The Effects of Munsell Neutral Grey Backgrounds on the Colour of Chrysoprase and the Application of AP Clustering to Chrysoprase Colour Grading

Chrysoprase is a popular gemstone with consumers because of its charming apple green colour but a scientific classification of its colour has not yet been achieved. In this research, we determined the most effective background of the Munsell Chart for chrysoprase colour grading under a 6504 K fluorescent lamp and applied an affinity propagation (AP) clustering algorithm to the colour grading of coloured gems for the first time. Forty gem-quality chrysoprase samples from Australia were studied using a UV-VIS spectrophotometer and Munsell neutral grey backgrounds. The results determined the effects of a Munsell neutral grey background on the observed colour. It was found that the Munsell N9.5 background was the most effective for colour grading in this case. The observed chrysoprase colours were classified into five groups: Fancy Light, Fancy, Fancy Intense, Fancy Deep and Fancy Dark. The feasibility of the colour grading scheme was verified using the colour difference formula DE2000.

K-affinity propagation clustering algorithm for the classification of part-time workers using the internet

There has been a significant increase in the number of part-time workers in the last 3 years. Data collected from sakernas BPS showed that the number of part-time workers was 125,443,748 in the second period of 2016. This number rapidly increased in 2017, 2018 and 2019 in the same period, by 128,062,746, 131,005,641, and 133,560,880 workers. Based on the increase in the last 3 years, East Java province has the highest number of part-time workers that use the internet. This research aims to determine the number of part-time workers that use the internet by using the k-affinity propagation (K-AP) clustering. This method is used to produce the optimal number of cluster points (exemplar) is the affinity propagation (AP). Three clusters were used to determine the sum of the smallest value ratio. The result showed that clusters 1, 2, and 3 have 3, 23, and 5 members in Bondowoso, Jombang, and Surabaya districts.

Location and Expansion of Electric Bus Charging Stations Based on Gridded Affinity Propagation Clustering and a Sequential Expansion Rule

With the escalating contradiction between the growing demand for electric buses and limited supporting resources of cities to deploy electric charging infrastructure, it is a great challenge for decision-makers to synthetically plan the location and decide on the expansion sequence of electric charging stations. In light of the location decisions of electric charging stations having long-term impacts on the deployment of electric buses and the layout of city traffic networks, a comprehensive framework for planning the locations and deciding on the expansion of electric bus charging stations should be developed simultaneously. In practice, construction or renovation of a new charging station is limited by various factors, such as land resources, capital investment, and power grid load. Thus, it is necessary to develop an evaluation structure that combines these factors to provide integrated decision support for the location of bus charging stations. Under this background, this paper develops a gridded affinity propagation (AP) clustering algorithm that combines the superiorities of the AP clustering algorithm and the map gridding rule to find the optimal candidate locations for electric bus charging stations by considering multiple impacting factors such as land cost, traffic conditions, and so on. Based on the location results of the candidate stations, the expansion sequence of these candidate stations is proposed. In particular, a sequential expansion rule for planning the charging stations is proposed that considers the development trends of the charging demand. To verify the performance of the gridded AP clustering and the effectiveness of the proposed sequential expansion rule, an empirical investigation of Guiyang City, the capital of Guizhou province in China, is conducted. The results of the empirical investigation demonstrate that the proposed framework that helps find optimal locations for electric bus charging stations and the expansion sequence of these locations are decided with less capital investment pressure. This research shows that the combination of gridded AP clustering and the proposed sequential expansion rule can systematically solve the problem of finding the optimal locations and deciding on the best expansion sequence for electric bus charging stations, which denotes that the proposed structure is pretty pragmatic and would benefit the government for long-term investment in electric bus station deployment.

A Hybrid Alarm Association Method Based on AP Clustering and Causality

Internet of Things (IoT) brought great convenience to people’s daily lives. Meanwhile, the IoT devices are facing severe attacks from hackers and malicious attackers. Hackers and malicious attackers use various methods to invade the Internet of Things system, causing the Internet of Things to face a large number of targeted, concealed, and penetrating potential threats, which makes the privacy problem of the Internet of Things suffers serious challenges. But the existing methods and technologies cannot fully identify the attacker’s attack process and protect the privacy of the Internet of Things. Alarm correlation method can construct a complete attack scenario and identify the attacker’s intention by alarming the alarm data which provides an effective protection for user privacy. However, the existing alarm correlation methods still have the disadvantages of low correlation accuracy, poor correlation efficiency, and strong dependence on the knowledge base. To address these issues, we propose an alarm correlation method based on Affinity Propagation (AP) clustering algorithm and causal relationship. Our method considers that the alarm data triggered by the same attack process has high similarity characteristics, adopts the AP algorithm to improve the correlation efficiency, and at the same time constructs a complete attack process based on the causal correlation idea. The new alarm correlation method has a high correlation effect and builds a complete attack process to help managers identify attack intentions and prevent attacks.

