Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Some Experimental Issues in Financial Fraud Detection: An Investigation

Financial fraud detection is an important problem with a number of design aspects to consider. Issues such as algorithm selection and performance analysis will affect the perceived ability of proposed solutions, so for auditors and researchers to be able to sufficiently detect financial fraud it is necessary that these issues be thoroughly explored. In this paper we will revisit the key performance metrics used for financial fraud detection with a focus on credit card fraud, critiquing the prevailing ideas and offering our own understandings. There are many different performance metrics that have been employed in prior financial fraud detection research. We will analyse several of the popular metrics and compare their effectiveness at measuring the ability of detection mechanisms. We further investigated the performance of a range of computational intelligence techniques when applied to this problem domain, and explored the efficacy of several binary classification methods.
Evolutionary Rate Covariation Identifies New Members of a Protein Network Required for Drosophila melanogaster Female Post-Mating Responses

Seminal fluid proteins transferred from males to females during copulation are required for full fertility and can exert dramatic effects on female physiology and behavior. In Drosophila melanogaster, the seminal protein sex peptide (SP) affects mated females by increasing egg production and decreasing receptivity to courtship. These behavioral changes persist for several days because SP binds to sperm that are stored in the female. SP is then gradually released, allowing it to interact with its female-expressed receptor. The binding of SP to sperm requires five additional seminal proteins, which act together in a network. Hundreds of uncharacterized male and female proteins have been identified in this species, but individually screening each protein for network function would present a logistical challenge. To prioritize the screening of these proteins for involvement in the SP network, we used a comparative genomic method to identify candidate proteins whose evolutionary rates across the Drosophila phylogeny co-vary with those of the SP network proteins. Subsequent functional testing of 18 co-varying candidates by RNA interference identified three male seminal proteins and three female reproductive tract proteins that are each required for the long-term persistence of SP responses in females. Molecular genetic analysis showed the three new male proteins are required for the transfer of other network proteins to females and for SP to become bound to sperm that are stored in mated females. The three female proteins, in contrast, act downstream of SP binding and sperm storage. These findings expand the number of seminal proteins required for SP's actions in the female and show that multiple female proteins are necessary for the SP response. Furthermore, our functional analyses demonstrate that evolutionary rate covariation is a valuable predictive tool for identifying candidate members of interacting protein networks.
Hearing is not necessarily believing in nocturnal anurans

The recent discovery of the use of visual cues for mate choice by nocturnal acoustic species raises the important, and to date unaddressed, question of how these signals affect the outcome of mate choice predicted by female preference for male calls. In order to address this question, we presented female Hyla arborea tree frogs with a series of choices between combinations of acoustic and visual cues of varying quality in nocturnal conditions. While females exhibited the expected preference for a combination of attractive values for visual and acoustic signals over combinations of unattractive values for both signals, when presented with conflicting acoustic and visual cues, they equally adopted one of two strategies, preferring either attractive calls or intense vocal sac coloration. This constitutes novel evidence that the outcome of mate choice, as predicted on the basis of male calling quality, can be drastically different when additional communication modalities—in this case vision—are taken into account. These results also highlight the possible existence of individual variation in female rules for cue prioritization. The implications of these results for the study of mate choice in nocturnal acoustic species are discussed.
Scanning Force Microscopy

Scanning force microscopy (SFM) belongs to a class of real-space microscopic techniques, which combine high spatial resolution, 3-D imaging capabilities, and contrast mechanisms based on specific materials contrast. In particular, in the field of polymer science and technology, SFM quickly developed into an indispensable characterization technique and has found widespread use. In this article the application of SFM to polymers is discussed based on a selection of topics covering the whole breadth from topography imaging to mapping of surface properties and studies of dynamic processes in real time. The basic concepts and modes of SFM, as well as some rudimentary theory, are introduced as a self-supporting basis for the following sections. The visualization of the morphology and ordering of polymers at various hierarchical levels is reviewed starting from the visualization of single macromolecules, chain packing, and surface crystal structures. The imaging of lamellar crystals, hedrites, and spherulites by SFM approaches is discussed, followed by studies of the effects of deformation and processing, as well as studies on the morphology of latex particles and fibers. The mapping of surface properties and composition in the heterogeneous and surface-modified polymer systems via the spatially resolved measurement of adhesion and friction forces, as well as surface mechanical properties, are covered. The final section is focused on in situ studies of structure development and dynamic processes, including polymer crystallization, followed in real time by SFM. Keywords: scanning probe microscopy (SPM); atomic force microscopy (AFM); scanning force microscopy (SFM); polymers; semicrystalline polymers; chemical mapping; compositional mapping; friction mapping; elasticity mapping; polymer crystallization; real-time studies; dynamic processes
Variability in prior expectations explains biases in confidence reports

