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A CF-based Health Functional Recommender System using Extended User Similarity Measure (확장된 사용자 유사도를 이용한 CF-기반 건강기능식품 추천 시스템)

  • Sein Hong;Euiju Jeong;Jaekyeong Kim
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.29 no.3
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    • pp.1-17
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    • 2023
  • With the recent rapid development of ICT(Information and Communication Technology) and the popularization of digital devices, the size of the online market continues to grow. As a result, we live in a flood of information. Thus, customers are facing information overload problems that require a lot of time and money to select products. Therefore, a personalized recommender system has become an essential methodology to address such issues. Collaborative Filtering(CF) is the most widely used recommender system. Traditional recommender systems mainly utilize quantitative data such as rating values, resulting in poor recommendation accuracy. Quantitative data cannot fully reflect the user's preference. To solve such a problem, studies that reflect qualitative data, such as review contents, are being actively conducted these days. To quantify user review contents, text mining was used in this study. The general CF consists of the following three steps: user-item matrix generation, Top-N neighborhood group search, and Top-K recommendation list generation. In this study, we propose a recommendation algorithm that applies an extended similarity measure, which utilize quantified review contents in addition to user rating values. After calculating review similarity by applying TF-IDF, Word2Vec, and Doc2Vec techniques to review content, extended similarity is created by combining user rating similarity and quantified review contents. To verify this, we used user ratings and review data from the e-commerce site Amazon's "Health and Personal Care". The proposed recommendation model using extended similarity measure showed superior performance to the traditional recommendation model using only user rating value-based similarity measure. In addition, among the various text mining techniques, the similarity obtained using the TF-IDF technique showed the best performance when used in the neighbor group search and recommendation list generation step.

Optimization of Multiclass Support Vector Machine using Genetic Algorithm: Application to the Prediction of Corporate Credit Rating (유전자 알고리즘을 이용한 다분류 SVM의 최적화: 기업신용등급 예측에의 응용)

  • Ahn, Hyunchul
    • Information Systems Review
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    • v.16 no.3
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    • pp.161-177
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    • 2014
  • Corporate credit rating assessment consists of complicated processes in which various factors describing a company are taken into consideration. Such assessment is known to be very expensive since domain experts should be employed to assess the ratings. As a result, the data-driven corporate credit rating prediction using statistical and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques has received considerable attention from researchers and practitioners. In particular, statistical methods such as multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) and multinomial logistic regression analysis (MLOGIT), and AI methods including case-based reasoning (CBR), artificial neural network (ANN), and multiclass support vector machine (MSVM) have been applied to corporate credit rating.2) Among them, MSVM has recently become popular because of its robustness and high prediction accuracy. In this study, we propose a novel optimized MSVM model, and appy it to corporate credit rating prediction in order to enhance the accuracy. Our model, named 'GAMSVM (Genetic Algorithm-optimized Multiclass Support Vector Machine),' is designed to simultaneously optimize the kernel parameters and the feature subset selection. Prior studies like Lorena and de Carvalho (2008), and Chatterjee (2013) show that proper kernel parameters may improve the performance of MSVMs. Also, the results from the studies such as Shieh and Yang (2008) and Chatterjee (2013) imply that appropriate feature selection may lead to higher prediction accuracy. Based on these prior studies, we propose to apply GAMSVM to corporate credit rating prediction. As a tool for optimizing the kernel parameters and the feature subset selection, we suggest genetic algorithm (GA). GA is known as an efficient and effective search method that attempts to simulate the biological evolution phenomenon. By applying genetic operations such as selection, crossover, and mutation, it is designed to gradually improve the search results. Especially, mutation operator prevents GA from falling into the local optima, thus we can find the globally optimal or near-optimal solution using it. GA has popularly been applied to search optimal parameters or feature subset selections of AI techniques including MSVM. With these reasons, we also adopt GA as an optimization tool. To empirically validate the usefulness of GAMSVM, we applied it to a real-world case of credit rating in Korea. Our application is in bond rating, which is the most frequently studied area of credit rating for specific debt issues or other financial obligations. The experimental dataset was collected from a large credit rating company in South Korea. It contained 39 financial ratios of 1,295 companies in the manufacturing industry, and their credit ratings. Using various statistical methods including the one-way ANOVA and the stepwise MDA, we selected 14 financial ratios as the candidate independent variables. The dependent variable, i.e. credit rating, was labeled as four classes: 1(A1); 2(A2); 3(A3); 4(B and C). 80 percent of total data for each class was used for training, and remaining 20 percent was used for validation. And, to overcome small sample size, we applied five-fold cross validation to our dataset. In order to examine the competitiveness of the proposed model, we also experimented several comparative models including MDA, MLOGIT, CBR, ANN and MSVM. In case of MSVM, we adopted One-Against-One (OAO) and DAGSVM (Directed Acyclic Graph SVM) approaches because they are known to be the most accurate approaches among various MSVM approaches. GAMSVM was implemented using LIBSVM-an open-source software, and Evolver 5.5-a commercial software enables GA. Other comparative models were experimented using various statistical and AI packages such as SPSS for Windows, Neuroshell, and Microsoft Excel VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). Experimental results showed that the proposed model-GAMSVM-outperformed all the competitive models. In addition, the model was found to use less independent variables, but to show higher accuracy. In our experiments, five variables such as X7 (total debt), X9 (sales per employee), X13 (years after founded), X15 (accumulated earning to total asset), and X39 (the index related to the cash flows from operating activity) were found to be the most important factors in predicting the corporate credit ratings. However, the values of the finally selected kernel parameters were found to be almost same among the data subsets. To examine whether the predictive performance of GAMSVM was significantly greater than those of other models, we used the McNemar test. As a result, we found that GAMSVM was better than MDA, MLOGIT, CBR, and ANN at the 1% significance level, and better than OAO and DAGSVM at the 5% significance level.

