Search

Purpose - Personal bankruptcy is on the rise in Malaysia. The Insolvency Department of Malaysia reported that personal bankruptcy has increased since 2007, and the total accumulated personal bankruptcy cases stood at 131,282 in 2014. This is indeed an alarming issue because the increasing number of personal bankruptcy cases will have a negative impact on the Malaysian economy, as well as on the society. From the aspect of individual's personal economy, bankruptcy minimizes their chances of securing a job. Apart from that, their account will be frozen, lost control on their assets and properties and not allowed to start any business nor be a part of any company's management. Bankrupts also will be denied from any loan application, restricted from travelling overseas and cannot act as a guarantor. This paper aims to investigate this problem by developing the personal bankruptcy prediction model using the decision tree technique. Design/methodology/approach - In this paper, bankrupt is defined as terminated members who failed to settle their loans. The sample comprised of 24,546 cases with 17 per cent settled cases and 83 per cent terminated cases. The data included a dependent variable, i.e. bankruptcy status (Y = 1(bankrupt), Y = 0 (non-bankrupt)) and 12 predictors. SAS Enterprise Miner 14.1 software was used to develop the decision tree model. Findings - Upon completion, this study succeeds to come out with the profiles of bankrupts, reliable personal bankruptcy scoring model and significant variables of personal bankruptcy. Practical implications - This decision tree model is possible for patent and income generation. Financial institutions are able to use this model for potential borrowers to predict their tendency toward personal bankruptcy. Originality/value - This decision tree model is able to facilitate and assist financial institutions in evaluating and assessing their potential borrower. It helps to identify potential defaulting borrowers. It also can assist financial institutions in implementing the right strategies to avoid defaulting borrowers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current suicide risk assessments for predicting suicide attempts are time consuming, of low predictive value and have inadequate reliability. This paper aims to develop a predictive model for suicide attempts among patients with depression using machine learning algorithms as well as presents a comparative study on single predictive models with ensemble predictive models for differentiating depressed patients with suicide attempts from non-suicide attempters. We applied and trained eight different machine learning algorithms using a dataset that consists of 75 patients diagnosed with a depressive disorder. A recursive feature elimination was used to reduce the features via three-fold cross validation. An ensemble predictive models outperformed the single predictive models. Voting and bagging revealed the highest accuracy of 92% compared to other machine learning algorithms. Our findings indicate that history of suicide attempt, religion, race, suicide ideation and severity of clinical depression are useful factors for prediction of suicide attempts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, a novel data mining technique, Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS) has begun attracted attention from several hydrological researchers because their application is relatively new in modelling hydrological processes. The power of this approach has been proven in variety learning problems such as financial analysis, species distributions modelling, and doweled pavement performance modelling. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to investigate the performance of MARS model in capture the rainfallrunoff processes at river catchment of Malaysia. Pahang River has been selected as area of study. 30-years data set of daily rainfall and runoff at upstream tributaries of Pahang River were used to developed and validate the capability of MARS model in flood prediction. The effect of different length of record data to performance of MARS model was also examined by arranged the data into 5-years data set, 10 years data set, 20 years data set, and 30 years data set. All these data sets used 1-year data of 2003 for validation process while the others were applied for calibration. Simulation results showed that MARS model was able to learn the rainfall-runoff processes in Pahang River catchment and the model performance improved due to the longer period of data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of organizational demographic variables on successful knowledge management (KM) implementation which insofar has not been thoroughly reported in the KM literature. For meaningful results to be generated, four organizational demographic variables, namely functional areas, years of KM involvement, KM development stage, and degree of knowledge intensity were moderated against a comprehensive set of KM activities, which comprise of KM preliminary success factors, KM strategies and KM processes, with organizational performance. The respondents comprised of middle managers working in the telecommunication industry in Malaysia. Based on the data collected from 289 respondents using a set of structured questionnaire, the results reveal that all the four demographic characteristics interacted with the degree of implementation of the KM activities, while three of the characteristics, with exception of functional areas, show significant relationships with organizational performance. The contributions of the paper, along with the implications of the results are discussed and interpreted to provide guidance to organizations for improved business performance through KM implementation success. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Introduction: The use of electronic cigarette and vape (ECV) among adults has been rapidly in Malaysia. Objectives: The primary objective of this paper is to understand the characteristics of ECV users in Malaysia by assessing the perceptions and demographic variables. The influence of perceptions and demographic variables were assessed on the current status of ECV use. Several predictor variables included in this study were: seven demographics variables (i.e., age, gender, race, residence, marital, occupation and education) and twenty variables on the perception of ECV use. An Induction Decision Tree (ID3) algorithm, one of the renowned data mining technique, was used in this study. Materials and Methods: A number of simulations was carried out on the dataset which was extracted from the National Electronic Cigarette Survey (NECS) 2016. Results: The result of this study shows that the most critical variable identified in this study was gender, hence indicates decision for ECV uses significantly differs among male and female. Conclusion: The findings of this study would contribute towards strategizing public health campaign on smoking cessation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents landslide-susceptibility mapping using an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) using a geographic information system (GIS) environment. In the first stage, landslide locations from the study area were identified by interpreting aerial photographs and supported by an extensive field survey. In the second stage, landslide-related conditioning factors such as altitude, slope angle, plan curvature, distance to drainage, distance to road, soil texture and stream power index (SPI) were extracted from the topographic and soil maps. Then, landslide-susceptible areas were analyzed by the ANFIS approach and mapped using landslide-conditioning factors. In particular, various membership functions (MFs) were applied for the landslide-susceptibility mapping and their results were compared with the field-verified landslide locations. Additionally, the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve for all landslide susceptibility maps were drawn and the areas under curve values were calculated. The ROC curve technique is based on the plotting of model sensitivity — true positive fraction values calculated for different threshold values, versus model specificity — true negative fraction values, on a graph. Landslide test locations that were not used during the ANFIS modeling purpose were used to validate the landslide susceptibility maps. The validation results revealed that the susceptibility maps constructed by the ANFIS predictive models using triangular, trapezoidal, generalized bell and polynomial MFs produced reasonable results (84.39%), which can be used for preliminary land-use planning. Finally, the authors concluded that ANFIS is a very useful and an effective tool in regional landslide susceptibility assessment. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]