• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.65-77
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• 2022

Due to the recent development in electronic financial services, transactions of electronic prepayment are rapidly growing, leading to growing fraud attempts. This paper proposes a methodology that can effectively detect fraud transactions in electronic prepayment by machine learning algorithms, including support vector machines, decision trees, and artificial neural networks. Actual transaction data of electronic prepayment services were collected and preprocessed to extract the most relevant variables from raw data. Two different approaches were explored in the paper. One is a transaction-based approach, and the other is a user ID-based approach. For the transaction-based approach, the first model is primarily based on raw data features, while the second model uses extra features in addition to the first model. The user ID-based approach also used feature engineering to extract and transform the most relevant features. Overall, the user ID-based approach showed a better performance than the transaction-based approach, where the artificial neural networks showed the best performance. The proposed method could be used to reduce the damage caused by financial accidents by detecting and blocking fraud attempts.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.81-99
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• 2015

The acceleration of global warming has required better understanding of carbon cycles over local and regional areas such as the Korean peninsula. Since forests serve as a carbon sink, which stores a large amount of terrestrial carbon, there has been a demand to accurately estimate such forest carbon sequestration. In Korea, the National Forest Inventory(NFI) has been used to estimate the forest carbon stocks based on the amount of growing stocks per hectare measured at sampled location. However, as such data are based on point(i.e., plot) measurements, it is difficult to identify spatial distribution of forest carbon stocks. This study focuses on urban areas, which have limited number of NFI samples and have shown rapid land cover change, to estimate grid-based forest carbon stocks based on UNFCCC Approach 3 and Tier 3. Land cover change and forest carbon stocks were estimated using Landsat 5 TM data acquired in 1991, 1992, 2010, and 2011, high resolution airborne images, and the 3rd, 5th~6th NFI data. Machine learning techniques(i.e., random forest and support vector machines/regression) were used for land cover change classification and forest carbon stock estimation. Forest carbon stocks were estimated using reflectance, band ratios, vegetation indices, and topographical indices. Results showed that 33.23tonC/ha of carbon was sequestrated on the unchanged forest areas between 1991 and 2010, while 36.83 tonC/ha of carbon was sequestrated on the areas changed from other land-use types to forests. A total of 7.35 tonC/ha of carbon was released on the areas changed from forests to other land-use types. This study was a good chance to understand the quantitative forest carbon stock change according to the land cover change. Moreover the result of this study can contribute to the effective forest management.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.139-155
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• 2009

For the last few decades, many studies have tried to explore and unveil venture companies' success factors and unique features in order to identify the sources of such companies' competitive advantages over their rivals. Such venture companies have shown tendency to give high returns for investors generally making the best use of information technology. For this reason, many venture companies are keen on attracting avid investors' attention. Investors generally make their investment decisions by carefully examining the evaluation criteria of the alternatives. To them, credit rating information provided by international rating agencies, such as Standard and Poor's, Moody's and Fitch is crucial source as to such pivotal concerns as companies stability, growth, and risk status. But these types of information are generated only for the companies issuing corporate bonds, not venture companies. Therefore, this study proposes a method for evaluating venture businesses by presenting our recent empirical results using financial data of Korean venture companies listed on KOSDAQ in Korea exchange. In addition, this paper used multi-class SVM for the prediction of DEA-based efficiency rating for venture businesses, which was derived from our proposed method. Our approach sheds light on ways to locate efficient companies generating high level of profits. Above all, in determining effective ways to evaluate a venture firm's efficiency, it is important to understand the major contributing factors of such efficiency. Therefore, this paper is constructed on the basis of following two ideas to classify which companies are more efficient venture companies: i) making DEA based multi-class rating for sample companies and ii) developing multi-class SVM-based efficiency prediction model for classifying all companies. First, the Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA) is a non-parametric multiple input-output efficiency technique that measures the relative efficiency of decision