Enhancing Predictive Accuracy of Collaborative Filtering Algorithms using the Network Analysis of Trust Relationship among Users (사용자 간 신뢰관계 네트워크 분석을 활용한 협업 필터링 알고리즘의 예측 정확도 개선)

  • Choi, Seulbi;Kwahk, Kee-Young;Ahn, Hyunchul
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.22 no.3
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    • pp.113-127
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    • 2016
  • Among the techniques for recommendation, collaborative filtering (CF) is commonly recognized to be the most effective for implementing recommender systems. Until now, CF has been popularly studied and adopted in both academic and real-world applications. The basic idea of CF is to create recommendation results by finding correlations between users of a recommendation system. CF system compares users based on how similar they are, and recommend products to users by using other like-minded people's results of evaluation for each product. Thus, it is very important to compute evaluation similarities among users in CF because the recommendation quality depends on it. Typical CF uses user's explicit numeric ratings of items (i.e. quantitative information) when computing the similarities among users in CF. In other words, user's numeric ratings have been a sole source of user preference information in traditional CF. However, user ratings are unable to fully reflect user's actual preferences from time to time. According to several studies, users may more actively accommodate recommendation of reliable others when purchasing goods. Thus, trust relationship can be regarded as the informative source for identifying user's preference with accuracy. Under this background, we propose a new hybrid recommender system that fuses CF and social network analysis (SNA). The proposed system adopts the recommendation algorithm that additionally reflect the result analyzed by SNA. In detail, our proposed system is based on conventional memory-based CF, but it is designed to use both user's numeric ratings and trust relationship information between users when calculating user similarities. For this, our system creates and uses not only user-item rating matrix, but also user-to-user trust network. As the methods for calculating user similarity between users, we proposed two alternatives - one is algorithm calculating the degree of similarity between users by utilizing in-degree and out-degree centrality, which are the indices representing the central location in the social network. We named these approaches as 'Trust CF - All' and 'Trust CF - Conditional'. The other alternative is the algorithm reflecting a neighbor's score higher when a target user trusts the neighbor directly or indirectly. The direct or indirect trust relationship can be identified by searching trust network of users. In this study, we call this approach 'Trust CF - Search'. To validate the applicability of the proposed system, we used experimental data provided by LibRec that crawled from the entire FilmTrust website. It consists of ratings of movies and trust relationship network indicating who to trust between users. The experimental system was implemented using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and UCINET 6. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system, we compared the performance of our proposed method with one of conventional CF system. The performances of recommender system were evaluated by using average MAE (mean absolute error). The analysis results confirmed that in case of applying without conditions the in-degree centrality index of trusted network of users(i.e. Trust CF - All), the accuracy (MAE = 0.565134) was lower than conventional CF (MAE = 0.564966). And, in case of applying the in-degree centrality index only to the users with the out-degree centrality above a certain threshold value(i.e. Trust CF - Conditional), the proposed system improved the accuracy a little (MAE = 0.564909) compared to traditional CF. However, the algorithm searching based on the trusted network of users (i.e. Trust CF - Search) was found to show the best performance (MAE = 0.564846). And the result from paired samples t-test presented that Trust CF - Search outperformed conventional CF with 10% statistical significance level. Our study sheds a light on the application of user's trust relationship network information for facilitating electronic commerce by recommending proper items to users.

