• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.307-332
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• 2022

One of the most intensively conducted research areas in business application study is a bankruptcy prediction model, a representative classification problem related to loan lending, investment decision making, and profitability to financial institutions. Many research demonstrated outstanding performance for bankruptcy prediction models using artificial intelligence techniques. However, since most machine learning algorithms are "black-box," AI has been identified as a prominent research topic for providing users with an explanation. Although there are many different approaches for explanations, this study focuses on explaining a bankruptcy prediction model using a counterfactual example. Users can obtain desired output from the model by using a counterfactual-based explanation, which provides an alternative case. This study introduces a counterfactual generation technique based on a genetic algorithm (GA) that leverages both domain knowledge (i.e., causal feasibility) and feature importance from a black-box model along with other critical counterfactual variables, including proximity, distribution, and sparsity. The proposed method was evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively to measure the quality and the validity.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.1-20
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• 2013

Nowadays, social network is a huge communication platform for providing people to connect with one another and to bring users together to share common interests, experiences, and their daily activities. Users spend hours per day in maintaining personal information and interacting with other people via posting, commenting, messaging, games, social events, and applications. Due to the growth of user's distributed information in social network, there is a great potential to utilize the social data to enhance the quality of recommender system. There are some researches focusing on social network analysis that investigate how social network can be used in recommendation domain. Among these researches, we are interested in taking advantages of the interaction between a user and others in social network that can be determined and known as social relationship. Furthermore, mostly user's decisions before purchasing some products depend on suggestion of people who have either the same preferences or closer relationship. For this reason, we believe that user's relationship in social network can provide an effective way to increase the quality in prediction user's interests of recommender system. Therefore, social relationship between users encountered from social network is a common factor to improve the way of predicting user's preferences in the conventional approach. Recommender system is dramatically increasing in popularity and currently being used by many e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com, Last.fm, eBay.com, etc. Collaborative filtering (CF) method is one of the essential and powerful techniques in recommender system for suggesting the appropriate items to user by learning user's preferences. CF method focuses on user data and generates automatic prediction about user's interests by gathering information from users who share similar background and preferences. Specifically, the intension of CF method is to find users who have similar preferences and to suggest target user items that were mostly preferred by those nearest neighbor users. There are two basic units that need to be considered by CF method, the user and the item. Each user needs to provide his rating value on items i.e. movies, products, books, etc to indicate their interests on those items. In addition, CF uses the user-rating matrix to find a group of users who have similar rating with target user. Then, it predicts unknown rating value for items that target user has not rated. Currently, CF has been successfully implemented in both information filtering and e-commerce applications. However, it remains some important challenges such as cold start, data sparsity, and scalability reflected on quality and accuracy of prediction. In order to overcome these challenges, many researchers have proposed various kinds of CF method such as hybrid CF, trust-based CF, social network-based CF, etc. In the purpose of improving the recommendation performance and prediction accuracy of standard CF, in this paper we propose a method which integrates traditional CF technique with social relationship between users discovered from user's behavior in social network i.e. Facebook. We identify user's relationship from behavior of user such as posts and comments interacted with friends in Facebook. We believe that social relationship implicitly inferred from user's behavior can be likely applied to compensate the limitation of conventional approach. Therefore, we extract posts and comments of each user by using Facebook Graph API and calculate feature score among each term to obtain feature vector for computing similarity of user. Then, we combine the result with similarity value computed using traditional CF technique. Finally, our system provides a list of recommended items according to neighbor users who have the biggest total similarity value to the target user. In order to verify and evaluate our proposed method we have performed an experiment on data collected from our Movies Rating System. Prediction accuracy evaluation is conducted to demonstrate how much our algorithm gives the correctness of recommendation to user in terms of MAE. Then, the evaluation of performance is made to show the effectiveness of our method in terms of precision, recall, and F1-measure. Evaluation on coverage is also included in our experiment to see the ability of generating recommendation. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperform and more accurate in suggesting items to users with better performance. The effectiveness of user's behavior in social network particularly shows the significant improvement by up to 6% on recommendation accuracy. Moreover, experiment of recommendation performance shows that incorporating social relationship observed from user's behavior into CF is beneficial and useful to generate recommendation with 7% improvement of performance compared with benchmark methods. Finally, we confirm that interaction between users in social network is able to enhance the accuracy and give better recommendation in conventional approach.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.241-263
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• 2010