making units(DMUs) using a linear programming based model. It is non-parametric because it requires no assumption on the shape or parameters of the underlying production function. DEA has been already widely applied for evaluating the relative efficiency of DMUs. Recently, a number of DEA based studies have evaluated the efficiency of various types of companies, such as internet companies and venture companies. It has been also applied to corporate credit ratings. In this study we utilized DEA for sorting venture companies by efficiency based ratings. The Support Vector Machine(SVM), on the other hand, is a popular technique for solving data classification problems. In this paper, we employed SVM to classify the efficiency ratings in IT venture companies according to the results of DEA. The SVM method was first developed by Vapnik (1995). As one of many machine learning techniques, SVM is based on a statistical theory. Thus far, the method has shown good performances especially in generalizing capacity in classification tasks, resulting in numerous applications in many areas of business, SVM is basically the algorithm that finds the maximum margin hyperplane, which is the maximum separation between classes. According to this method, support vectors are the closest to the maximum margin hyperplane. If it is impossible to classify, we can use the kernel function. In the case of nonlinear class boundaries, we can transform the inputs into a high-dimensional feature space, This is the original input space and is mapped into a high-dimensional dot-product space. Many studies applied SVM to the prediction of bankruptcy, the forecast a financial time series, and the problem of estimating credit rating, In this study we employed SVM for developing data mining-based efficiency prediction model. We used the Gaussian radial function as a kernel function of SVM. In multi-class SVM, we adopted one-against-one approach between binary classification method and two all-together methods, proposed by Weston and Watkins(1999) and Crammer and Singer(2000), respectively. In this research, we used corporate information of 154 companies listed on KOSDAQ market in Korea exchange. We obtained companies' financial information of 2005 from the KIS(Korea Information Service, Inc.). Using this data, we made multi-class rating with DEA efficiency and built multi-class prediction model based data mining. Among three manners of multi-classification, the hit ratio of the Weston and Watkins method is the best in the test data set. In multi classification problems as efficiency ratings of venture business, it is very useful for investors to know the class with errors, one class difference, when it is difficult to find out the accurate class in the actual market. So we presented accuracy results within 1-class errors, and the Weston and Watkins method showed 85.7% accuracy in our test samples. We conclude that the DEA based multi-class approach in venture business generates more information than the binary classification problem, notwithstanding its efficiency level. We believe this model can help investors in decision making as it provides a reliably tool to evaluate venture companies in the financial domain. For the future research, we perceive the need to enhance such areas as the variable selection process, the parameter selection of kernel function, the generalization, and the sample size of multi-class.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.29-45
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• 2015

Response modeling is a well-known research issue for those who have tried to get more superior performance in the capability of predicting the customers' response for the marketing promotion. The response model for customers would reduce the marketing cost by identifying prospective customers from very large customer database and predicting the purchasing intention of the selected customers while the promotion which is derived from an undifferentiated marketing strategy results in unnecessary cost. In addition, the big data environment has accelerated developing the response model with data mining techniques such as CBR, neural networks and support vector machines. And CBR is one of the most major tools in business because it is known as simple and robust to apply to the response model. However, CBR is an attractive data mining technique for data mining applications in business even though it hasn't shown high performance compared to other machine learning techniques. Thus many studies have tried to improve CBR and utilized in business data mining with the enhanced algorithms or the support of other techniques such as genetic algorithm, decision tree and AHP (Analytic Process Hierarchy). Ahn and Kim(2008) utilized logit, neural networks, CBR to predict that which customers would purchase the items promoted by marketing department and tried to optimized the number of k for k-nearest neighbor with genetic algorithm for the purpose of improving the performance of the integrated model. Hong and Park(2009) noted that the integrated approach with CBR for logit, neural networks, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) showed more improved prediction ability for response of customers to marketing promotion than each data mining models such as logit, neural networks, and SVM. This paper presented an approach to predict customers' response of