Recommending Core and Connecting Keywords of Research Area Using Social Network and Data Mining Techniques (소셜 네트워크와 데이터 마이닝 기법을 활용한 학문 분야 중심 및 융합 키워드 추천 서비스)

  • Cho, In-Dong;Kim, Nam-Gyu
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.17 no.1
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    • pp.127-138
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    • 2011
  • The core service of most research portal sites is providing relevant research papers to various researchers that match their research interests. This kind of service may only be effective and easy to use when a user can provide correct and concrete information about a paper such as the title, authors, and keywords. However, unfortunately, most users of this service are not acquainted with concrete bibliographic information. It implies that most users inevitably experience repeated trial and error attempts of keyword-based search. Especially, retrieving a relevant research paper is more difficult when a user is novice in the research domain and does not know appropriate keywords. In this case, a user should perform iterative searches as follows : i) perform an initial search with an arbitrary keyword, ii) acquire related keywords from the retrieved papers, and iii) perform another search again with the acquired keywords. This usage pattern implies that the level of service quality and user satisfaction of a portal site are strongly affected by the level of keyword management and searching mechanism. To overcome this kind of inefficiency, some leading research portal sites adopt the association rule mining-based keyword recommendation service that is similar to the product recommendation of online shopping malls. However, keyword recommendation only based on association analysis has limitation that it can show only a simple and direct relationship between two keywords. In other words, the association analysis itself is unable to present the complex relationships among many keywords in some adjacent research areas. To overcome this limitation, we propose the hybrid approach for establishing association network among keywords used in research papers. The keyword association network can be established by the following phases : i) a set of keywords specified in a certain paper are regarded as co-purchased items, ii) perform association analysis for the keywords and extract frequent patterns of keywords that satisfy predefined thresholds of confidence, support, and lift, and iii) schematize the frequent keyword patterns as a network to show the core keywords of each research area and connecting keywords among two or more research areas. To estimate the practical application of our approach, we performed a simple experiment with 600 keywords. The keywords are extracted from 131 research papers published in five prominent Korean journals in 2009. In the experiment, we used the SAS Enterprise Miner for association analysis and the R software for social network analysis. As the final outcome, we presented a network diagram and a cluster dendrogram for the keyword association network. We summarized the results in Section 4 of this paper. The main contribution of our proposed approach can be found in the following aspects : i) the keyword network can provide an initial roadmap of a research area to researchers who are novice in the domain, ii) a researcher can grasp the distribution of many keywords neighboring to a certain keyword, and iii) researchers can get some idea for converging different research areas by observing connecting keywords in the keyword association network. Further studies should include the following. First, the current version of our approach does not implement a standard meta-dictionary. For practical use, homonyms, synonyms, and multilingual problems should be resolved with a standard meta-dictionary. Additionally, more clear guidelines for clustering research areas and defining core and connecting keywords should be provided. Finally, intensive experiments not only on Korean research papers but also on international papers should be performed in further studies.

