Improvement on dynamic elastic interpolation technique for reconstructing 3-D objects from serial cross sections [biomedical application

An improved method for automatically reconstructing a three-dimensional object from serial cross sections is presented. The method improves the dynamic elastic contour interpolation technique. There are two major improvements: (1) in the case of branching that involves concave contours, instead of pairwise interpolation between the start contour and each goal contour, the goal image is considered globally and local constraints are imposed on the forces exerting upon the vertices; and (2) it takes the continuity of high-order derivatives into consideration and incorporates the schemes of spline theory, quadratic-variation-based surface interpolation, and finite-element-based multilevel surface interpolation to create smoother surfaces of the reconstructed object. Based on the output from the preliminary processing, two alternatives, a quadratic-variation-based surface interpolation algorithm and a finite-element-based multilevel surface interpolation algorithm, can be adopted to obtain the final surface representation     

Stock Price Forecasting: An Echo State Network Approach

Forecasting stock prices using deep learning models suffers from problems such as low accuracy, slow convergence, and complex network structures. This study developed an echo state network (ESN) model to mitigate such problems. We compared our ESN with a long short-term memory (LSTM) network by forecasting the stock data of Kweichow Moutai, a leading enterprise in China’s liquor industry. By analyzing data for 120, 240, and 300 days, we generated forecast data for the next 40, 80, and 100 days, respectively, using both ESN and LSTM. In terms of accuracy, ESN had the unique advantage of capturing nonlinear data. Mean absolute error (MAE) was used to present the accuracy results. The MAEs of the data forecast by ESN were 0.024, 0.024, and 0.025, which were, respectively, 0.065, 0.007, and 0.009 less than those of LSTM. In terms of convergence, ESN has a reservoir state-space structure, which makes it perform faster than other models. Root-mean-square error (RMSE) was used to present the convergence time. In our experiment, the RMSEs of ESN were 0.22, 0.27, and 0.26, which were, respectively, 0.08, 0.01, and 0.12 less than those of LSTM. In terms of network structure, ESN consists only of input, reservoir, and output spaces, making it a much simpler model than the others. The proposed ESN was found to be an effective model that, compared to others, converges faster, forecasts more accurately, and builds time-series analyses more easily.     

A Network Security Risk Assessment Method Based on a B_NAG Model

Computer networks face a variety of cyberattacks. Most network attacks are contagious and destructive, and these types of attacks can be harmful to society and computer network security. Security evaluation is an effective method to solve network security problems. For accurate assessment of the vulnerabilities of computer networks, this paper proposes a network security risk assessment method based on a Bayesian network attack graph (B_NAG) model. First, a new resource attack graph (RAG) and the algorithm E-Loop, which is applied to eliminate loops in the B_NAG, are proposed. Second, to distinguish the confusing relationships between nodes of the attack graph in the conversion process, a related algorithm is proposed to generate the B_NAG model. Finally, to analyze the reachability of paths in B_NAG, the measuring indexs such as node attack complexity and node state transition are defined, and an iterative algorithm for obtaining the probability of reaching the target node is presented. On this basis, the posterior probability of related nodes can be calculated. A simulation environment is set up to evaluate the effectiveness of the B_NAG model. The experimental results indicate that the B_NAG model is realistic and effective in evaluating vulnerabilities of computer networks and can accurately highlight the degree of vulnerability in a chaotic relationship.     

Speech Enhancement via Residual Dense Generative Adversarial Network

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are paid more attention to dealing with the end-to-end speech enhancement in recent years. Various GAN-based enhancement methods are presented to improve the quality of reconstructed speech. However, the performance of these GAN-based methods is worse than those of masking-based methods. To tackle this problem, we propose speech enhancement method with a residual dense generative adversarial network (RDGAN) contributing to map the log-power spectrum (LPS) of degraded speech to the clean one. In detail, a residual dense block (RDB) architecture is designed to better estimate the LPS of clean speech, which can extract rich local features of LPS through densely connected convolution layers. Meanwhile, sequential RDB connections are incorporated on various scales of LPS. It significantly increases the feature learning flexibility and robustness in the time-frequency domain. Simulations show that the proposed method achieves attractive speech enhancement performance in various acoustic environments. Specifically, in the untrained acoustic test with limited priors, e.g., unmatched signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and unmatched noise category, RDGAN can still outperform the existing GAN-based methods and masking-based method in the measures of PESQ and other evaluation indexes. It indicates that our method is more generalized in untrained conditions.     

Land‐use dynamic discovery based on heterogeneous mobility sources

Nowadays, cities are the most relevant type of human settlement and their population has been endlessly growing for decades. At the same time, we are witnessing an explosion of digital data that capture many different aspects and details of city life. This allows detecting human mobility patterns in urban areas with more detail than ever before. In this context, based on the fusion of mobility data from different and heterogeneous sources, such as public transport, transport‐network connectivity and Online Social Networks, this study puts forward a novel approach to uncover the actual land use of a city. Unlike previous solutions, our work avoids a time‐invariant approach and it considers the temporal factor based on the assumption that urban areas are not used by citizens all the time in the same manner. We have tested our solution in two different cities showing high accuracy rates.     

Entity-level sentiment prediction in Danmaku video interaction

The Journal of Supercomputing - Sentiment analysis in Danmaku video interaction aims at measuring public mood in respect of the video, which is helpful for the potential applications in behavioral...     

Sensitive attribute privacy preservation of trajectory data publishing based on l-diversity

Distributed and Parallel Databases - The widely application of positioning technology has made collecting the movement of people feasible for knowledge-based decision. Data in its original form...     

FHUQI-Miner: Fast high utility quantitative itemset mining

Applied Intelligence - High utility itemset mining is a popular pattern mining task, which aims at revealing all sets of items that yield a high profit in a transaction database. Although this task...     

Software defect prediction model based on LASSO–SVM

Neural Computing and Applications - A software defect report is a bug in the software system that developers and users submit to the software defect library during software development and...     

Creativity in non‐routine jobs: The role of transformational leadership and organizational identification

An increasing number of individuals work in jobs with little standardization and repetition, that is, with high levels of job non‐routinization. At the same time, demands for creativity are high, which raises the question of how employees can use job non‐routinization to develop creativity. Acknowledging the importance of social processes for creativity, we propose that transformational leaders raise feelings of organizational identification in followers and that this form of identification then helps individuals to develop creativity in jobs with little routinization. This is because organizational members evaluate and promote those ideas as more creative, which are in line with a shared understanding of creativity within the organization. To investigate these relationships, we calculated a mediated moderation model with 173 leader–follower dyads from China. Results confirm our hypotheses that transformational leadership moderates the relationship between job non‐routinization on employee creativity through organizational identification. We conclude that raising feelings of social identity is a key task for leaders today, especially when working in uncertain and fast developing environments with little repetition and the constant need to develop creative ideas.