KoFlux is a Korean network of micrometeorological tower sites that use eddy covariance methods to monitor the cycles of energy, water, and carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and the key terrestrial ecosystems in Korea. KoFlux embraces the mission of AsiaFlux, i.e. to bring Asia's key ecosystems under observation to ensure quality and sustainability of life on earth. The main purposes of KoFlux are to provide (1) an infrastructure to monitor, compile, archive and distribute data for the science community and (2) a forum and short courses for the application and distribution of knowledge and data between scientists including practitioners. The KoFlux community pursues the vision of AsiaFlux, i.e., "thinking community, learning frontiers" by creating information and knowledge of ecosystem science on carbon, water and energy exchanges in key terrestrial ecosystems in Asia, by promoting multidisciplinary cooperations and integration of scientific researches and practices, and by providing the local communities with sustainable ecosystem services. Currently, KoFlux has seven sites in key terrestrial ecosystems (i.e., five sites in Korea and two sites in the Arctic and Antarctic). KoFlux has systemized a standardized data processing based on scrutiny of the data observed from these ecosystems and synthesized the processed data for constructing database for further uses with open access. Through publications, workshops, and training courses on a regular basis, KoFlux has provided an agora for building networks, exchanging information among flux measurement and modelling experts, and educating scientists in flux measurement and data analysis. Despite such persistent initiatives, the collaborative networking is still limited within the KoFlux community. In order to break the walls between different disciplines and boost up partnership and ownership of the network, KoFlux will be housed in the National Center for Agro-Meteorology (NCAM) at Seoul National University in 2011 and provide several core services of NCAM. Such concerted efforts will facilitate the augmentation of the current monitoring network, the education of the next-generation scientists, and the provision of sustainable ecosystem services to our society.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.155-169
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• 2014

With the rapid advances in technologies, organizations are more likely to depend on information systems in their decision-making processes. Business Intelligence (BI) systems, in particular, have become a mainstay in dealing with complex problems in an organization, partly because a variety of advanced computational methods from statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence can be applied to solve business problems such as demand forecasting. In addition to the ability to analyze past and present trends, these predictive analytics capabilities provide huge value to an organization's ability to respond to change in markets, business risks, and customer trends. While the performance effects of BI system use in organization settings have been studied, it has been little discussed on the use of predictive analytics technologies embedded in BI systems for forecasting tasks. Thus, this study aims to find important factors that can help to take advantage of the benefits of advanced technologies of a BI system. More generally, a BI system can be viewed as an advisor, defined as the one that formulates judgments or recommends alternatives and communicates these to the person in the role of the judge, and the information generated by the BI system as advice that a decision maker (judge) can follow. Thus, we refer to the findings from the advice-giving and advice-taking literature, focusing on the role of explanations of the system in users' advice taking. It has been shown that advice discounting could occur when an advisor's reasoning or evidence justifying the advisor's decision is not available. However, the majority of current BI systems merely provide a number, which may influence decision makers in accepting the advice and inferring the quality of advice. We in this study explore the following key factors that can influence users' advice taking within the setting of a BI system: explanations on how the box-office grosses are predicted, types of advisor, i.e., system (data mining technique) or human-based business advice mechanisms such as prediction markets (aggregated human advice) and human advisors (individual human expert advice), users' evaluations of the provided advice, and individual differences in decision-makers. Each subject performs the following four tasks, by going through a series of display screens on the computer. First, given the information of the given movie such as director and genre, the subjects are asked to predict the opening weekend box office of the movie. Second, in light of the information generated by an advisor, the subjects are asked to adjust their original predictions, if they desire to do so. Third, they are asked to evaluate the value of the given information (e.g., perceived usefulness, trust, satisfaction). Lastly, a short survey is conducted to identify individual differences that may affect advice-taking. The results from the experiment show that subjects are more likely to follow system-generated advice than human advice when the advice is provided with an explanation. When the subjects as system users think the information provided by the system is useful, they are also more likely to take the advice. In addition, individual differences affect advice-taking. The subjects with more expertise on advisors or that tend to agree with others adjust their predictions, following the advice. On the other hand, the subjects with more knowledge on movies are less affected by the advice and their final decisions are close to their original predictions. The advances in predictive analytics of a BI system demonstrate a great potential to support increasingly complex business decisions. This study shows how the designs of a BI system can play a role in influencing users' acceptance of the system-generated advice, and the findings provide valuable insights on how to leverage the advanced predictive analytics of the BI system in an organization's forecasting practices.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.43-57
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• 2012