A Study on the Individual Issue and Organizational Issue of Organizational Innovation (개인혁신과 조직혁신의 이슈에 관한 연구)

  • Song Kyung-Soo;Kim Hye-Jung
    • Management & Information Systems Review
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    • v.16
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    • pp.59-76
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    • 2005
  • The inner and outer environment surrounding companies becomes more insecure and unpredictable due to sudden changes. Because the change of environment surrounding companies can deeply affect the existence of companies, continuous innovation of organization is required to develope management ability. Also, to conquer insecure present and future of companies effectively, organizations of companies have voluntarily coped with insecurities and intense competitions through endless organization innovation. Externally, globalization, openness, and relaxed regulation intensify competitions; consumers' requests get varied; consciousness of members of organizations have changed. Due to those factors, companies are placed in a situation that they should practice endless inner innovation. Internally, competitive power has weakened due to decline in productivity and inefficiency of indirect parts of company has increased. From those factors, managers increasingly request inner innovation and pursue organization innovation for the purpose of effective usage of extra resources and being prepared for the future. The managers who operate organization innovation think that systematized approach to organization innovation is the most practical, and actually operate the thought. However, the negative side of the thought is not neglectable. To minimize inner and outer resistance and to operate organization innovation successfully, some innovation strategies that properly reflect several issues related to organization innovation should be prepared. Another words, organization innovation should be operated differently by cases that if it focuses on personal perspective or on organization's. For many cases of our country, several techniques of organization innovation have been adopted in a short time and operated without making its original use. Therefore, this study looks into major Issues that should be considered for more successful operation of organization innovation, from both personal aspect and organizational aspect. When considering such aspects and operate organization innovation, there is more possibility to succeed on organization innovation. Now, Korean companies have overcame trial period and reborn as global companies. Take warnings by the ordeal under IMF administration, this is time to secure international competitive power by using developed innovation techniques and transform to superior company. Managers need to recognize that to try successful organization innovation is the shortcut to reborn as competitive company, and should take a continuous and profound search for decisive factors to succeed on organization innovation. To operate successful organization innovation, first, at the step of planning organization. innovation, the company should understand the company's capability, position in market and relationship with competitors. Then, the company should establish a distinguished innovation strategy which is of the whole company's aspect, so that the company can freely choose various technique of organization innovation that suits for the company's capability and needs, and unfold the organization innovation movement. Establishing strategy in the aspect of the total company is very important because it offers clear focus of the purpose of adopt, priority and distribution of resources. Second, at the step of operating organization innovation, the company should define concrete purpose and method to evaluate the results that are expected to obtain by adopting organization innovation in advance. While pushing forward, the company should set proper time of examination(milestone) and inspect if expected results are shown. Third, at the step of afterward management of operating organization innovation, the company requires a thorough afterwards verification if targeted results are obtained and of confirmation of successful or failure factors. Also, the company should cultivate specialists in the company who can accumulate and continuously spread the know-how learned during organization innovation promotion, so the know-how don't remain only in certain departments or to a few people in charge. The company should also give effort to maintain the accumulated innovation techniques to be continued.

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A Literature Review and Classification of Recommender Systems on Academic Journals (추천시스템관련 학술논문 분석 및 분류)

  • Park, Deuk-Hee;Kim, Hyea-Kyeong;Choi, Il-Young;Kim, Jae-Kyeong
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.17 no.1
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    • pp.139-152
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    • 2011
  • Recommender systems have become an important research field since the emergence of the first paper on collaborative filtering in the mid-1990s. In general, recommender systems are defined as the supporting systems which help users to find information, products, or services (such as books, movies, music, digital products, web sites, and TV programs) by aggregating and analyzing suggestions from other users, which mean reviews from various authorities, and user attributes. However, as academic researches on recommender systems have increased significantly over the last ten years, more researches are required to be applicable in the real world situation. Because research field on recommender systems is still wide and less mature than other research fields. Accordingly, the existing articles on recommender systems need to be reviewed toward the next generation of recommender systems. However, it would be not easy to confine the recommender system researches to specific disciplines, considering the nature of the recommender system researches. So, we reviewed all articles on recommender systems from 37 journals which were published from 2001 to 2010. The 37 journals are selected from top 125 journals of the MIS Journal Rankings. Also, the literature search was based on the descriptors "Recommender system", "Recommendation system", "Personalization system", "Collaborative filtering" and "Contents filtering". The full text of each article was reviewed to eliminate the article that was not actually related to recommender systems. Many of articles were excluded because the articles such as Conference papers, master's and doctoral dissertations, textbook, unpublished working papers, non-English publication papers and news were unfit for our research. We classified articles by year of publication, journals, recommendation fields, and data mining techniques. The recommendation fields and data mining techniques of 187 articles are reviewed and classified into eight recommendation fields (book, document, image, movie, music, shopping, TV program, and others) and eight data mining techniques (association rule, clustering, decision tree, k-nearest neighbor, link analysis, neural network, regression, and other heuristic methods). The results represented in this paper have several significant implications. First, based on previous publication rates, the interest in the recommender system related research will grow significantly in the future. Second, 49 articles are related to movie recommendation whereas image and TV program recommendation are identified in only 6 articles. This result has been caused by the easy use of MovieLens data set. So, it is necessary to prepare data set of other fields. Third, recently social network analysis has been used in the various applications. However studies on recommender systems using social network analysis are deficient. Henceforth, we expect that new recommendation approaches using social network analysis will be developed in the recommender systems. So, it will be an interesting and further research area to evaluate the recommendation system researches using social method analysis. This result provides trend of recommender system researches by examining the published literature, and provides practitioners and researchers with insight and future direction on recommender systems. We hope that this research helps anyone who is interested in recommender systems research to gain insight for future research.

