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Purpose: Accurate foreign tourist arrivals forecasting can help public and private sectors to formulate scientific tourism planning and improve the allocation efficiency of tourism resources. This paper aims to address the problem of low prediction accuracy of Chinese inbound tourism demand caused by the lack of valid historical data. Design/methodology/approach: A novel hybrid Chinese inbound tourism demand forecasting model combining fractional non-homogenous discrete grey model and firefly algorithm is constructed. In the proposed model, all adjustable parameters of the fractional non-homogenous discrete grey model are optimized simultaneously by the firefly algorithm. Findings: The data sets of annual foreign tourist arrivals to China are used to verify the validity of the proposed model. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective and can be used as a useful predictor for the prediction of Chinese inbound tourism demand. Originality/value: The method proposed in this paper is effective and can be used as a feasible approach for forecasting the development trend of Chinese inbound tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: For urban economies, an ecological endowment embodiment analysis has to be supported by endowment intensities at both the international and domestic scales to reflect the international and domestic imports of increasing importance. A three-scale input–output modeling for an urban economy to give nine categories of embodiment fluxes is presented in this paper by a case study on the carbon dioxide emissions by the Beijing economy in 2007, based on the carbon intensities for the average world and national economies. The total direct emissions are estimated at 1.03E+08t, in which 91.61% is energy-related emissions. By the modeling, emissions embodied in fixed capital formation amount to 7.20E+07t, emissions embodied in household consumption are 1.58 times those in government consumption, and emissions in gross capital formation are 14.93% more than those in gross consumption. As a net exporter of carbon emissions, Beijing exports 5.21E+08t carbon embodied in foreign imported commodities and 1.06E+08t in domestic imported commodities, while emissions embodied in foreign and domestic imported commodities are 3.34E+07 and 1.75E+08t respectively. The algorithm presented in this study is applicable to the embodiment analysis of other environmental resources for regional economies characteristic of multi-scales. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Managerial decision-making processes often involve data of the time nature and need to understand complex temporal associations among events. Extending classical association rule mining approaches in consideration of time in order to obtain temporal information/knowledge is deemed important for decision support, which is nowadays one of the key issues in business intelligence. This paper presents the notion of multi-temporal patterns with four different temporal predicates, namely before, during, equal and overlap, and discusses a number of related properties, based on which a mining algorithm is designed. This enables us to effectively discover multi-temporal patterns in large-scale temporal databases by reducing the database scan in the generation of candidate patterns. The proposed approach is then applied to stock markets, aimed at exploring possible associative movements between the stock markets of Chinese mainland and Hong Kong so as to provide helpful knowledge for investment decisions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Radiation symmetry evaluation is critical to the laser driven Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF), which is usually obtained through a view-factor equation model. The model is nonlinear, and its equation number can be very large when the size of discrete mesh element is very small to achieve a prescribed accuracy, which may lead to an intensive equation solving process. In this paper, an efficient radiation symmetry analysis approach is presented through equation model compression, in which, (1) the radiation symmetry analysis is carried out for two kinds of geometric shapes: cylindrical capsule and spherical capsule. For the structure of cylindrical capsule, the Legendre–Fourier basis and Zernike basis are applied to represent the radiation flux of the capsule. And for the structure of spherical capsule, the spherical harmonics is employed to sparsely represent the radiation flux on the capsule and spherical cavity. Then the nonlinear energy equilibrium equations are transformed into the equations with sparse coefficients, which means there are many redundant equations, (2) Only a few equations are uniformly selected to recover such sparse coefficients with a Latin hypercube sampling scheme, (3) A Modified Conjugate Gradient-Iteration Hard Thresholding (MCG-IHT) algorithm is then given to rapidly solve such sparse coefficients equations with as few as possible iterations. Finally, the presented approach is validated with two experiment targets for Shenguang III-YX and Shenguang II laser facilities in China. The equation model is reduced much more, only a few of equations are required to achieve the radiation flux with comparable accuracy within much less of computation time. And the solution is much more efficient as the size of discrete mesh element decreases, in which, almost 1.1% computation time is required to obtain the comparable result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]