To enhance the competitive advantage in a constantly changing business environment, an enterprise management must make the right decision in many business activities based on both internal and external information. Thus, providing accurate information plays a prominent role in management's decision making. Intuitively, historical data can provide a feasible estimate through the forecasting models. Therefore, if the service department can estimate the service quantity for the next period, the service department can then effectively control the inventory of service related resources such as human, parts, and other facilities. In addition, the production department can make load map for improving its product quality. Therefore, obtaining an accurate service forecast most likely appears to be critical to manufacturing companies. Numerous investigations addressing this problem have generally employed statistical methods, such as regression or autoregressive and moving average simulation. However, these methods are only efficient for data with are seasonal or cyclical. If the data are influenced by the special characteristics of product, they are not feasible. In our research, we propose a forecasting framework that predicts service demand of manufacturing organization by combining Case-based reasoning (CBR) and leveraging an unsupervised artificial neural network based clustering analysis (i.e., Self-Organizing Maps; SOM). We believe that this is one of the first attempts at applying unsupervised artificial neural network-based machine-learning techniques in the service forecasting domain. Our proposed approach has several appealing features : (1) We applied CBR and SOM in a new forecasting domain such as service demand forecasting. (2) We proposed our combined approach between CBR and SOM in order to overcome limitations of traditional statistical forecasting methods and We have developed a service forecasting tool based on the proposed approach using an unsupervised artificial neural network and Case-based reasoning. In this research, we conducted an empirical study on a real digital TV manufacturer (i.e., Company A). In addition, we have empirically evaluated the proposed approach and tool using real sales and service related data from digital TV manufacturer. In our empirical experiments, we intend to explore the performance of our proposed service forecasting framework when compared to the performances predicted by other two service forecasting methods; one is traditional CBR based forecasting model and the other is the existing service forecasting model used by Company A. We ran each service forecasting 144 times; each time, input data were randomly sampled for each service forecasting framework. To evaluate accuracy of forecasting results, we used Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) as primary performance measure in our experiments. We conducted one-way ANOVA test with the 144 measurements of MAPE for three different service forecasting approaches. For example, the F-ratio of MAPE for three different service forecasting approaches is 67.25 and the p-value is 0.000. This means that the difference between the MAPE of the three different service forecasting approaches is significant at the level of 0.000. Since there is a significant difference among the different service forecasting approaches, we conducted Tukey's HSD post hoc test to determine exactly which means of MAPE are significantly different from which other ones. In terms of MAPE, Tukey's HSD post hoc test grouped the three different service forecasting approaches into three different subsets in the following order: our proposed approach > traditional CBR-based service forecasting approach > the existing forecasting approach used by Company A. Consequently, our empirical experiments show that our proposed approach outperformed the traditional CBR based forecasting model and the existing service forecasting model used by Company A. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides some research background information such as summary of CBR and SOM. Section 3 presents a hybrid service forecasting framework based on Case-based Reasoning and Self-Organizing Maps, while the empirical evaluation results are summarized in Section 4. Conclusion and future research directions are finally discussed in Section 5.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.139-161
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• 2019