Confidence in a decision is defined statistically as the probability of that decision being correct. Humans, however, display systematic confidence biases, as has been exposed in various experiments. Here, we show that these biases vanish when taking into account participants' prior expectations, which we measure independently of the confidence report. We use a wagering experiment to show that modeling subjects' choices allows for classifying individuals according to their prior biases, which fully explain from first principles the differences in their later confidence reports. Our parameter-free confidence model predicts two counterintuitive patterns for individuals with different prior beliefs: pessimists should report higher confidence than optimists, and, for the same task difficulty, the confidence of pessimists should increase with the generosity of the task. These findings show how systematic confidence biases can be simply understood as differences in prior expectations.
Matching the Resolution of Electron Beam Lithography by Scanning Near-Field Photolithography

Molecular features with widths of only 20 nm have been fabricated in self-assembled monolayers of alkanethiols on gold using a new lithographic tool, scanning near-field photolithography, based upon the use of a near-field scanning optical microscope (NSOM) coupled to a UV laser. Quite unexpectedly it has proved possible to routinely fabricate structures significantly smaller than the aperture in the NSOM probe. This exceptional performance is strongly correlated with the morphology of the gold film. In particular, the best results are achieved on films with comparatively small grain sizes. In contrast, the use of atomically flat, epitaxially deposited gold films leads to a minimum feature size comparable to the aperture diameter (ca 50 nm). It is concluded that nonradiative interactions (possibly the excitation of surface plasmons) between the gold substrate and the fiber lead to a pronounced focusing of the electric field beneath the aperture.
Carbohydrate quantity and quality and risk of type 2 diabetes in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition-Netherlands (EPIC-NL) study.

BACKGROUND Carbohydrate quantity and quality may play an important role in the development of type 2 diabetes. OBJECTIVE We investigated the associations of dietary glycemic load (GL), glycemic index (GI), carbohydrate, and fiber intake with the incidence of type 2 diabetes. DESIGN A prospective cohort study was conducted in 37,846 participants of the EPIC-NL (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition-Netherlands) study, aged 21-70 y at baseline and free of diabetes. Dietary intake was assessed with the use of a validated food-frequency questionnaire. Incident diabetes cases were mainly self-reported and verified against general practitioner records. RESULTS During a mean follow-up of 10 y, 915 incident diabetes cases were documented. Dietary GL was associated with an increased diabetes risk after adjustment for age, sex, established diabetes risk factors, and dietary factors [hazard ratio (HR) per SD increase: 1.27; 95% CI: 1.11, 1.44; P < 0.001] [corrected]. GI tended to increase diabetes risk (HR: 1.08; 95% CI: 1.00, 1.17; P = 0.05). Dietary fiber was inversely associated with diabetes risk (HR: 0.92; 95% CI: 0.85, 0.99; P < 0.05), whereas carbohydrate intake was associated with increased diabetes risk (HR: 1.15; 95% CI: 1.01, 1.32; P < 0.05). Of the carbohydrate subtypes, only starch was related to increased diabetes risk [HR: 1.25 (1.07, 1.46), P < 0.05]. All associations became slightly stronger after exclusion of energy misreporters. CONCLUSIONS Diets high in GL, GI, and starch and low in fiber were associated with an increased diabetes risk. Both carbohydrate quantity and quality seem to be important factors in diabetes prevention. Energy misreporting contributed to a slight attenuation of associations.
Validation of a Consensus Method for Identifying Delirium from Hospital Records

Background Delirium is increasingly considered to be an important determinant of trajectories of cognitive decline. Therefore, analyses of existing cohort studies measuring cognitive outcomes could benefit from methods to ascertain a retrospective delirium diagnosis. This study aimed to develop and validate such a method for delirium detection using routine medical records in UK and Ireland. Methods A point prevalence study of delirium provided the reference-standard ratings for delirium diagnosis. Blinded to study results, clinical vignettes were compiled from participants' medical records in a standardised manner, describing any relevant delirium symptoms recorded in the whole case record for the period leading up to case-ascertainment. An expert panel rated each vignette as unlikely, possible, or probable delirium and disagreements were resolved by consensus. Results From 95 case records, 424 vignettes were abstracted by 5 trained clinicians. There were 29 delirium cases according to the reference standard. Median age of subjects was 76.6 years (interquartile range 54.6 to 82.5). Against the original study DSM-IV diagnosis, the chart abstraction method gave a positive likelihood ratio (LR) of 7.8 (95% CI 5.7–12.0) and the negative LR of 0.45 (95% CI 0.40–0.47) for probable delirium (sensitivity 0.58 (95% CI 0.53–0.62); specificity 0.93 (95% CI 0.90–0.95); AUC 0.86 (95% CI 0.82–0.89)). The method diagnosed possible delirium with positive LR 3.5 (95% CI 2.9–4.3) and negative LR 0.15 (95% CI 0.11–0.21) (sensitivity 0.89 (95% CI 0.85–0.91); specificity 0.75 (95% CI 0.71–0.79); AUC 0.86 (95% CI 0.80–0.89)). Conclusions This chart abstraction method can retrospectively diagnose delirium in hospitalised patients with good accuracy. This has potential for retrospectively identifying delirium in cohort studies where routine medical records are available. This example of record linkage between hospitalisations and epidemiological data may lead to further insights into the inter-relationship between acute illness, as an exposure, for a range of chronic health outcomes.
Using partial satisfaction planning to automatically select NPCs' goals and generate plans in a simulation game