marketing promotion with Case Based Reasoning. The proposed model was developed by applying different weights to each feature. We deployed logit model with a database including the promotion and the purchasing data of bath soap. After that, the coefficients were used to give different weights of CBR. We analyzed the performance of proposed weighted CBR based model compared to neural networks and pure CBR based model empirically and found that the proposed weighted CBR based model showed more superior performance than pure CBR model. Imbalanced data is a common problem to build data mining model to classify a class with real data such as bankruptcy prediction, intrusion detection, fraud detection, churn management, and response modeling. Imbalanced data means that the number of instance in one class is remarkably small or large compared to the number of instance in other classes. The classification model such as response modeling has a lot of trouble to recognize the pattern from data through learning because the model tends to ignore a small number of classes while classifying a large number of classes correctly. To resolve the problem caused from imbalanced data distribution, sampling method is one of the most representative approach. The sampling method could be categorized to under sampling and over sampling. However, CBR is not sensitive to data distribution because it doesn't learn from data unlike machine learning algorithm. In this study, we investigated the robustness of our proposed model while changing the ratio of response customers and nonresponse customers to the promotion program because the response customers for the suggested promotion is always a small part of nonresponse customers in the real world. We simulated the proposed model 100 times to validate the robustness with different ratio of response customers to response customers under the imbalanced data distribution. Finally, we found that our proposed CBR based model showed superior performance than compared models under the imbalanced data sets. Our study is expected to improve the performance of response model for the promotion program with CBR under imbalanced data distribution in the real world.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.127-137
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• 2019

Recidivism prediction has been a subject of constant research by experts since the early 1970s. But it has become more important as committed crimes by recidivist steadily increase. Especially, in the 1990s, after the US and Canada adopted the 'Recidivism Risk Assessment Report' as a decisive criterion during trial and parole screening, research on recidivism prediction became more active. And in the same period, empirical studies on 'Recidivism Factors' were started even at Korea. Even though most recidivism prediction studies have so far focused on factors of recidivism or the accuracy of recidivism prediction, it is important to minimize the prediction misclassification cost, because recidivism prediction has an asymmetric error cost structure. In general, the cost of misrecognizing people who do not cause recidivism to cause recidivism is lower than the cost of incorrectly classifying people who would cause recidivism. Because the former increases only the additional monitoring costs, while the latter increases the amount of social, and economic costs. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an XGBoost(eXtream Gradient Boosting; XGB) based recidivism prediction model considering asymmetric error cost. In the first step of the model, XGB, being recognized as high performance ensemble method in the field of data mining, was applied. And the results of XGB were compared with various prediction models such as LOGIT(logistic regression analysis), DT(decision trees), ANN(artificial neural networks), and SVM(support vector machines). In the next step, the threshold is optimized to minimize the total misclassification cost, which is the weighted average of FNE(False Negative Error) and FPE(False Positive Error). To verify the usefulness of the model, the model was applied to a real recidivism prediction dataset. As a result, it was confirmed that the XGB model not only showed better prediction accuracy than other prediction models but also reduced the cost of misclassification most effectively.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.29-45
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• 2012

Bond rating is regarded as an important event for measuring financial risk of companies and for determining the investment returns of investors. As a result, it has been a popular research topic for researchers to predict companies' credit ratings by applying statistical and machine learning techniques. The statistical techniques, including multiple regression, multiple discriminant analysis (MDA), logistic models (LOGIT), and probit analysis, have been traditionally used in bond rating. However, one major drawback is that it should be based on strict assumptions. Such strict assumptions include linearity, normality, independence among predictor variables and pre-existing functional forms relating the criterion variablesand the predictor variables. Those strict assumptions of traditional statistics have limited their application to the real world. Machine learning techniques also used in bond rating prediction models include decision