The utilization of the e-commerce market has become a common life style in today. It has become important part to know where and how to make reasonable purchases of good quality products for customers. This change in purchase psychology tends to make it difficult for customers to make purchasing decisions in vast amounts of information. In this case, the recommendation system has the effect of reducing the cost of information retrieval and improving the satisfaction by analyzing the purchasing behavior of the customer. Amazon and Netflix are considered to be the well-known examples of sales marketing using the recommendation system. In the case of Amazon, 60% of the recommendation is made by purchasing goods, and 35% of the sales increase was achieved. Netflix, on the other hand, found that 75% of movie recommendations were made using services. This personalization technique is considered to be one of the key strategies for one-to-one marketing that can be useful in online markets where salespeople do not exist. Recommendation techniques that are mainly used in recommendation systems today include collaborative filtering and content-based filtering. Furthermore, hybrid techniques and association rules that use these techniques in combination are also being used in various fields. Of these, collaborative filtering recommendation techniques are the most popular today. Collaborative filtering is a method of recommending products preferred by neighbors who have similar preferences or purchasing behavior, based on the assumption that users who have exhibited similar tendencies in purchasing or evaluating products in the past will have a similar tendency to other products. However, most of the existed systems are recommended only within the same category of products such as books and movies. This is because the recommendation system estimates the purchase satisfaction about new item which have never been bought yet using customer's purchase rating points of a similar commodity based on the transaction data. In addition, there is a problem about the reliability of purchase ratings used in the recommendation system. Reliability of customer purchase ratings is causing serious problems. In particular, 'Compensatory Review' refers to the intentional manipulation of a customer purchase rating by a company intervention. In fact, Amazon has been hard-pressed for these "compassionate reviews" since 2016 and has worked hard to reduce false information and increase credibility. The survey showed that the average rating for products with 'Compensated Review' was higher than those without 'Compensation Review'. And it turns out that 'Compensatory Review' is about 12 times less likely to give the lowest rating, and about 4 times less likely to leave a critical opinion. As such, customer purchase ratings are full of various noises. This problem is directly related to the performance of recommendation systems aimed at maximizing profits by attracting highly satisfied customers in most e-commerce transactions. In this study, we propose the possibility of using new indicators that can objectively substitute existing customer 's purchase ratings by using RFM multi-dimensional analysis technique to solve a series of problems. RFM multi-dimensional analysis technique is the most widely used analytical method in customer relationship management marketing(CRM), and is a data analysis method for selecting customers who are likely to purchase goods. As a result of verifying the actual purchase history data using the relevant index, the accuracy was as high as about 55%. This is a result of recommending a total of 4,386 different types of products that have never been bought before, thus the verification result means relatively high accuracy and utilization value. And this study suggests the possibility of general recommendation system that can be applied to various offline product data. If additional data is acquired in the future, the accuracy of the proposed recommendation system can be improved.

• 대한공업교육학회지
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.192-217
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• 2008

This paper investigated the perceived criticalities and patterns of Korean Professional Engineer's competency regarding the working activities of automative product development, manufacturing, etc by using questionnaires responded to the survey which were applied to the automotive professors, experts and professional engineers (vocational parties) by e/mail, etc. This research investigated the following questions: First, what are the characteristic patterns, relevancy and perceived criticalities of Korean Professional Engineer's competencies? Second, What are the ranked priority of the Korean Professional Engineers' competencies? Are there any differency for each item, sub group of job, intelectual criterior of the competencies between relevancy and perceived criticalities according to the types of vocational parties, etc.? Accoring to the results; first, Professor group showed highest points among 3 groups per each item of the competencies by vocational parties Second, Chassis design group ranked top position among the 8 sub groups by vocational parties and, third, Problem Solving Knowledge ranked highest points than any others. Korean Professional Engineers are found to be positioned as key members, leaders and managers on surveying market, product planning, designing product & components, developing component parts, establishing shop with production equipment, managing quality control & material handling, organizing relevant meetings, developing human resources by training and learning, to back up finance with law matters, cooperating with concerned parties to achieve organizational goals, and to coordinate projects. etc, identifying ethical issues and business skills in order to survive and win to be competitive in various kinds of the automotive industry battle fields.