Self-optimizing feature selection algorithm for enhancing campaign effectiveness (캠페인 효과 제고를 위한 자기 최적화 변수 선택 알고리즘)

  • Seo, Jeoung-soo;Ahn, Hyunchul
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.26 no.4
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    • pp.173-198
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    • 2020
  • For a long time, many studies have been conducted on predicting the success of campaigns for customers in academia, and prediction models applying various techniques are still being studied. Recently, as campaign channels have been expanded in various ways due to the rapid revitalization of online, various types of campaigns are being carried out by companies at a level that cannot be compared to the past. However, customers tend to perceive it as spam as the fatigue of campaigns due to duplicate exposure increases. Also, from a corporate standpoint, there is a problem that the effectiveness of the campaign itself is decreasing, such as increasing the cost of investing in the campaign, which leads to the low actual campaign success rate. Accordingly, various studies are ongoing to improve the effectiveness of the campaign in practice. This campaign system has the ultimate purpose to increase the success rate of various campaigns by collecting and analyzing various data related to customers and using them for campaigns. In particular, recent attempts to make various predictions related to the response of campaigns using machine learning have been made. It is very important to select appropriate features due to the various features of campaign data. If all of the input data are used in the process of classifying a large amount of data, it takes a lot of learning time as the classification class expands, so the minimum input data set must be extracted and used from the entire data. In addition, when a trained model is generated by using too many features, prediction accuracy may be degraded due to overfitting or correlation between features. Therefore, in order to improve accuracy, a feature selection technique that removes features close to noise should be applied, and feature selection is a necessary process in order to analyze a high-dimensional data set. Among the greedy algorithms, SFS (Sequential Forward Selection), SBS (Sequential Backward Selection), SFFS (Sequential Floating Forward Selection), etc. are widely used as traditional feature selection techniques. It is also true that if there are many risks and many features, there is a limitation in that the performance for classification prediction is poor and it takes a lot of learning time. Therefore, in this study, we propose an improved feature selection algorithm to enhance the effectiveness of the existing campaign. The purpose of this study is to improve the existing SFFS sequential method in the process of searching for feature subsets that are the basis for improving machine learning model performance using statistical characteristics of the data to be processed in the campaign system. Through this, features that have a lot of influence on performance are first derived, features that have a negative effect are removed, and then the sequential method is applied to increase the efficiency for search performance and to apply an improved algorithm to enable generalized prediction. Through this, it was confirmed that the proposed model showed better search and prediction performance than the traditional greed algorithm. Compared with the original data set, greed algorithm, genetic algorithm (GA), and recursive feature elimination (RFE), the campaign success prediction was higher. In addition, when performing campaign success prediction, the improved feature selection algorithm was found to be helpful in analyzing and interpreting the prediction results by providing the importance of the derived features. This is important features such as age, customer rating, and sales, which were previously known statistically. Unlike the previous campaign planners, features such as the combined product name, average 3-month data consumption rate, and the last 3-month wireless data usage were unexpectedly selected as important features for the campaign response, which they rarely used to select campaign targets. It was confirmed that base attributes can also be very important features depending on the type of campaign. Through this, it is possible to analyze and understand the important characteristics of each campaign type.