trees (DT), neural networks (NN), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Especially, SVM is recognized as a new and promising classification and regression analysis method. SVM learns a separating hyperplane that can maximize the margin between two categories. SVM is simple enough to be analyzed mathematical, and leads to high performance in practical applications. SVM implements the structuralrisk minimization principle and searches to minimize an upper bound of the generalization error. In addition, the solution of SVM may be a global optimum and thus, overfitting is unlikely to occur with SVM. In addition, SVM does not require too many data sample for training since it builds prediction models by only using some representative sample near the boundaries called support vectors. A number of experimental researches have indicated that SVM has been successfully applied in a variety of pattern recognition fields. However, there are three major drawbacks that can be potential causes for degrading SVM's performance. First, SVM is originally proposed for solving binary-class classification problems. Methods for combining SVMs for multi-class classification such as One-Against-One, One-Against-All have been proposed, but they do not improve the performance in multi-class classification problem as much as SVM for binary-class classification. Second, approximation algorithms (e.g. decomposition methods, sequential minimal optimization algorithm) could be used for effective multi-class computation to reduce computation time, but it could deteriorate classification performance. Third, the difficulty in multi-class prediction problems is in data imbalance problem that can occur when the number of instances in one class greatly outnumbers the number of instances in the other class. Such data sets often cause a default classifier to be built due to skewed boundary and thus the reduction in the classification accuracy of such a classifier. SVM ensemble learning is one of machine learning methods to cope with the above drawbacks. Ensemble learning is a method for improving the performance of classification and prediction algorithms. AdaBoost is one of the widely used ensemble learning techniques. It constructs a composite classifier by sequentially training classifiers while increasing weight on the misclassified observations through iterations. The observations that are incorrectly predicted by previous classifiers are chosen more often than examples that are correctly predicted. Thus Boosting attempts to produce new classifiers that are better able to predict examples for which the current ensemble's performance is poor. In this way, it can reinforce the training of the misclassified observations of the minority class. This paper proposes a multiclass Geometric Mean-based Boosting (MGM-Boost) to resolve multiclass prediction problem. Since MGM-Boost introduces the notion of geometric mean into AdaBoost, it can perform learning process considering the geometric mean-based accuracy and errors of multiclass. This study applies MGM-Boost to the real-world bond rating case for Korean companies to examine the feasibility of MGM-Boost. 10-fold cross validations for threetimes with different random seeds are performed in order to ensure that the comparison among three different classifiers does not happen by chance. For each of 10-fold cross validation, the entire data set is first partitioned into tenequal-sized sets, and then each set is in turn used as the test set while the classifier trains on the other nine sets. That is, cross-validated folds have been tested independently of each algorithm. Through these steps, we have obtained the results for classifiers on each of the 30 experiments. In the comparison of arithmetic mean-based prediction accuracy between individual classifiers, MGM-Boost (52.95%) shows higher prediction accuracy than both AdaBoost (51.69%) and SVM (49.47%). MGM-Boost (28.12%) also shows the higher prediction accuracy than AdaBoost (24.65%) and SVM (15.42%)in terms of geometric mean-based prediction accuracy. T-test is used to examine whether the performance of each classifiers for 30 folds is significantly different. The results indicate that performance of MGM-Boost is significantly different from AdaBoost and SVM classifiers at 1% level. These results mean that MGM-Boost can provide robust and stable solutions to multi-classproblems such as bond rating.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.23-46
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• 2021

Collaborative filtering, which is often used in personalization recommendations, is recognized as a very useful technique to find similar customers and recommend products to them based on their purchase history. However, the traditional collaborative filtering technique has raised the question of having difficulty calculating the similarity for new customers or products due to the method of calculating similaritiesbased on direct connections and common features among customers. For this reason, a hybrid technique was designed to use content-based filtering techniques together. On the one hand, efforts have been made to solve these problems by applying the structural characteristics of social networks. This applies a method of indirectly calculating similarities through their similar customers placed between them. This means creating a customer's