be immediately incorporated into the model due to high costs involved. Cumulative changes in the domain environment that have failed to be reflected eventually undermine system performance. This study incorporates the Markov model of transition probabilities and the concept of fuzzy clustering with CBCF to propose predictive clustering-based CF (PCCF) that solves the issues of reduced coverage and of unstable performance. The method improves performance instability by tracking the changes in user preferences and bridging the gap between the static model and dynamic users. Furthermore, the issue of reduced coverage also improves by expanding the coverage based on transition probabilities and clustering probabilities. The proposed method consists of four processes. First, user preferences are normalized in preference clustering. Second, changes in user preferences are detected from review score entries during preference transition detection. Third, user propensities are normalized using patterns of changes (propensities) in user preferences in propensity clustering. Lastly, the preference prediction model is developed to predict user preferences for items during preference prediction. The proposed method has been validated by testing the robustness of performance instability and scalability-performance tradeoff. The initial test compared and analyzed the performance of individual recommender systems each enabled by IBCF, CBCF, ICFEC and PCCF under an environment where data sparsity had been minimized. The following test adjusted the optimal number of clusters in CBCF, ICFEC and PCCF for a comparative analysis of subsequent changes in the system performance. The test results revealed that the suggested method produced insignificant improvement in performance in comparison with the existing techniques. In addition, it failed to achieve significant improvement in the standard deviation that indicates the degree of data fluctuation. Notwithstanding, it resulted in marked improvement over the existing techniques in terms of range that indicates the level of performance fluctuation. The level of performance fluctuation before and after the model generation improved by 51.31% in the initial test. Then in the following test, there has been 36.05% improvement in the level of performance fluctuation driven by the changes in the number of clusters. This signifies that the proposed method, despite the slight performance improvement, clearly offers better performance stability compared to the existing techniques. Further research on this study will be directed toward enhancing the recommendation performance that failed to demonstrate significant improvement over the existing techniques. The future research will consider the introduction of a high-dimensional parameter-free clustering algorithm or deep learning-based model in order to improve performance in recommendations.