Classical biological control is an important means of managing the increasing threat of invasive plants. It constitutes the introduction of natural enemies from the native range of the target plant into the invaded area. This method may be the only cost-effective solution to control the rapidly expanding common ragweed, Ambrosia artemisiifolia, in non-crop habitats in Europe. Therefore, candidate biocontrol agents urgently need to be assessed for their suitability for ragweed control in Europe. A previous literature review prioritized the host-specific leaf beetle Ophraella slobodkini as a candidate agent for ragweed control in Europe, whereas it rejected its oligophagous congener O. communa. Meanwhile, O. communa was accidentally introduced and became established south of the European Alps, and we show here that it is expanding its European range. We then present a short version of the traditional pre-release risk-benefit assessment for these two candidate agents to facilitate fast decision-making about further research efforts. We selected two complementary tests that can be conducted relatively rapidly and inform about essential risks and benefits. We conducted a comparative no-choice juvenile performance assay using leaves of ragweed and sunflower, the most important non-target plant, in Petri dishes in climatic conditions similar to that in the current European range of O. communa. This informs on the fundamental host range and potential for increasing abundance on these host plants. The results confirm that O. slobodkini does not survive on, and is hence unlikely to cause severe damage to sunflower, while O. communa can survive but develops more slowly on sunflower than on ragweed. In parallel, our species distribution models predict no suitable area for the establishment of O. slobodkini in Europe, while O. communa is likely to expand its current range to include a maximum of 18% of the European ragweed distribution. Based on this early assessment, the prioritization and further assessment of O. slobodkini seem unwarranted whereas the results urgently advocate further risk-benefit analysis of O. communa. Having revealed that most of the European area colonized by ragweed is unlikely to be suitable for these species of Ophraella we suggest the use of such relatively short and cheap preliminary assessment to prioritise other candidate agents or strains for these areas., Suzanne T. E. Lommen, Emilien F. Jolidon, Yan Sun, José I. Bustamante Eduardo, Heinz Müller-Schärer., and Obsahuje bibliografii
An effective and novel roller bearing fault diagnosis technique based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) energy entropy and support vector machine (SVM) is put forward in this article. The vibration signal of roller bearing is decomposed by EMD and the first 5 intrinsic mode function (IMF) components are obtained. SVM served as a fault diagnosis classifier and the extracted energy features of the first 5 IMFs are taken as network input vectors, and then the fault bearing and the normal bearing can be distinguished. An technique for fault of roller bearing by SVM is evaluated against a series of fault diagnosis methods that are widely used in machinery, with particular regard to the effect of training set size on fault diagnosis accuracy. We trained the SVM using RBF kernel function. We compare our experimental results with the existing results given by SMO and SVM-light algorithms. It can be seen that the fault diagnosis method based on SVM-light is superior to that based on SMO in diagnosis accuracy of roller bearing. In addition to the SVM, the same datasets were classified using RBF NN and Hopfield NN. The experimental results show that the technique of support vector machine based on EMD energy entropy has higher fault diagnosis ability.
Designing a wavelet neural network (WNN) needs to be done judiciously in attaining the optimal generalization performance. Its prediction competence relies highly on the initial value of translation vectors. However, there is no established solution in determining the appropriate initial value for the translation vectors at this moment. In this paper, we propose a novel enhanced fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm - specifically, the modified point symmetry-based fuzzy c-means (MPSDFCM) algorithm - in initializing the translation vectors of the WNNs. The effectiveness of embedding different activation functions in WNNs will be investigated as well. The categorization effectiveness of the proposed WNNs model was then evaluated in classifying the type 2 diabetics, and was compared with the multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and radial basis function neural networks (RBFNNs) models. Performance assessment shows that our proposed model outperforms the rest, since a 100% superior classification rate was achieved.
Color quantization is an important process for image processing and various applications. Up to now, many color quantization methods have been proposed. The self-organizing maps (SOM) method is one of the most effective color quantization methods, which gives excellent color quantization results. However, it is slow, so it is not suitable for real-time applications. In this paper, we present a color importance{based SOM color quantization method. The proposed method dynamically adjusts the learning rate and the radius of the neighborhood using color importance. This makes the proposed method faster than the conventional SOM-based color quantization method. We compare the proposed method to 10 well-known color quantization methods to evaluate performance. The methods are compared by measuring mean absolute error (MAE), mean square error (MSE), and processing time. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective and excellent for color quantization. Not only does the proposed method provide the best results compared to the other methods, but it uses only 67.18% of the processing time of the conventional SOM method.
