• Journal of Environmental Impact Assessment
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.635-646
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• 2018

This study sought to identify the characteristics of seasonal concentration differences of particulate matter influenced by land cover types associated with particulate matter emission and reductions, namely forest and urbanized regions. PM10 and PM2.5 was measured with quantitative concentration in 2016 on 23 urban air monitoring stations in Seoul, classified the stations into 3 groups based on the ratio of urbanized and forest land covers within a range of 3km around station, and analysed the differences in particulate matter concentration by season. The center values for the urbanized and forest land covers by group were 53.4% and 34.6% in Group A, 61.8% and 16.5% in Group B, and 76.3% and 6.7% in Group C. The group-specific concentration of PM10 and PM2.5 by season indicated that the concentration of Group A, with high ratio of forests, was the lowest in all seasons, and the concentration of Group C, with high ratio of urbanized regions, had the highest concentration from spring to autumn. These inter-group differences were statistically significant. The concentration of Group C was lower than Group B in the winter; however, the differences between Groups B to C in the winter were not statistically significant. Group A concentration compared to the high-concentration groups by season was lower by 8.5%, 11.2%, 8.0%, 6.8% for PM10 in the order of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and 3.5%, 10.0%, 4.1% and 3.3% for PM2.5. The inter-group concentration differences for both PM10 and PM2.5 were the highest in the summer and grew smaller in the winter, this was thought to be because the forests' ability to reduce particulate matter emissions was the most pronounced during the summer and the least pronounced during the winter. The influence of urbanized areas on particulate matter concentration was lower compared to the influence of forests. This study provided evidence that the particulate matter concentration was lower for regions with higher ratios of forests, and subsequent studies are required to identify the role of green space to manage particulate matter concentration in cities.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.111-131
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• 2015

There are only a handful number of research conducted on pattern analysis of corporate distress as compared with research for bankruptcy prediction. The few that exists mainly focus on audited firms because financial data collection is easier for these firms. But in reality, corporate financial distress is a far more common and critical phenomenon for non-audited firms which are mainly comprised of small and medium sized firms. The purpose of this paper is to classify non-audited firms under distress according to their financial ratio using data mining; Self-Organizing Map (SOM). SOM is a type of artificial neural network that is trained using unsupervised learning to produce a lower dimensional discretized representation of the input space of the training samples, called a map. SOM is different from other artificial neural networks as it applies competitive learning as opposed to error-correction learning such as backpropagation with gradient descent, and in the sense that it uses a neighborhood function to preserve the topological properties of the input space. It is one of the popular and successful clustering algorithm. In this study, we classify types of financial distress firms, specially, non-audited firms. In the empirical test, we collect 10 financial ratios of 100 non-audited firms under distress in 2004 for the previous two years (2002 and 2003). Using these financial ratios and the SOM algorithm, five distinct patterns were distinguished. In pattern 1, financial distress was very serious in almost all financial ratios. 12% of the firms are included in these patterns. In pattern 2, financial distress was weak in almost financial ratios. 14% of the firms are included in pattern 2. In pattern 3, growth ratio was the worst among all patterns. It is speculated that the firms of this pattern may be under distress due to severe competition in their industries. Approximately 30% of the firms fell into this group. In pattern 4, the growth ratio was higher than any other pattern but the cash ratio and profitability ratio were not at the level of the growth ratio. It is concluded that the firms of this pattern were under distress in pursuit of expanding their business. About 25% of the firms were in this pattern. Last, pattern 5 encompassed very solvent firms. Perhaps firms of this pattern were distressed due to a bad short-term strategic decision or due to problems with the enterpriser of the firms. Approximately 18% of the firms were under this pattern. This study has the academic and empirical contribution. In the perspectives of the academic contribution, non-audited companies that tend to be easily bankrupt and have the unstructured or easily manipulated financial data are classified by the data mining technology (Self-Organizing Map) rather than big sized audited firms that have the well prepared and reliable financial data. In the perspectives of the empirical one, even though the financial data of the non-audited firms are conducted to analyze, it is useful for find out the first order symptom of financial distress, which makes us to forecast the prediction of bankruptcy of the firms and to manage the early warning and alert signal. These are the academic and empirical contribution of this study. The limitation of this research is to analyze only 100 corporates due to the difficulty of collecting the financial data of the non-audited firms, which make us to be hard to proceed to the analysis by the category or size difference. Also, non-financial qualitative data is crucial for the analysis of bankruptcy. Thus, the non-financial qualitative factor is taken into account for the next study. This study sheds some light on the non-audited small and medium sized firms' distress prediction in the future.