Research on Designing an Industrial Product-Service System with Uncertain Customer Demands

The industrial product-service system (iPSS) is a kind of system engineering methodology, integration scheme, and business model to realize service value by adding intangible services in the whole life cycle. However, the design of the system involves many difficulties such as uncertain customer demands, strong subjectivity of the experience design, and long debugging times. Methods for solving upper problems are therefore essential. This paper presents a design model that integrates an improved affinity propagation (AP) clustering algorithm, quality function development (QFD), and axiomatic design (AD). The entire process of designing an iPSS can be split into three steps. First, uncertain customer demands is determined and standardized. Second, the functions of the product-service system are investigated. Finally, the structures of the system are determined. This paper examines the example of the control service of an iPSS for a water heater tank capping press. An improved AP clustering algorithm is used to determine standardized customer demands, the proposed QFD, and an AD integration model to initially establish a mapping between the customer demands domain and the function domain and clarify the design focus. Next, a QFD- and AD-integrated model is constructed to establish a mapping between the function domain and the structure domain and optimize the control scheme through the quality of its risk prediction. Finally the paper verifies that the upper process and methods can guide the design process effectively in production applications.

Affinity Propagation Approach for Catchment Classification Applied to Arid Catchments

One of the major issues in the arid region is the availability of hydrological data for hydrological studies of the basins for water resources projects. Since the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is a huge country and contains many arid basins it is awfully expensive and time-consuming to make hydrological networks for studying all these basins. Therefore, the Affinity Propagation (AP) clustering technique is proposed to cluster basins into groups that are similar in morphological, hydrological, and landcover characteristics and defining an exemplar (a representative basin) to each group. This basin is utilized for the installation of a detailed hydrological network. The hydrological response of that basin can be transferred and scaled appropriately to other basins in the cluster since they are hydrologically and morphologically similar. A pilot study is performed on 18 sub-basins in the southwestern part of KSA. GIS software is used to extract basin attributes and the clustering process is performed using the AP cluster packages in R software. The results show that four clusters are obtained based on the morphological attributes (twenty-eight attributes), five clusters based on hydrological attributes (twelve attributes), and three clusters based on land cover and CN (three kinds of landcover as attributes). The AP clustering technique was evaluated by the construction of a correlation matrix that shows a high correlation of 0.817 to 0.999. This study provides a robust technique that is effective and efficient to identify the similarity of catchments and can help hydrologists to develop a catchment management application in arid regions.

RRH Clustering Using Affinity Propagation Algorithm with Adaptive Thresholding and Greedy Merging in Cloud Radio Access Network

Affinity propagation (AP) clustering with low complexity and high performance is suitable for radio remote head (RRH) clustering for real-time joint transmission in the cloud radio access network. The existing AP algorithms for joint transmission have the limitation of high computational complexities owing to re-sweeping preferences (diagonal components of the similarity matrix) to determine the optimal number of clusters as system parameters such as network topology. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new approach in which preferences are fixed, where the threshold changes in response to the variations in system parameters. In AP clustering, each diagonal value of a final converged matrix is mapped to the position (x,y coordinates) of a corresponding RRH to form two-dimensional image. Furthermore, an environment-adaptive threshold value is determined by adopting Otsu’s method, which uses the gray-scale histogram of the image to make a statistical decision. Additionally, a simple greedy merging algorithm is proposed to resolve the problem of inter-cluster interference owing to the adjacent RRHs selected as exemplars (cluster centers). For a realistic performance assessment, both grid and uniform network topologies are considered, including exterior interference and various transmitting power levels of an RRH. It is demonstrated that with similar normalized execution times, the proposed algorithm provides better spectral and energy efficiencies than those of the existing algorithms.

Lung Cancer Classification and Gene Selection by Combining Affinity Propagation Clustering and Sparse Group Lasso

Background: Cancer threatens human health seriously. Diagnosing cancer via gene expression analysis is a hot topic in cancer research. Objective: The study aimed to diagnose the accurate type of lung cancer and discover the pathogenic genes. Methods: In this study, Affinity Propagation (AP) clustering with similarity score was employed to each type of lung cancer and normal lung. After grouping genes, sparse group lasso was adopted to construct four binary classifiers and the voting strategy was used to integrate them. Results: This study screened six gene groups that may associate with different lung cancer subtypes among 73 genes groups, and identified three possible key pathogenic genes, KRAS, BRAF and VDR. Furthermore, this study achieved improved classification accuracies at minority classes SQ and COID in comparison with other four methods. Conclusion: We propose the AP clustering based sparse group lasso (AP-SGL), which provides an alternative for simultaneous diagnosis and gene selection for lung cancer.