Business Application of Convolutional Neural Networks for Apparel Classification Using Runway Image (합성곱 신경망의 비지니스 응용: 런웨이 이미지를 사용한 의류 분류를 중심으로)

  • Seo, Yian;Shin, Kyung-shik
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.24 no.3
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    • pp.1-19
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    • 2018
  • Large amount of data is now available for research and business sectors to extract knowledge from it. This data can be in the form of unstructured data such as audio, text, and image data and can be analyzed by deep learning methodology. Deep learning is now widely used for various estimation, classification, and prediction problems. Especially, fashion business adopts deep learning techniques for apparel recognition, apparel search and retrieval engine, and automatic product recommendation. The core model of these applications is the image classification using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). CNN is made up of neurons which learn parameters such as weights while inputs come through and reach outputs. CNN has layer structure which is best suited for image classification as it is comprised of convolutional layer for generating feature maps, pooling layer for reducing the dimensionality of feature maps, and fully-connected layer for classifying the extracted features. However, most of the classification models have been trained using online product image, which is taken under controlled situation such as apparel image itself or professional model wearing apparel. This image may not be an effective way to train the classification model considering the situation when one might want to classify street fashion image or walking image, which is taken in uncontrolled situation and involves people's movement and unexpected pose. Therefore, we propose to train the model with runway apparel image dataset which captures mobility. This will allow the classification model to be trained with far more variable data and enhance the adaptation with diverse query image. To achieve both convergence and generalization of the model, we apply Transfer Learning on our training network. As Transfer Learning in CNN is composed of pre-training and fine-tuning stages, we divide the training step into two. First, we pre-train our architecture with large-scale dataset, ImageNet dataset, which consists of 1.2 million images with 1000 categories including animals, plants, activities, materials, instrumentations, scenes, and foods. We use GoogLeNet for our main architecture as it has achieved great accuracy with efficiency in ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC). Second, we fine-tune the network with our own runway image dataset. For the runway image dataset, we could not find any previously and publicly made dataset, so we collect the dataset from Google Image Search attaining 2426 images of 32 major fashion brands including Anna Molinari, Balenciaga, Balmain, Brioni, Burberry, Celine, Chanel, Chloe, Christian Dior, Cividini, Dolce and Gabbana, Emilio Pucci, Ermenegildo, Fendi, Giuliana Teso, Gucci, Issey Miyake, Kenzo, Leonard, Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Marni, Max Mara, Missoni, Moschino, Ralph Lauren, Roberto Cavalli, Sonia Rykiel, Stella McCartney, Valentino, Versace, and Yve Saint Laurent. We perform 10-folded experiments to consider the random generation of training data, and our proposed model has achieved accuracy of 67.2% on final test. Our research suggests several advantages over previous related studies as to our best knowledge, there haven't been any previous studies which trained the network for apparel image classification based on runway image dataset. We suggest the idea of training model with image capturing all the possible postures, which is denoted as mobility, by using our own runway apparel image dataset. Moreover, by applying Transfer Learning and using checkpoint and parameters provided by Tensorflow Slim, we could save time spent on training the classification model as taking 6 minutes per experiment to train the classifier. This model can be used in many business applications where the query image can be runway image, product image, or street fashion image. To be specific, runway query image can be used for mobile application service during fashion week to facilitate brand search, street style query image can be classified during fashion editorial task to classify and label the brand or style, and website query image can be processed by e-commerce multi-complex service providing item information or recommending similar item.