Controlling and coordinating a large number of Non-Playable Characters (NPCs) is an important challenge in video games. In order to obtain a realistic behaviour, traditional approaches relies hand-written rule based scripts or finite state machines. In the last decade, a new approach to artificial intelligence has emerged. Indeed, automated planning is now a way to control NPCs. However, the gap between theory and application is still quite not filled. In this paper, we address different approaches of i) goal selection and distribution for autonomous planning agents by a coordination module and ii) autonomous goal selection by planning agents using partial satisfaction planning. Our techniques result in a simpler way to coordinate NPCs, still effective in terms of CPU and produce realistic behaviour.
Tree-Local Multicomponent Tree-Adjoining Grammars with Shared Nodes

This article addresses the problem that the expressive power of tree-adjoining grammars (TAGs) is too limited to deal with certain syntactic phenomena, in particular, with scrambling in free-word-order languages. The TAG variants proposed so far in order to account for scrambling are not entirely satisfying. Therefore, the article introduces an alternative extension of TAG that is based on the notion of node sharing, so-called (restricted) tree-local multicomponent TAG with shared nodes (RSN-MCTAG). The analysis of some German scrambling data is sketched in order to show that this TAG extension can deal with scrambling. Then it is shown that for RSN-MCTAGs of a specific type, equivalent simple range concatenation grammars can be constructed. As a consequence, these RSN-MCTAGs are mildly context-sensitive and in particular polynomially parsable. These specific RSN-MCTAGs probably can deal not with all scrambling phenomena, but with an arbitrarily large subset.
A new control algorithm for energy conservation from main grid during generation intermittence in the micro grids using A.C electric springs

The work presented in this paper addresses the problem of main grid dependability in micro grids using Electric springs. The micro grids which have more penetration of renewable sources are bound to depend on main grids during generation intermittence of the micro sources. In order to reduce the dependability of micro grids on main grid an efficient energy management algorithm has been presented. The proposed algorithm schedules the non-critical loads present in the micro grid using A.C Electric springs and the simulation studies are performed in MATLAB. The reduction in energy consumption from the main grid is achieved by making the non-critical loads consume lesser power during generation intermittence in the micro grid.
Coupled viscoelastic-viscoplastic modeling of homogeneous and reinforced thermoplastic polymers

Glass fiber reinforced thermoplastics are widely used in structural applications because of their high stiffness and failure stress. However, controlling their complex mechanical behavior must rely on numerical simulations. The main outcome of this thesis is an original mean-field approach predicting the mechanical response of fibre reinforced thermoplastics under arbitrary loading paths. The model accounts for the volume fraction and the orientations of fibers as well as the viscoelastic- viscoplastic (VE-VP) character of the surrounding matrix. The matrix response is described in terms of a coupled VE-VP model suitable for multi-axial strains. The total strain is the sum of viscoelastic and viscoplastic parts, and the Cauchy stress is computed by assuming linear viscoelasticity and relying on a Boltzmann integral of the history of viscoelastic strains. An efficient and robust time-integration algorithm is developed, implemented in a numerical code and studied. In order to evaluate the composite's behavior, an affine linearization procedure is proposed for the coupled VE-VP model. This formulation leads to an incremental constitutive relation in the time domain which is form-similar to linear thermo-elasticity. Hence, existing homogenization models for linear thermoelastic composites can be applied. We also conducted direct finite element (FE) analysis of representative volume elements (RVEs) to verify the predictions of the proposed mean field homogenization (MFH) method.
Crosstalk-constrained performance optimization by using wire sizing and perturbation

