Abstract Libraries have long been widely recognized as import information-offering institutes. Thousands of new books are acquired per month by our university¡Xa mid-sized university in Taiwan), and patrons may have difficulties identifying the small set of books that really interest them. This gives rise to the problem of finding an effective way to recommend patrons the newly arrived books in a library. In this work, we address this problem in finding generalized association rules between patrons and books. We first discuss how to identify relevant but independent patron attributes in regard of the books they checked out. Then, we propose a set of algorithms for generating large itemsets and evaluate their performance experimentally. In addition, we define interestingness of rules and propose an algorithm for pruning uninteresting rules. Finally, we apply our approach to the circulation data of National SUN Yat-Sen University library and report our experiences.

In this thesis, we propose a data mining approach to recommending library new books that have never been rated or borrowed by users. In our problem context, users are characterized by their demographic attributes, and concept hierarchies can be defined for some of these demographic attributes. Books are assigned to the base categories of taxonomy. The proposed approach starts with the identification of the type of users who are interested in some specific type of books. We call such knowledge generalized profile association rules. Less interesting or redundant generalized profile association rules are then pruned to form a concise rule set. The resultant rule set is then used for promotion of new books. We develop a new definition of rule interestingness with respect to book recommendation, propose an approximation scheme for estimating the interestingness of a rule, and construct a scheme to effectively conduct new book recommendation by using the interesting rules. We finally apply the book circulation data of a university library to the proposed approach for performance evaluation.

Monetary policy has been given either too many positive attributes or, in contrast, only economy-disturbing features. Central banks must take into account a wide variety of factors to achieve a proper characterization of modern economies for the optimal implementation of monetary policy. Such is the case of central bank accountability and monetary policy effectiveness. The objective of this dissertation is to examine these two concerns relevant to the current macroeconomic debate. The analyses are carried out using an innovative set of tools to extract presumably important information from historical data of selected macroeconomic indicators. This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay explores the causality between the elements of the "celebrated" Taylor rule, using a Structural Vector Autoregression approach on US data. Directed acyclical graph techniques and Bayesian search models are used to identify the contemporaneous causal structure in the construction of impulse-response functions. Further analysis is performed by evaluating the implications of performing standard innovation-accounting procedures, derived from a Structural Vector Autoregression on interest rates, inflation, and unemployment. This is examined whenever a causal structure is imposed vs. when it is observed. We find that the interest rate causes inflation and unemployment. This suggests that the Fed has not followed a Taylor rule in any of the two periods under study. This result differs significantly to the case when the causal structure is imposed. The second essay presents an incentive-compatible approach based on proper scoring rules to evaluate density forecasts in order to reduce the central banks' accountability problem. Our results indicate that the surveyed forecasters have done a "better" job than the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). The third essay analyzes the causal structure of the factors that are presumed to influence the effectiveness of monetary policy, represented by the sacrifice ratio. Directed acyclical graph methods are used to identify the causal flow between such determinants and the sacrifice ratio. We find evidence that, while wage rigidities and central bank independence are the two major determinants of the sacrifice ratio, the degree of openness has no direct effect on the sacrifice ratio.

Unbalanced operation of distribution feeders not only affects equipment utilization, voltage level and system protection, but it also increases extra energy losses. This leads to a deterioration of service quality, reliability and operation efficiency of a distribution system. This dissertation analyzes the problems of unbalanced three-phase distribution feeders, and offers potential solutions. Due to the voluminous data involved in a distribution system, analyzing the system by retrieving system data from paper maps is tedious and difficult. Thus, this dissertation uses data from the already constructed Outage Management System (OMS) of Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) to support distribution feeder three-phase unbalance analysis. The distribution feeder network was obtained by retrieving the connectivity table and attribute data of distribution components from the database of OMS. The topology process and node reduction were executed to identify the network configuration and to prepare the input data for load flow analysis. The hourly loading of each distribution transformer was derived using data of monthly energy consumption of customers served by each transformer, as retrieved from the Customer Information System (CIS), and the typical daily load patterns of customer classes. By performing three-phase load flow analysis, phase currents and neutral current of each primary trunk line section and each lateral could be calculated. Finally, an expert system is proposed to establish the rephasing strategy of laterals and distribution transformers to improve the imbalance of the three phases of the unbalanced distribution feeders. The heuristic rules adopted by distribution engineers are incorporated in the knowledge base of the expert system in the problem-solving process. The neutral current reduction algorithm is developed to support the inference engine to derive the rephasing strategy to reduce the neutral current of distribution feeder. In doing so, customer service interruption due to unexpected tripping of low energy over current relay (LCO) can be prevented, and furthermore the customer service interruption costs and labor costs to implement the rephasing strategy can be justified by the reduced power loss. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed methodology in improving the three-phase unbalance of the distribution feeders, two actual distribution feeders in the Taipower Fengshan District were selected for computer simulation. After Taipower engineers implement the proposed rephasing strategies, the data of phase currents and neutral current of test feeders were collected from the SCADA system of Distribution Dispatch Control Center (DDCC). By comparing to the neutral current of test feeders before rephasing, it is concluded that the proposed rephasing strategy is effective in achieving three-phase balance of the distribution feeders after executing the rephasing of laterals and distribution transformers.

Abstract The main outline of this paper is divided into six chapters, as follows. Introduction of the first chapter, respectively, describe the motive of writing the purpose of research methods , the main terms and concepts related to a introduced. Chapter II, "the type of juvenile law and basic functional theory", first of all, mainly to clarify the function of model juvenile law and juvenile law related to the basis of a preliminary study to explore the rationale; followed, especially on Taiwan's 1997 amendments to the creation of juvenile law the "concentric circle theory" and the juvenile law system thinking interpretation of it. Chapter III "juvenile protection and international norms", is the first on juvenile protection and the formation of international norms slightly introduction, followed by the current international juvenile most countries signed the protection of international instruments "Convention on the Rights of the Child", "juvenile justice Standard Rules (the Beijing Rules) "," Protection of Juveniles Deprived of their Liberty Rules "and" guidelines for the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency (Riyadh Guidelines), "notes one by one; Finally, in 2008 occurred in Taiwan's Kaohsiung port by juvenile probation girls shift supervisor incident Cases of view of international norms in our country to implement it or not. Chapter IV, "Taiwan and Japan's juvenile law amending the law History and Trends" to the two most recent content of amending the law (namely, in 2006 the draft amendment of Taiwan's juvenile law and juvenile law in 2000 to amend the content of Japan) for the scene, combined with the theory and practical view, discusses the trend of juvenile law. Chapter V "Taiwan and with Japan's juvenile law more", it has since juvenile law to distinguish between the two countries with the specific provisions of the same comparative study, although the former is the same provisions, but in different field of customs and people, the respective lead drawing a lot of practical life; the latter is looking forward to learning as the domain from the start, trying to inspire a new style of juvenile law. