This study uses corporate data from 2012 to 2018 when K-IFRS was applied in earnest to predict default risks. The data used in the analysis totaled 10,545 rows, consisting of 160 columns including 38 in the statement of financial position, 26 in the statement of comprehensive income, 11 in the statement of cash flows, and 76 in the index of financial ratios. Unlike most previous prior studies used the default event as the basis for learning about default risk, this study calculated default risk using the market capitalization and stock price volatility of each company based on the Merton model. Through this, it was able to solve the problem of data imbalance due to the scarcity of default events, which had been pointed out as the limitation of the existing methodology, and the problem of reflecting the difference in default risk that exists within ordinary companies. Because learning was conducted only by using corporate information available to unlisted companies, default risks of unlisted companies without stock price information can be appropriately derived. Through this, it can provide stable default risk assessment services to unlisted companies that are difficult to determine proper default risk with traditional credit rating models such as small and medium-sized companies and startups. Although there has been an active study of predicting corporate default risks using machine learning recently, model bias issues exist because most studies are making predictions based on a single model. Stable and reliable valuation methodology is required for the calculation of default risk, given that the entity's default risk information is very widely utilized in the market and the sensitivity to the difference in default risk is high. Also, Strict standards are also required for methods of calculation. The credit rating method stipulated by the Financial Services Commission in the Financial Investment Regulations calls for the preparation of evaluation methods, including verification of the adequacy of evaluation methods, in consideration of past statistical data and experiences on credit ratings and changes in future market conditions. This study allowed the reduction of individual models' bias by utilizing stacking ensemble techniques that synthesize various machine learning models. This allows us to capture complex nonlinear relationships between default risk and various corporate information and maximize the advantages of machine learning-based default risk prediction models that take less time to calculate. To calculate forecasts by sub model to be used as input data for the Stacking Ensemble model, training data were divided into seven pieces, and sub-models were trained in a divided set to produce forecasts. To compare the predictive power of the Stacking Ensemble model, Random Forest, MLP, and CNN models were trained with full training data, then the predictive power of each model was verified on the test set. The analysis showed that the Stacking Ensemble model exceeded the predictive power of the Random Forest model, which had the best performance on a single model. Next, to check for statistically significant differences between the Stacking Ensemble model and the forecasts for each individual model, the Pair between the Stacking Ensemble model and each individual model was constructed. Because the results of the Shapiro-wilk normality test also showed that all Pair did not follow normality, Using the nonparametric method wilcoxon rank sum test, we checked whether the two model forecasts that make up the Pair showed statistically significant differences. The analysis showed that the forecasts of the Staging Ensemble model showed statistically significant differences from those of the MLP model and CNN model. In addition, this study can provide a methodology that allows existing credit rating agencies to apply machine learning-based bankruptcy risk prediction methodologies, given that traditional credit rating models can also be reflected as sub-models to calculate the final default probability. Also, the Stacking Ensemble techniques proposed in this study can help design to meet the requirements of the Financial Investment Business Regulations through the combination of various sub-models. We hope that this research will be used as a resource to increase practical use by overcoming and improving the limitations of existing machine learning-based models.
Selecting high-quality information that meets the interests and needs of users among the overflowing contents is becoming more important as the generation continues. In the flood of information, efforts to reflect the intention of the user in the search result better are being tried, rather than recognizing the information request as a simple string. Also, large IT companies such as Google and Microsoft focus on developing knowledge-based technologies including search engines which provide users with satisfaction and convenience. Especially, the finance is one of the fields expected to have the usefulness and potential of text data analysis because it's constantly generating new information, and the earlier the information is, the more valuable it is. Automatic knowledge extraction can be effective in areas where information flow is vast, such as financial sector, and new information continues to emerge. However, there are several practical difficulties faced by automatic knowledge extraction. First, there are difficulties in making corpus from different fields with same algorithm, and it is difficult to extract good quality triple. Second, it becomes more difficult to produce labeled text data by people if the extent and scope of knowledge increases and patterns are constantly updated. Third, performance evaluation is difficult due to the characteristics of unsupervised learning. Finally, problem definition for automatic knowledge extraction is not easy because of ambiguous conceptual characteristics of knowledge. So, in order to overcome limits described above and improve the semantic performance of stock-related information searching, this study attempts to extract the knowledge entity by using neural tensor network and evaluate the performance of them. Different from other references, the purpose of this study is to extract knowledge entity which is related to individual stock items. Various but relatively simple data processing methods are applied in the presented model to solve the problems of previous researches and to enhance the effectiveness of the model. From these processes, this study has the following three significances. First, A practical and simple automatic knowledge extraction method that can be applied. Second, the possibility of performance evaluation is presented through simple problem definition. Finally, the expressiveness of the knowledge increased by generating input data on a sentence basis without complex morphological analysis. The results of the empirical analysis and objective performance evaluation method are also presented. The empirical study to confirm the usefulness of the presented model, experts' reports about individual 30 stocks which are top 30 items based on frequency of publication from May 30, 2017 to May 21, 2018 are used. the total number of reports are 5,600, and 3,074 reports, which accounts about 55% of the total, is designated as a training set, and other 45% of reports are designated as a testing set. Before constructing the model, all reports of a training set are classified by stocks, and their entities are extracted using named entity recognition tool which is the KKMA. for each stocks, top 100 entities based on appearance frequency are selected, and become vectorized using one-hot encoding. After that, by using neural tensor network, the same number of score functions as stocks are trained. Thus, if a new entity from a testing set appears, we can try to calculate the score by putting it into every single score function, and the stock of the function with the highest score is predicted as the related item with the entity. To evaluate presented models, we confirm prediction power and determining whether the score functions are well constructed by calculating hit ratio for all reports of testing set. As a result of the empirical study, the presented model shows 69.3% hit accuracy for testing set which consists of 2,526 reports. this hit ratio is meaningfully high despite of some constraints for conducting research. Looking at the prediction performance of the model for each stocks, only 3 stocks, which are LG ELECTRONICS, KiaMtr, and Mando, show extremely low performance than average. this result maybe due to the interference effect with other similar items and generation of new knowledge. In this paper, we propose a methodology to find out key entities or their combinations which are necessary to search related information in accordance with the user's investment intention. Graph data is generated by using only the named entity recognition tool and applied to the neural tensor network without learning corpus or word vectors for the field. From the empirical test, we confirm the effectiveness of the presented model as described above. However, there also exist some limits and things to complement. Representatively, the phenomenon that the model performance is especially bad for only some stocks shows the need for further researches. Finally, through the empirical study, we confirmed that the learning method presented in this study can be used for the purpose of matching the new text information semantically with the related stocks.
Thanks to the rapid development of information technologies, the data available on Internet have grown rapidly. In this era of big data, many studies have attempted to offer insights and express the effects of data analysis. In the tourism and hospitality industry, many firms and studies in the era of big data have paid attention to online reviews on social media because of their large influence over customers. As tourism is an information-intensive industry, the effect of these information networks on social media platforms is more remarkable compared to any other types of media. However, there are some limitations to the improvements in service quality that can be made based on opinions on social media platforms. Users on social media platforms represent their opinions as text, images, and so on. Raw data sets from these reviews are unstructured. Moreover, these data sets are too big to extract new information and hidden knowledge by human competences. To use them for business intelligence and analytics applications, proper big data techniques like Natural Language Processing and data mining techniques are needed. This study suggests an analytical approach to directly yield insights from these reviews to improve the service quality of hotels. Our proposed approach consists of topic mining to extract topics contained in the reviews and the decision tree modeling to explain the relationship between topics and ratings. Topic mining refers to a method for finding a group of words from a collection of documents that represents a document. Among several topic mining methods, we adopted the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm, which is considered as the most universal algorithm. However, LDA is not enough to find insights that can improve service quality because it cannot find the relationship between topics and ratings. To overcome this limitation, we also use the Classification and Regression Tree method, which is a kind of decision tree technique. Through the CART method, we can find what topics are related to positive or negative ratings of a hotel and visualize the results. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the representation of an analytical approach for the improvement of hotel service quality from unstructured review data sets. Through experiments for four hotels in Hong Kong, we can find the strengths and weaknesses of services for each hotel and suggest improvements to aid in customer satisfaction. Especially from positive reviews, we find what these hotels should maintain for service quality. For example, compared with the other hotels, a hotel has a good location and room condition which are extracted from positive reviews for it. In contrast, we also find what they should modify in their services from negative reviews. For example, a hotel should improve room condition related to soundproof. These results mean that our approach is useful in finding some insights for the service quality of hotels. That is, from the enormous size of review data, our approach can provide practical suggestions for hotel managers to improve their service quality. In the past, studies for improving service quality relied on surveys or interviews of customers. However, these methods are often costly and time consuming and the results may be biased by biased sampling or untrustworthy answers. The proposed approach directly obtains honest feedback from customers' online reviews and draws some insights through a type of big data analysis. So it will be a more useful tool to overcome the limitations of surveys or interviews. Moreover, our approach easily obtains the service quality information of other hotels or services in the tourism industry because it needs only open online reviews and ratings as input data. Furthermore, the performance of our approach will be better if other structured and unstructured data sources are added.
As the global business environment changes, uncertainties in technology development and market needs increase, and competition among companies intensifies, interests and demands for R&D activities of individual companies are increasing. In order to cope with these environmental changes, R&D companies are strengthening R&D investment as one of the means to enhance the qualitative competitiveness of R&D while paying more attention to facility investment. As a result, facilities or R&D investment elements are inevitably a burden for R&D companies to bear future uncertainties. It is true that the management strategy of increasing investment in R&D as a means of enhancing R&D capability is highly uncertain in terms of corporate performance. In this study, the structural factors that influence the R&D capabilities of companies are explored in terms of technology management capabilities, R&D capabilities, and corporate classification attributes by utilizing data mining techniques, and the characteristics these individual factors present according to the level of R&D capabilities are analyzed. This study also showed cluster analysis and experimental results based on evidence data for all domestic R&D companies, and is expected to provide important implications for corporate management strategies to enhance R&D capabilities of individual companies. For each of the three viewpoints, detailed evaluation indexes were composed of 7, 2, and 4, respectively, to quantitatively measure individual levels in the corresponding area. In the case of technology management capability and R&D capability, the sub-item evaluation indexes that are being used by current domestic technology evaluation agencies were referenced, and the final detailed evaluation index was newly constructed in consideration of whether data could be obtained quantitatively. In the case of corporate classification attributes, the most basic corporate classification profile information is considered. In particular, in order to grasp the homogeneity of the R&D competency level, a comprehensive score for each company was given using detailed evaluation indicators of technology management capability and R&D capability, and the competency level was classified into five grades and compared with the cluster analysis results. In order to give the meaning according to the comparative evaluation between the analyzed cluster and the competency level grade, the clusters with high and low trends in R&D competency level were searched for each cluster. Afterwards, characteristics according to detailed evaluation indicators were analyzed in the cluster. Through this method of conducting research, two groups with high R&D competency and one with low level of R&D competency were analyzed, and the remaining two clusters were similar with almost high incidence. As a result, in this study, individual characteristics according to detailed evaluation indexes were analyzed for two clusters with high competency level and one cluster with low competency level. The implications of the results of this study are that the faster the replacement cycle of professional managers who can effectively respond to changes in technology and market demand, the more likely they will contribute to enhancing R&D capabilities. In the case of a private company, it is necessary to increase the intensity of input of R&D capabilities by enhancing the sense of belonging of R&D personnel to the company through conversion to a corporate company, and to provide the accuracy of responsibility and authority through the organization of the team unit. Since the number of technical commercialization achievements and technology certifications are occurring both in the case of contributing to capacity improvement and in case of not, it was confirmed that there is a limit in reviewing it as an important factor for enhancing R&D capacity from the perspective of management. Lastly, the experience of utility model filing was identified as a factor that has an important influence on R&D capability, and it was confirmed the need to provide motivation to encourage utility model filings in order to enhance R&D capability. As such, the results of this study are expected to provide important implications for corporate management strategies to enhance individual companies' R&D capabilities.
This study uses Node2vec graph embedding method and Light GBM link prediction to explore undeveloped export candidate countries in Korea's food and beverage industry. Node2vec is the method that improves the limit of the structural equivalence representation of the network, which is known to be relatively weak compared to the existing link prediction method based on the number of common neighbors of the network. Therefore, the method is known to show excellent performance in both community detection and structural equivalence of the network. The vector value obtained by embedding the network in this way operates under the condition of a constant length from an arbitrarily designated starting point node. Therefore, it has the advantage that it is easy to apply the sequence of nodes as an input value to the model for downstream tasks such as Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, and Random Forest. Based on these features of the Node2vec graph embedding method, this study applied the above method to the international trade information of the Korean food and beverage industry. Through this, we intend to contribute to creating the effect of extensive margin diversification in Korea in the global value chain relationship of the industry. The optimal predictive model derived from the results of this study recorded a precision of 0.95 and a recall of 0.79, and an F1 score of 0.86, showing excellent performance. This performance was shown to be superior to that of the binary classifier based on Logistic Regression set as the baseline model. In the baseline model, a precision of 0.95 and a recall of 0.73 were recorded, and an F1 score of 0.83 was recorded. In addition, the light GBM-based optimal prediction model derived from this study showed superior performance than the link prediction model of previous studies, which is set as a benchmarking model in this study. The predictive model of the previous study recorded only a recall rate of 0.75, but the proposed model of this study showed better performance which recall rate is 0.79. The difference in the performance of the prediction results between benchmarking model and this study model is due to the model learning strategy. In this study, groups were classified by the trade value scale, and prediction models were trained differently for these groups. Specific methods are (1) a method of randomly masking and learning a model for all trades without setting specific conditions for trade value, (2) arbitrarily masking a part of the trades with an average trade value or higher and using the model method, and (3) a method of arbitrarily masking some of the trades with the top 25% or higher trade value and learning the model. As a result of the experiment, it was confirmed that the performance of the model trained by randomly masking some of the trades with the above-average trade value in this method was the best and appeared stably. It was found that most of the results of potential export candidates for Korea derived through the above model appeared appropriate through additional investigation. Combining the above, this study could suggest the practical utility of the link prediction method applying Node2vec and Light GBM. In addition, useful implications could be derived for weight update strategies that can perform better link prediction while training the model. On the other hand, this study also has policy utility because it is applied to trade transactions that have not been performed much in the research related to link prediction based on graph embedding. The results of this study support a rapid response to changes in the global value chain such as the recent US-China trade conflict or Japan's export regulations, and I think that it has sufficient usefulness as a tool for policy decision-making.
Personalized services directly and indirectly acquire personal data, in part, to provide customers with higher-value services that are specifically context-relevant (such as place and time). Information technologies continue to mature and develop, providing greatly improved performance. Sensory networks and intelligent software can now obtain context data, and that is the cornerstone for providing personalized, context-specific services. Yet, the danger of overflowing personal information is increasing because the data retrieved by the sensors usually contains privacy information. Various technical characteristics of context-aware applications have more troubling implications for information privacy. In parallel with increasing use of context for service personalization, information privacy concerns have also increased such as an unrestricted availability of context information. Those privacy concerns are consistently regarded as a critical issue facing context-aware personalized service success. The entire field of information privacy is growing as an important area of research, with many new definitions and terminologies, because of a need for a better understanding of information privacy concepts. Especially, it requires that the factors of information privacy should be revised according to the characteristics of new technologies. However, previous information privacy factors of context-aware applications have at least two shortcomings. First, there has been little overview of the technology characteristics of context-aware computing. Existing studies have only focused on a small subset of the technical characteristics of context-aware computing. Therefore, there has not been a mutually exclusive set of factors that uniquely and completely describe information privacy on context-aware applications. Second, user survey has been widely used to identify factors of information privacy in most studies despite the limitation of users' knowledge and experiences about context-aware computing technology. To date, since context-aware services have not been widely deployed on a commercial scale yet, only very few people have prior experiences with context-aware personalized services. It is difficult to build users' knowledge about context-aware technology even by increasing their understanding in various ways: scenarios, pictures, flash animation, etc. Nevertheless, conducting a survey, assuming that the participants have sufficient experience or understanding about the technologies shown in the survey, may not be absolutely valid. Moreover, some surveys are based solely on simplifying and hence unrealistic assumptions (e.g., they only consider location information as a context data). A better understanding of information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services is highly needed. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to identify a generic set of factors for elemental information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services and to develop a rank-order list of information privacy concern factors. We consider overall technology characteristics to establish a mutually exclusive set of factors. A Delphi survey, a rigorous data collection method, was deployed to obtain a reliable opinion from the experts and to produce a rank-order list. It, therefore, lends itself well to obtaining a set of universal factors of information privacy concern and its priority. An international panel of researchers and practitioners who have the expertise in privacy and context-aware system fields were involved in our research. Delphi rounds formatting will faithfully follow the procedure for the Delphi study proposed by Okoli and Pawlowski. This will involve three general rounds: (1) brainstorming for important factors; (2) narrowing down the original list to the most important ones; and (3) ranking the list of important factors. For this round only, experts were treated as individuals, not panels. Adapted from Okoli and Pawlowski, we outlined the process of administrating the study. We performed three rounds. In the first and second rounds of the Delphi questionnaire, we gathered a set of exclusive factors for information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services. The respondents were asked to provide at least five main factors for the most appropriate understanding of the information privacy concern in the first round. To do so, some of the main factors found in the literature were presented to the participants. The second round of the questionnaire discussed the main factor provided in the first round, fleshed out with relevant sub-factors. Respondents were then requested to evaluate each sub factor's suitability against the corresponding main factors to determine the final sub-factors from the candidate factors. The sub-factors were found from the literature survey. Final factors selected by over 50% of experts. In the third round, a list of factors with corresponding questions was provided, and the respondents were requested to assess the importance of each main factor and its corresponding sub factors. Finally, we calculated the mean rank of each item to make a final result. While analyzing the data, we focused on group consensus rather than individual insistence. To do so, a concordance analysis, which measures the consistency of the experts' responses over successive rounds of the Delphi, was adopted during the survey process. As a result, experts reported that context data collection and high identifiable level of identical data are the most important factor in the main factors and sub factors, respectively. Additional important sub-factors included diverse types of context data collected, tracking and recording functionalities, and embedded and disappeared sensor devices. The average score of each factor is very useful for future context-aware personalized service development in the view of the information privacy. The final factors have the following differences comparing to those proposed in other studies. First, the concern factors differ from existing studies, which are based on privacy issues that may occur during the lifecycle of acquired user information. However, our study helped to clarify these sometimes vague issues by determining which privacy concern issues are viable based on specific technical characteristics in context-aware personalized services. Since a context-aware service differs in its technical characteristics compared to other services, we selected specific characteristics that had a higher potential to increase user's privacy concerns. Secondly, this study considered privacy issues in terms of service delivery and display that were almost overlooked in existing studies by introducing IPOS as the factor division. Lastly, in each factor, it correlated the level of importance with professionals' opinions as to what extent users have privacy concerns. The reason that it did not select the traditional method questionnaire at that time is that context-aware personalized service considered the absolute lack in understanding and experience of users with new technology. For understanding users' privacy concerns, professionals in the Delphi questionnaire process selected context data collection, tracking and recording, and sensory network as the most important factors among technological characteristics of context-aware personalized services. In the creation of a context-aware personalized services, this study demonstrates the importance and relevance of determining an optimal methodology, and which technologies and in what sequence are needed, to acquire what types of users' context information. Most studies focus on which services and systems should be provided and developed by utilizing context information on the supposition, along with the development of context-aware technology. However, the results in this study show that, in terms of users' privacy, it is necessary to pay greater attention to the activities that acquire context information. To inspect the results in the evaluation of sub factor, additional studies would be necessary for approaches on reducing users' privacy concerns toward technological characteristics such as highly identifiable level of identical data, diverse types of context data collected, tracking and recording functionality, embedded and disappearing sensor devices. The factor ranked the next highest level of importance after input is a context-aware service delivery that is related to output. The results show that delivery and display showing services to users in a context-aware personalized services toward the anywhere-anytime-any device concept have been regarded as even more important than in previous computing environment. Considering the concern factors to develop context aware personalized services will help to increase service success rate and hopefully user acceptance for those services. Our future work will be to adopt these factors for qualifying context aware service development projects such as u-city development projects in terms of service quality and hence user acceptance.
Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet) is one class of the powerful Deep Neural Network that can analyze and learn hierarchies of visual features. Originally, first neural network (Neocognitron) was introduced in the 80s. At that time, the neural network was not broadly used in both industry and academic field by cause of large-scale dataset shortage and low computational power. However, after a few decades later in 2012, Krizhevsky made a breakthrough on ILSVRC-12 visual recognition competition using Convolutional Neural Network. That breakthrough revived people interest in the neural network. The success of Convolutional Neural Network is achieved with two main factors. First of them is the emergence of advanced hardware (GPUs) for sufficient parallel computation. Second is the availability of large-scale datasets such as ImageNet (ILSVRC) dataset for training. Unfortunately, many new domains are bottlenecked by these factors. For most domains, it is difficult and requires lots of effort to gather large-scale dataset to train a ConvNet. Moreover, even if we have a large-scale dataset, training ConvNet from scratch is required expensive resource and time-consuming. These two obstacles can be solved by using transfer learning. Transfer learning is a method for transferring the knowledge from a source domain to new domain. There are two major Transfer learning cases. First one is ConvNet as fixed feature extractor, and the second one is Fine-tune the ConvNet on a new dataset. In the first case, using pre-trained ConvNet (such as on ImageNet) to compute feed-forward activations of the image into the ConvNet and extract activation features from specific layers. In the second case, replacing and retraining the ConvNet classifier on the new dataset, then fine-tune the weights of the pre-trained network with the backpropagation. In this paper, we focus on using multiple ConvNet layers as a fixed feature extractor only. However, applying features with high dimensional complexity that is directly extracted from multiple ConvNet layers is still a challenging problem. We observe that features extracted from multiple ConvNet layers address the different characteristics of the image which means better representation could be obtained by finding the optimal combination of multiple ConvNet layers. Based on that observation, we propose to employ multiple ConvNet layer representations for transfer learning instead of a single ConvNet layer representation. Overall, our primary pipeline has three steps. Firstly, images from target task are given as input to ConvNet, then that image will be feed-forwarded into pre-trained AlexNet, and the activation features from three fully connected convolutional layers are extracted. Secondly, activation features of three ConvNet layers are concatenated to obtain multiple ConvNet layers representation because it will gain more information about an image. When three fully connected layer features concatenated, the occurring image representation would have 9192 (4096+4096+1000) dimension features. However, features extracted from multiple ConvNet layers are redundant and noisy since they are extracted from the same ConvNet. Thus, a third step, we will use Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to select salient features before the training phase. When salient features are obtained, the classifier can classify image more accurately, and the performance of transfer learning can be improved. To evaluate proposed method, experiments are conducted in three standard datasets (Caltech-256, VOC07, and SUN397) to compare multiple ConvNet layer representations against single ConvNet layer representation by using PCA for feature selection and dimension reduction. Our experiments demonstrated the importance of feature selection for multiple ConvNet layer representation. Moreover, our proposed approach achieved 75.6% accuracy compared to 73.9% accuracy achieved by FC7 layer on the Caltech-256 dataset, 73.1% accuracy compared to 69.2% accuracy achieved by FC8 layer on the VOC07 dataset, 52.2% accuracy compared to 48.7% accuracy achieved by FC7 layer on the SUN397 dataset. We also showed that our proposed approach achieved superior performance, 2.8%, 2.1% and 3.1% accuracy improvement on Caltech-256, VOC07, and SUN397 dataset respectively compare to existing work.
The objective of this research is to test the feasibility of developing a statewide truck traffic forecasting methodology for Wisconsin by using Origin-Destination surveys, traffic counts, classification counts, and other data that are routinely collected by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT). Development of a feasible model will permit estimation of future truck traffic for every major link in the network. This will provide the basis for improved estimation of future pavement deterioration. Pavement damage rises exponentially as axle weight increases, and trucks are responsible for most of the traffic-induced damage to pavement. Consequently, forecasts of truck traffic are critical to pavement management systems. The pavement Management Decision Supporting System (PMDSS) prepared by WisDOT in May 1990 combines pavement inventory and performance data with a knowledge base consisting of rules for evaluation, problem identification and rehabilitation recommendation. Without a r.easonable truck traffic forecasting methodology, PMDSS is not able to project pavement performance trends in order to make assessment and recommendations in the future years. However, none of WisDOT's existing forecasting methodologies has been designed specifically for predicting truck movements on a statewide highway network. For this research, the Origin-Destination survey data avaiiable from WisDOT, including two stateline areas, one county, and five cities, are analyzed and the zone-to'||'&'||'not;zone truck trip tables are developed. The resulting Origin-Destination Trip Length Frequency (00 TLF) distributions by trip type are applied to the Gravity Model (GM) for comparison with comparable TLFs from the GM. The gravity model is calibrated to obtain friction factor curves for the three trip types, Internal-Internal (I-I), Internal-External (I-E), and External-External (E-E). ~oth "macro-scale" calibration and "micro-scale" calibration are performed. The comparison of the statewide GM TLF with the 00 TLF for the macro-scale calibration does not provide suitable results because the available 00 survey data do not represent an unbiased sample of statewide truck trips. For the "micro-scale" calibration, "partial" GM trip tables that correspond to the 00 survey trip tables are extracted from the full statewide GM trip table. These "partial" GM trip tables are then merged and a partial GM TLF is created. The GM friction factor curves are adjusted until the partial GM TLF matches the 00 TLF. Three friction factor curves, one for each trip type, resulting from the micro-scale calibration produce a reasonable GM truck trip model. A key methodological issue for GM. calibration involves the use of multiple friction factor curves versus a single friction factor curve for each trip type in order to estimate truck trips with reasonable accuracy. A single friction factor curve for each of the three trip types was found to reproduce the 00 TLFs from the calibration data base. Given the very limited trip generation data available for this research, additional refinement of the gravity model using multiple mction factor curves for each trip type was not warranted. In the traditional urban transportation planning studies, the zonal trip productions and attractions and region-wide OD TLFs are available. However, for this research, the information available for the development .of the GM model is limited to Ground Counts (GC) and a limited set ofOD TLFs. The GM is calibrated using the limited OD data, but the OD data are not adequate to obtain good estimates of truck trip productions and attractions .. Consequently, zonal productions and attractions are estimated using zonal population as a first approximation. Then, Selected Link based (SELINK) analyses are used to adjust the productions and attractions and possibly recalibrate the GM. The SELINK adjustment process involves identifying the origins and destinations of all truck trips that are assigned to a specified "selected link" as the result of a standard traffic assignment. A link adjustment factor is computed as the ratio of the actual volume for the link (ground count) to the total assigned volume. This link adjustment factor is then applied to all of the origin and destination zones of the trips using that "selected link". Selected link based analyses are conducted by using both 16 selected links and 32 selected links. The result of SELINK analysis by u~ing 32 selected links provides the least %RMSE in the screenline volume analysis. In addition, the stability of the GM truck estimating model is preserved by using 32 selected links with three SELINK adjustments, that is, the GM remains calibrated despite substantial changes in the input productions and attractions. The coverage of zones provided by 32 selected links is satisfactory. Increasing the number of repetitions beyond four is not reasonable because the stability of GM model in reproducing the OD TLF reaches its limits. The total volume of truck traffic captured by 32 selected links is 107% of total trip productions. But more importantly, ~ELINK adjustment factors for all of the zones can be computed. Evaluation of the travel demand model resulting from the SELINK adjustments is conducted by using screenline volume analysis, functional class and route specific volume analysis, area specific volume analysis, production and attraction analysis, and Vehicle Miles of Travel (VMT) analysis. Screenline volume analysis by using four screenlines with 28 check points are used for evaluation of the adequacy of the overall model. The total trucks crossing the screenlines are compared to the ground count totals. L V/GC ratios of 0.958 by using 32 selected links and 1.001 by using 16 selected links are obtained. The %RM:SE for the four screenlines is inversely proportional to the average ground count totals by screenline .. The magnitude of %RM:SE for the four screenlines resulting from