network based on purchasing data and calculating the similarity between the two based on the features of the network that indirectly connects the two customers within this network. Such similarity can be used as a measure to predict whether the target customer accepts recommendations. The centrality metrics of networks can be utilized for the calculation of these similarities. Different centrality metrics have important implications in that they may have different effects on recommended performance. In this study, furthermore, the effect of these centrality metrics on the performance of recommendation may vary depending on recommender algorithms. In addition, recommendation techniques using network analysis can be expected to contribute to increasing recommendation performance even if they apply not only to new customers or products but also to entire customers or products. By considering a customer's purchase of an item as a link generated between the customer and the item on the network, the prediction of user acceptance of recommendation is solved as a prediction of whether a new link will be created between them. As the classification models fit the purpose of solving the binary problem of whether the link is engaged or not, decision tree, k-nearest neighbors (KNN), logistic regression, artificial neural network, and support vector machine (SVM) are selected in the research. The data for performance evaluation used order data collected from an online shopping mall over four years and two months. Among them, the previous three years and eight months constitute social networks composed of and the experiment was conducted by organizing the data collected into the social network. The next four months' records were used to train and evaluate recommender models. Experiments with the centrality metrics applied to each model show that the recommendation acceptance rates of the centrality metrics are different for each algorithm at a meaningful level. In this work, we analyzed only four commonly used centrality metrics: degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and eigenvector centrality. Eigenvector centrality records the lowest performance in all models except support vector machines. Closeness centrality and betweenness centrality show similar performance across all models. Degree centrality ranking moderate across overall models while betweenness centrality always ranking higher than degree centrality. Finally, closeness centrality is characterized by distinct differences in performance according to the model. It ranks first in logistic regression, artificial neural network, and decision tree withnumerically high performance. However, it only records very low rankings in support vector machine and K-neighborhood with low-performance levels. As the experiment results reveal, in a classification model, network centrality metrics over a subnetwork that connects the two nodes can effectively predict the connectivity between two nodes in a social network. Furthermore, each metric has a different performance depending on the classification model type. This result implies that choosing appropriate metrics for each algorithm can lead to achieving higher recommendation performance. In general, betweenness centrality can guarantee a high level of performance in any model. It would be possible to consider the introduction of proximity centrality to obtain higher performance for certain models.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.141-154
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• 2019

Rapid growth of internet technology and social media is progressing. Data mining technology has evolved to enable unstructured document representations in a variety of applications. Sentiment analysis is an important technology that can distinguish poor or high-quality content through text data of products, and it has proliferated during text mining. Sentiment analysis mainly analyzes people's opinions in text data by assigning predefined data categories as positive and negative. This has been studied in various directions in terms of accuracy from simple rule-based to dictionary-based approaches using predefined labels. In fact, sentiment analysis is one of the most active researches in natural language processing and is widely studied in text mining. When real online reviews aren't available for others, it's not only easy to openly collect information, but it also affects your business. In marketing, real-world information from customers is gathered on websites, not surveys. Depending on whether the website's posts are positive or negative, the customer response is reflected in the sales and tries to identify the information. However, many reviews on a website are not always good, and difficult to identify. The earlier studies in this research area used the reviews data of the Amazon.com shopping mal, but the research data used in the recent studies uses the data for stock market trends, blogs, news articles, weather forecasts, IMDB, and facebook etc. However, the lack of accuracy is recognized because sentiment calculations are changed according to the subject, paragraph, sentiment lexicon direction, and sentence strength. This study aims to classify the polarity analysis of sentiment analysis into positive and negative categories and increase the prediction accuracy of the polarity analysis using the pretrained IMDB