Outdoor/Environmental Education Program Design in the Nature Study Center - The Program Diversification for the Middle School Students - (자연학습원 옥외 환경교육 프로그램 설계를 위한 연구 -중학생을 위한 프로그램 다양화를 중심으로-)

  • 이재영;안동만
    • Hwankyungkyoyuk
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    • v.3 no.1
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    • pp.141-152
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    • 1992
  • The purpose of this study is to search for the ways to diversify Outdoor/Environmental Education Program in the Nature Study Center(NSC), especially for the middle school students. For this study, various research methods such as literature review, questionnaire survey (448 students, 11 middle school teachers, 19 NSC staffs), interview and participant observation are used the process of this study consists of two steps. The first step is to define research questions through pilot survey and the second is to investigate the research questions, in the form of hypotheses through main survey. Nine hypotheses are formulated. Six are related with program elements (educational goals, student characteristics, staff resources, teaching methods, instructional resources, contents). three are related with program implementation process(preplan, implementation, post-evaluation). The hypotheses are tested and alternatives for program improvement are proposed. 1. Educational goals : Educational goals of NSC should be focused on Outdoor /Environmental Education and each NSC should specialize on its own theme. The objectives of every sub-program should be unified toward educational goals. 2. Student characteristics: The Outdoor/Environmental Education Program should reflect student characteristics: sex, urban/rural origins, normal/handicapped, number of visit and so on. 3. Staff resources : Provide qualified staff with professional knowledge and positive attitudes, reeducate staffs periodically, reduce management staff and increase teaching staffs. Provide permanent and well paid position, encourage and give opportunities and the middle school teachers to participate in program. 4. teaching method: Increase outdoor classes two way communication between teaching staffs and students adopt more open ended teaching method so that students can exercise coworks in small groups. 5. Instructional resources: Diversify NSC sites(mountains, coastal areas, urban areas and so on), teaching media (audio/visual equipments, graphic design of signs). Consider design for handicapped and integrate indoor and outdoor educational facilities. Plan nature trails with separate themes, allign nature trail so that it passes through diverse environments. 6. Content : Reflect characteristic site potential specialize on day or night program, on seasonal program, and on site specific social issues(such as interpreting of environmental damages around the NSCs). 7. Preplan: Get Information and know about visiting students in advance. Discuss with middle school teachers and adjust program weeks before visits if many or all of the students had already visited a NSC. arrange a visit to other NSC. Provide an introductory class for the teachers and students before they visit a NSC. 8. Implementation: During NSC visit and classes apply various and appropriate techniques to collect in formation for later evaluation. Improve NSC provided evaluation sheet so as to reflect student characteristic. Compare with formal education and investigate on effects of NSC program. 9. Post-evaluation: Formalize a post-evaluation process and organization. During the winter vacation, develop new programs based on the post-evaluationacation, for the next year. Also, have comparative evaluation meetings of staff from various NSCs during the winter vacation while there is no visitors and classes.

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Roles of Cancer Registries in Enhancing Oncology Drug Access in the Asia-Pacific Region

  • Soon, Swee-Sung;Lim, Hwee-Yong;Lopes, Gilberto;Ahn, Jeonghoon;Hu, Min;Ibrahim, Hishamshah Mohd;Jha, Anand;Ko, Bor-Sheng;Lee, Pak Wai;MacDonell, Diana;Sirachainan, Ekaphop;Wee, Hwee-Lin
    • Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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    • v.14 no.4
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    • pp.2159-2165
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    • 2013
  • Cancer registries help to establish and maintain cancer incidence reporting system, serve as a resource for investigation of cancer and its causes, and provide information for planning and evaluation of preventive and control programs. However, their wider role in directly enhancing oncology drug access has not been fully explored. We examined the value of cancer registries in oncology drug access in the Asia-Pacific region on three levels: (1) specific registry variable types; (2) macroscopic strategies on the national level; and (3) a regional cancer registry network. Using literature search and proceedings from an expert forum, this paper covers recent cancer registry developments in eight economies in the Asia-Pacific region - Australia, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand - and the ways they can contribute to oncology drug access. Specific registry variables relating to demographics, tumor characteristics, initial treatment plans, prognostic markers, risk factors, and mortality help to anticipate drug needs, identify high-priority research area and design access programs. On a national level, linking registry data with clinical, drug safety, financial, or drug utilization databases allows analyses of associations between utilization and outcomes. Concurrent efforts should also be channeled into developing and implementing data integrity and stewardship policies, and providing clear avenues to make data available. Less mature registry systems can employ modeling techniques and ad-hoc surveys while increasing coverage. Beyond local settings, a cancer registry network for the Asia-Pacific region would offer cross-learning and research opportunities that can exert leverage through the experiences and capabilities of a highly diverse region.