The additive mixture rules have been extended for calculation of the effective longitudinal elasticity modulus of the composite (Functionally Graded Materials - FGM's) beams with both the polynomial longitudinal variation of the constituent's elasticity modulus. Stiffness matrix of the composite Bernoulli-Euler beam has been established which contains the transfer constants. These transfer constants describe very accurately the polynomial uni-axially variation of the effective longitudinal elasticity modulus, which is calculated using the extended mixture rules.
The mixture rules have been extended for calculation of the effective elasticity modulus for stretching and flexural bending of the layer-wise symmetric composite (FGM's) sandwich beam finite element as well. The polynomial longitudinal and transversally symmetric layer-wise variation of the sandwich beam stiffness has been taken into the account. Elastic behaviour of the sandwich beam will be modelled by the laminate theory. Stiffness matrix of such new sandwich beam element has been established. The nature and quality of the matrix reinforcement interface have not been considered. Four examples have been solved using the extended mixture rules and the new composite (FGM's) beam elements with varying stiffness. The obtained results are evaluated, discussed and compared. and Obsahuje seznam literatury
diagnosis. Moreover various studies can be found in medical journals dedicated to Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). In the presented study, a method was developed to learn and detect benign and malignant tumor types in contrast-enhanced breast magnetic resonance images (MRI). The backpropagation algorithm was taken as the ANN learning algorithm. The algorithm (NEUBREA) was developed in C# programming language by using Fast Artificial Neural Network Library (FANN). Having been diagnosed by radiologists, 7 cases of malignant tumor, 8 cases of benign tumor, and 3 normal cases were used as a training set. The results were tested on 34 cases that had been diagnosed by radiologists. After the comparison of the results, the overall accuracy of algorithm was defined as 92%.
When digital signals are transmitted through frequency selective communication channels, one of the problems that arise is inter-symbol interference (ISI). To compensate corruptions caused by ISI and to find original information being transmitted, an equalization process is performed at the receiver. Since communication channels are time varying and random in nature, adaptive equalizers must be used to learn and subsequently track the time varying characteristics of the channel. Traditional equalizers are based on finding the inverse of the channel and compensating the channel's influence using inverse filter technique. There exists no equalizer for non-invertible channels. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) can be applied to this for achieving better performance than conventional methods. We have proposed a model of a neural equalizer using MLP (multi layer perceptron), which reduces the mean square error to minimum and eliminates the effects of ISI. Empirically we have found that this neural equalizer is more efficient than conventional adaptive equalizers.
An efficient estimator for the expectation ∫f\dP is constructed, where P is a Gibbs random field, and f is a local statistic, i. e. a functional depending on a finite number of coordinates. The estimator coincides with the empirical estimator under the conditions stated in Greenwood and Wefelmeyer \cite{greenwood_wefelmeyer_1999}, and covers the known special cases, namely the von Mises statistic for the i.i.d. underlying fields and the case of one-dimensional Markov chains.
One of the most challenging problems in the optimal control theory consists of solving the nonsmooth optimal control problems where several discontinuities may be present in the control variable and derivative of the state variable. Recently some extended spectral collocation methods have been introduced for solving such problems, and a matrix of differentiation is usually used to discretize and to approximate the derivative of the state variable in the particular collocation points. In such methods, there is typically no condition for the continuity of the state variable at the switching points. In this article, we propose an efficient hp spectral collocation method for the general form of nonsmooth optimal control problems based on the operational integration matrix. The time interval of the problem is first partitioned into several variable subintervals, and the problem is then discretized by considering the Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto collocation points. Here, the switching points are unknown parameters, and having solved the final discretized problem, we achieve some approximations for the optimal solutions and the switching points. We solve some comparative numerical test problems to support of the performance of the suggested approach.
Time series forecasting, such as stock price prediction, is one of the most important complications in the financial area as data is unsteady and has noisy variables, which are affected by many factors. This study applies a hybrid method of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) technique to develop a method for predicting stock price and time series. In the GA method, the output values are further fed to a developed ANN algorithm to fix errors on exact point. The analysis suggests that the GA and ANN can increase the accuracy in fewer iterations. The analysis is conducted on the 200-day main index, as well as on five companies listed on the NASDAQ. By applying the proposed method to the Apple stocks dataset, based on a hybrid model of GA and Back Propagation (BP) algorithms, the proposed method reaches to 99.99% improvement in SSE and 90.66% in time improvement, in comparison to traditional methods. These results show the performances and the speed and the accuracy of the proposed approach.