In this paper, we propose a unified wire sizing and perturbation algorithm for crosstalk-constrained performance optimization that is applicable to general routing structures. Our algorithm is based on a two-stage iterative technique: we first perturb all wires to the positions with the minimum delay, then we adjust the wire sizes to further optimize delay under crosstalk constraints. The unified wire sizing and perturbation technique has the property of unimodality, implying that there is a unique position resulting in the optimal delay and crosstalk. Applying these properties can dramatically reduce the search space and thus lead to a very efficient method to determine the best wire position and the optimal wire size. Experimental results show that our algorithm can achieve average improvements of 44.5% and 40.2% in delay without sacrificing area and crosstalk for the 0.18 /spl mu/m and 0.25 /spl mu/m process technologies, respectively. Further, we develop an effective incremental update technique that can substantially speed up the runtime. Empirically, this technique can reduce runtime by 10 times.
Modeling unreliable LSA operation in 3GPP LTE cellular networks

Presently, we observe an unprecedented growth of traffic volumes in modern cellular networks. Consequently, to effectively meet the impeding capacity crunch, current spectrum bands can be extended by using LSA (Licensed Shared Access) - the promising technology that allows an operator to lease additional frequency bands in order to satisfy the increasing data rate requirements. This technology is naturally suitable for the state-of-the-art 3GPP LTE cellular networks, since it allows to flexibly control resource allocation across the network users. Owing to that, the operator can employ the LSA band whenever desired to improve area capacity and increase data rate. However, due to the fact that the LSA band may be unexpectedly revoked by its original owner, there exists a certain chance of degradation in system performance and user service quality. This paper focuses on studying a one-cell 3GPP LTE system over the LSA technology, with both analysis and simulations, by proposing a baseline methodology to model the unreliable operation of an LSA frequency band.
Automatic Partitioning of Parallel Loops and Data Arrays for Distributed Shared-Memory Multiprocessors

Presents a theoretical framework for automatically partitioning parallel loops to minimize cache coherency traffic on shared-memory multiprocessors. While several previous papers have looked at hyperplane partitioning of iteration spaces to reduce communication traffic, the problem of deriving the optimal tiling parameters for minimal communication in loops with general affine index expressions has remained open. Our paper solves this open problem by presenting a method for deriving an optimal hyperparallelepiped tiling of iteration spaces for minimal communication in multiprocessors with caches. We show that the same theoretical framework can also be used to determine optimal tiling parameters for both data and loop partitioning in distributed memory multicomputers. Our framework uses matrices to represent iteration and data space mappings and the notion of uniformly intersecting references to capture temporal locality in array references. We introduce the notion of data footprints to estimate the communication traffic between processors and use linear algebraic methods and lattice theory to compute precisely the size of data footprints. We have implemented this framework in a compiler for Alewife, a distributed shared-memory multiprocessor. >
Working Papers in Economics and Statistics Testing Enforcement Strategies in the Field: Legal Threat, Moral Appeal and Social Information

We run a large-scale natural field experiment to evaluate alternative strategies to enforce compliance with the law. The experiment varies the text of mailings sent to potential evaders of TV license fees. We find a strong alert effect of mailings, leading to a substantial increase in compliance. Among different mailing conditions a legal threat that stresses a high detection risk has a significant and highly robust deterrent effect. Neither appealing to morals nor imparting information about others' behavior enhances compliance. However, the information condition has a positive effect in municipalities where evasion is believed to be common. Overall, the economic model of crime performs remarkably well in explaining our data.
Lateral Growth Limitation of Corneal Fibrils and Their Lamellar Stacking Depend on Covalent Collagen Cross-linking by Transglutaminase-2 and Lysyl Oxidases, Respectively*

Background: Mechanisms of growth limitation and lamellar stacking of collagen fibrils in cornea remain elusive. Results: Covalent collagen cross-links are formed by catalysis involving both lysyl oxidases and tissue transglutaminase-2. Conclusion: Aldehyde-derived and isopeptide cross-linking of collagen determine lamellar stacking and lateral fibril growth, respectively. Significance: Two types of covalent collagen cross-linking are indispensable for correct corneal morphogenesis. Corneal stroma contains an extracellular matrix of orthogonal lamellae formed by parallel and equidistant fibrils with a homogeneous diameter of ∼35 nm. This is indispensable for corneal transparency and mechanical functions. However, the mechanisms controlling corneal fibrillogenesis are incompletely understood and the conditions required for lamellar stacking are essentially unknown. Under appropriate conditions, chick embryo corneal fibroblasts can produce an extracellular matrix in vitro resembling primary corneal stroma during embryonic development. Among other requirements, cross-links between fibrillar collagens, introduced by tissue transglutaminase-2, are necessary for the self-assembly of uniform, small diameter fibrils but not their lamellar stacking. By contrast, the subsequent lamellar organization into plywood-like stacks depends on lysyl aldehyde-derived cross-links introduced by lysyl oxidase activity, which, in turn, only weakly influences fibril diameters. These cross-links are introduced at early stages of fibrillogenesis. The enzymes are likely to be important for a correct matrix deposition also during repair of the cornea.