review data set. First, the text classification algorithm related to sentiment analysis adopts the popular machine learning algorithms such as NB (naive bayes), SVM (support vector machines), XGboost, RF (random forests), and Gradient Boost as comparative models. Second, deep learning has demonstrated discriminative features that can extract complex features of data. Representative algorithms are CNN (convolution neural networks), RNN (recurrent neural networks), LSTM (long-short term memory). CNN can be used similarly to BoW when processing a sentence in vector format, but does not consider sequential data attributes. RNN can handle well in order because it takes into account the time information of the data, but there is a long-term dependency on memory. To solve the problem of long-term dependence, LSTM is used. For the comparison, CNN and LSTM were chosen as simple deep learning models. In addition to classical machine learning algorithms, CNN, LSTM, and the integrated models were analyzed. Although there are many parameters for the algorithms, we examined the relationship between numerical value and precision to find the optimal combination. And, we tried to figure out how the models work well for sentiment analysis and how these models work. This study proposes integrated CNN and LSTM algorithms to extract the positive and negative features of text analysis. The reasons for mixing these two algorithms are as follows. CNN can extract features for the classification automatically by applying convolution layer and massively parallel processing. LSTM is not capable of highly parallel processing. Like faucets, the LSTM has input, output, and forget gates that can be moved and controlled at a desired time. These gates have the advantage of placing memory blocks on hidden nodes. The memory block of the LSTM may not store all the data, but it can solve the CNN's long-term dependency problem. Furthermore, when LSTM is used in CNN's pooling layer, it has an end-to-end structure, so that spatial and temporal features can be designed simultaneously. In combination with CNN-LSTM, 90.33% accuracy was measured. This is slower than CNN, but faster than LSTM. The presented model was more accurate than other models. In addition, each word embedding layer can be improved when training the kernel step by step. CNN-LSTM can improve the weakness of each model, and there is an advantage of improving the learning by layer using the end-to-end structure of LSTM. Based on these reasons, this study tries to enhance the classification accuracy of movie reviews using the integrated CNN-LSTM model.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.39-55
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• 2019

Recently banks and large financial institutions have introduced lots of Robo-Advisor products. Robo-Advisor is a Robot to produce the optimal asset allocation portfolio for investors by using the financial engineering algorithms without any human intervention. Since the first introduction in Wall Street in 2008, the market size has grown to 60 billion dollars and is expected to expand to 2,000 billion dollars by 2020. Since Robo-Advisor algorithms suggest asset allocation output to investors, mathematical or statistical asset allocation strategies are applied. Mean variance optimization model developed by Markowitz is the typical asset allocation model. The model is a simple but quite intuitive portfolio strategy. For example, assets are allocated in order to minimize the risk on the portfolio while maximizing the expected return on the portfolio using optimization techniques. Despite its theoretical background, both academics and practitioners find that the standard mean variance optimization portfolio is very sensitive to the expected returns calculated by past price data. Corner solutions are often found to be allocated only to a few assets. The Black-Litterman Optimization model overcomes these problems by choosing a neutral Capital Asset Pricing Model equilibrium point. Implied equilibrium returns of each asset are derived from equilibrium market portfolio through reverse optimization. The Black-Litterman model uses a Bayesian approach to combine the subjective views on the price forecast of one or more assets with implied equilibrium returns, resulting a new estimates of risk and expected returns. These new estimates can produce optimal portfolio by the well-known Markowitz mean-variance optimization algorithm. If the investor does not have any views on his asset classes, the Black-Litterman optimization model produce the same portfolio as the market portfolio. What if the subjective views are incorrect? A survey on reports of stocks performance recommended by securities analysts show very poor results. Therefore the incorrect views combined with implied equilibrium returns may produce very poor portfolio output to the Black-Litterman model users. This paper suggests an objective investor views model based on Support Vector Machines(SVM), which have showed good performance results in stock price forecasting. SVM is a discriminative classifier defined by a separating hyper plane. The linear, radial basis and polynomial kernel functions are used to learn the hyper planes. Input variables for the SVM are returns, standard deviations, Stochastics %K and price parity degree for each asset class. SVM output returns expected stock price movements