A Poverty Measurement Method Incorporating Spatial Correlation: A Case Study in Yangtze River Economic Belt, China

The UN 2030 Agenda sets poverty eradication as the primary goal of sustainable development. An accurate measurement of poverty is a critical input to the quality and efficiency of poverty alleviation in rural areas. However, poverty, as a geographical phenomenon, inevitably has a spatial correlation. Neglecting the spatial correlation between areas in poverty measurements will hamper efforts to improve the accuracy of poverty identification and to design policies in truly poor areas. To capture this spatial correlation, this paper proposes a new poverty measurement model based on a neural network, namely, the spatial vector deep neural network (SVDNN), which combines the spatial vector neural network model (SVNN) and the deep neural network (DNN). The SVNN was applied to measure spatial correlation, while the DNN used the SVNN output vector and explanatory variables dataset to measure the multidimensional poverty index (MPI). To determine the optimal spatial correlation structure of SVDNN, this paper compares the model performance of the spatial distance matrix, spatial adjacent matrix and spatial weighted adjacent matrix, selecting the optimal performing spatial distance matrix as the input data set of SVNN. Then, the SVDNN model was used for the MPI measurement of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, after which the results were compared with three baseline models of DNN, the back propagation neural network (BPNN), and artificial neural network (ANN). Experiments demonstrate that the SVDNN model can obtain spatial correlation from the spatial distance dataset between counties and its poverty identification accuracy is better than other baseline models. The spatio-temporal characteristics of MPI measured by SVDNN were also highly consistent with the distribution of urban aggregations and national-level poverty counties in the Yangtze River Economic Belt. The SVDNN model proposed in this paper could effectively improve the accuracy of poverty identification, thus reducing the misallocation of resources in tracking and targeting poverty in developing countries.

A Credit Conflict Detection Model Based on Decision Distance and Probability Matrix

Considering the credit index calculation differences, semantic differences, false data, and other problems between platforms such as Internet finance, e-commerce, and health and elderly care, which lead to the credit deviation from the trusted range of credit subjects and the lack of related information of credit subjects, in this paper, we proposed a crossplatform service credit conflict detection model based on the decision distance to support the migration and application of crossplatform credit information transmission and integration. Firstly, we give a scoring table of influencing factors. Score is the probability of the impact of this factor on credit. Through this probability, the distance matrix between influencing factors is generated. Secondly, the similarity matrix is calculated from the distance matrix. Thirdly, the support vector is calculated through the similarity matrix. Fourth, the credit vector is calculated by the support vector. Finally, the credibility is calculated by the credit vector and probability.

Clustering with Missing Features: A Density-Based Approach

Density clustering has been widely used in many research disciplines to determine the structure of real-world datasets. Existing density clustering algorithms only work well on complete datasets. In real-world datasets, however, there may be missing feature values due to technical limitations. Many imputation methods used for density clustering cause the aggregation phenomenon. To solve this problem, a two-stage novel density peak clustering approach with missing features is proposed: First, the density peak clustering algorithm is used for the data with complete features, while the labeled core points that can represent the whole data distribution are used to train the classifier. Second, we calculate a symmetrical FWPD distance matrix for incomplete data points, then the incomplete data are imputed by the symmetrical FWPD distance matrix and classified by the classifier. The experimental results show that the proposed approach performs well on both synthetic datasets and real datasets.

Inclusive Hadroproduction of P-wave Heavy Quarkonia in pNRQCD

We compute NRQCD long-distance matrix elements that appear in the inclusive production cross sections of P-wave heavy quarkonia in the framework of potential NRQCD. The formalism developed in this work applies to strongly coupled charmonia and bottomonia. This makes possible the determination of color-octet NRQCD long-distance matrix elements without relying on measured cross section data, which has not been possible so far. We obtain results for inclusive production cross sections of χcJ and χbJ at the LHC, which are in good agreement with measurements.

Eccentricity energy change of complete multipartite graphs due to edge deletion

The eccentricity matrix ɛ(G) of a graph G is obtained from the distance matrix of G by retaining the largest distances in each row and each column, and leaving zeros in the remaining ones. The eccentricity energy of G is sum of the absolute values of the eigenvalues of ɛ(G). Although the eccentricity matrices of graphs are closely related to the distance matrices of graphs, a number of properties of eccentricity matrices are substantially different from those of the distance matrices. The change in eccentricity energy of a graph due to an edge deletion is one such property. In this article, we give examples of graphs for which the eccentricity energy increase (resp., decrease) but the distance energy decrease (resp., increase) due to an edge deletion. Also, we prove that the eccentricity energy of the complete k-partite graph Kn 1, ... , nk with k ≥ 2 and ni ≥ 2, increases due to an edge deletion.

Relationship between adjacency and distance matrix of graph of diameter two

The relationship among every pair of vertices in a graph can be represented as a matrix, such as in adjacency matrix and distance matrix. Both adjacency and distance matrices have the same property. Adjacency and distance matrices are both symmetric matrix with diagonals entries equals to 0. In this paper, we discuss relationships between adjacency matrix and distance matrix of a graph of diameter two, which is <em>D=2(J-I)-A</em>. From this relationship, we also determine the value of the determinant matrix <em>A+D</em> and the upper bound of determinant of matrix <em>D</em>.

The spread of agriculture in Iberia through Approximate Bayesian Computation and Neolithic projectile tools

In the present article we use geometric microliths (a specific type of arrowhead) and Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) in order to evaluate possible origin points and expansion routes for the Neolithic in the Iberian Peninsula. In order to do so, we divide the Iberian Peninsula in four areas (Ebro river, Catalan shores, Xúquer river and Guadalquivir river) and we sample the geometric microliths existing in the sites with the oldest radiocarbon dates for each zone. On this data, we perform a partial Mantel test with three matrices: geographic distance matrix, cultural distance matrix and chronological distance matrix. After this is done, we simulate a series of partial Mantel tests where we alter the chronological matrix by using an expansion model with randomised origin points, and using the distribution of the observed partial Mantel test’s results as a summary statistic within an Approximate Bayesian Computation-Sequential Monte-Carlo (ABC-SMC) algorithm framework. Our results point clearly to a Neolithic expansion route following the Northern Mediterranean, whilst the Southern Mediterranean route could also find support and should be further discussed. The most probable origin points focus on the Xúquer river area.

Single Allocation Hub Location with Heterogeneous Economies of Scale

The economies of scale in hub location is usually modeled by a constant parameter, which captures the benefits companies obtain through consolidation. In their article “Single allocation hub location with heterogeneous economies of scale,” Rostami et al. relax this assumption and consider hub-hub connection costs as piecewise linear functions of the flow amounts. This spoils the triangular inequality property of the distance matrix, making the classical flow-based model invalid and further complicates the problem. The authors tackle the challenge by building a mixed-integer quadratically constrained program and by developing a methodology based on constructing Lagrangian function, linear dual functions, and specialized polynomial-time algorithms to generate enhanced cuts. The developed method offers a new strategy in Benders-type decomposition through relaxing a set of complicating constraints in subproblems when such relaxation is tight. The results confirm the efficacy of the solution methods in solving large-scale problem instances.