the fourth and last GM run by using 32 and 16 selected links is 22% and 31 % respectively. These results are similar to the overall %RMSE achieved for the 32 and 16 selected links themselves of 19% and 33% respectively. This implies that the SELINICanalysis results are reasonable for all sections of the state.Functional class and route specific volume analysis is possible by using the available 154 classification count check points. The truck traffic crossing the Interstate highways (ISH) with 37 check points, the US highways (USH) with 50 check points, and the State highways (STH) with 67 check points is compared to the actual ground count totals. The magnitude of the overall link volume to ground count ratio by route does not provide any specific pattern of over or underestimate. However, the %R11SE for the ISH shows the least value while that for the STH shows the largest value. This pattern is consistent with the screenline analysis and the overall relationship between %RMSE and ground count volume groups. Area specific volume analysis provides another broad statewide measure of the performance of the overall model. The truck traffic in the North area with 26 check points, the West area with 36 check points, the East area with 29 check points, and the South area with 64 check points are compared to the actual ground count totals. The four areas show similar results. No specific patterns in the L V/GC ratio by area are found. In addition, the %RMSE is computed for each of the four areas. The %RMSEs for the North, West, East, and South areas are 92%, 49%, 27%, and 35% respectively, whereas, the average ground counts are 481, 1383, 1532, and 3154 respectively. As for the screenline and volume range analyses, the %RMSE is inversely related to average link volume. 'The SELINK adjustments of productions and attractions resulted in a very substantial reduction in the total in-state zonal productions and attractions. The initial in-state zonal trip generation model can now be revised with a new trip production's trip rate (total adjusted productions/total population) and a new trip attraction's trip rate. Revised zonal production and attraction adjustment factors can then be developed that only reflect the impact of the SELINK adjustments that cause mcreases or , decreases from the revised zonal estimate of productions and attractions. Analysis of the revised production adjustment factors is conducted by plotting the factors on the state map. The east area of the state including the counties of Brown, Outagamie, Shawano, Wmnebago, Fond du Lac, Marathon shows comparatively large values of the revised adjustment factors. Overall, both small and large values of the revised adjustment factors are scattered around Wisconsin. This suggests that more independent variables beyond just 226; population are needed for the development of the heavy truck trip generation model. More independent variables including zonal employment data (office employees and manufacturing employees) by industry type, zonal private trucks 226; owned and zonal income data which are not available currently should be considered. A plot of frequency distribution of the in-state zones as a function of the revised production and attraction adjustment factors shows the overall " adjustment resulting from the SELINK analysis process. Overall, the revised SELINK adjustments show that the productions for many zones are reduced by, a factor of 0.5 to 0.8 while the productions for ~ relatively few zones are increased by factors from 1.1 to 4 with most of the factors in the 3.0 range. No obvious explanation for the frequency distribution could be found. The revised SELINK adjustments overall appear to be reasonable. The heavy truck VMT analysis is conducted by comparing the 1990 heavy truck VMT that is forecasted by the GM truck forecasting model, 2.975 billions, with the WisDOT computed data. This gives an estimate that is 18.3% less than the WisDOT computation of 3.642 billions of VMT. The WisDOT estimates are based on the sampling the link volumes for USH, 8TH, and CTH. This implies potential error in sampling the average link volume. The WisDOT estimate of heavy truck VMT cannot be tabulated by the three trip types, I-I, I-E ('||'&'||'pound;-I), and E-E. In contrast, the GM forecasting model shows that the proportion ofE-E VMT out of total VMT is 21.24%. In addition, tabulation of heavy truck VMT by route functional class shows that the proportion of truck traffic traversing the freeways and expressways is 76.5%. Only 14.1% of total freeway truck traffic is I-I trips, while 80% of total collector truck traffic is I-I trips. This implies that freeways are traversed mainly by I-E and E-E truck traffic while collectors are used mainly by I-I truck traffic. Other tabulations such as average heavy truck speed by trip type, average travel distance by trip type and the VMT distribution by trip type, route functional class and travel speed are useful information for highway planners to understand the characteristics of statewide heavy truck trip patternS. Heavy truck volumes for the target year 2010 are forecasted by using the GM truck forecasting model. Four scenarios are used. Fo~ better forecasting, ground count- based segment adjustment factors are developed and applied. ISH 90 '||'&'||' 94 and USH 41 are used as example routes. The forecasting results by using the ground count-based segment adjustment factors are satisfactory for long range planning purposes, but additional ground counts would be useful for USH 41. Sensitivity analysis provides estimates of the impacts of the alternative growth rates including information about changes in the trip types using key routes. The network'||'&'||'not;based GMcan easily model scenarios with different rates of growth in rural versus . . urban areas, small versus large cities, and in-state zones versus external stations. cities, and in-state zones versus external stations.