and their probabilities, which are used as input variables in the intelligent views model. The stock price movements are categorized by three phases; down, neutral and up. The expected stock returns make P matrix and their probability results are used in Q matrix. Implied equilibrium returns vector is combined with the intelligent views matrix, resulting the Black-Litterman optimal portfolio. For comparisons, Markowitz mean-variance optimization model and risk parity model are used. The value weighted market portfolio and equal weighted market portfolio are used as benchmark indexes. We collect the 8 KOSPI 200 sector indexes from January 2008 to December 2018 including 132 monthly index values. Training period is from 2008 to 2015 and testing period is from 2016 to 2018. Our suggested intelligent view model combined with implied equilibrium returns produced the optimal Black-Litterman portfolio. The out of sample period portfolio showed better performance compared with the well-known Markowitz mean-variance optimization portfolio, risk parity portfolio and market portfolio. The total return from 3 year-period Black-Litterman portfolio records 6.4%, which is the highest value. The maximum draw down is -20.8%, which is also the lowest value. Sharpe Ratio shows the highest value, 0.17. It measures the return to risk ratio. Overall, our suggested view model shows the possibility of replacing subjective analysts's views with objective view model for practitioners to apply the Robo-Advisor asset allocation algorithms in the real trading fields.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.187-204
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• 2016

Document classification based on emotional polarity has become a welcomed emerging task owing to the great explosion of data on the Web. In the big data age, there are too many information sources to refer to when making decisions. For example, when considering travel to a city, a person may search reviews from a search engine such as Google or social networking services (SNSs) such as blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. The emotional polarity of positive and negative reviews helps a user decide on whether or not to make a trip. Sentiment analysis of customer reviews has become an important research topic as datamining technology is widely accepted for text mining of the Web. Sentiment analysis has been used to classify documents through machine learning techniques, such as the decision tree, neural networks, and support vector machines (SVMs). is used to determine the attitude, position, and sensibility of people who write articles about various topics that are published on the Web. Regardless of the polarity of customer reviews, emotional reviews are very helpful materials for analyzing the opinions of customers through their reviews. Sentiment analysis helps with understanding what customers really want instantly through the help of automated text mining techniques. Sensitivity analysis utilizes text mining techniques on text on the Web to extract subjective information in the text for text analysis. Sensitivity analysis is utilized to determine the attitudes or positions of the person who wrote the article and presented their opinion about a particular topic. In this study, we developed a model that selects a hot topic from user posts at China's online stock forum by using the k-means algorithm and self-organizing map (SOM). In addition, we developed a detecting model to predict a hot topic by using machine learning techniques such as logit, the decision tree, and SVM. We employed sensitivity analysis to develop our model for the selection and detection of hot topics from China's online stock forum. The sensitivity analysis calculates a sentimental value from a document based on contrast and classification according to the polarity sentimental dictionary (positive or negative). The online stock forum was an attractive site because of its information about stock investment. Users post numerous texts about stock movement by analyzing the market according to government policy announcements, market reports, reports from research institutes on the economy, and even rumors. We divided the online forum's topics into 21 categories to utilize sentiment analysis. One hundred forty-four topics were selected among 21 categories at online forums about stock. The posts were crawled to build a positive and negative text database. We ultimately obtained 21,141 posts on 88 topics by preprocessing the text from March 2013 to February 2015. The interest index was defined to select the hot topics, and the k-means algorithm and SOM presented equivalent results with this data. We developed a decision tree model to detect hot topics with three algorithms: CHAID, CART, and C4.5. The results of CHAID were subpar compared to the others. We also employed SVM to detect the hot topics from negative data. The SVM models were trained with the radial basis function (RBF) kernel function by a grid search to detect the hot topics. The detection of hot topics by using sentiment analysis provides the latest trends and hot topics in the stock forum for investors so that they no longer need to search the vast amounts of information on the Web. Our proposed model is also helpful to rapidly determine customers' signals or attitudes towards government policy and firms' products and services.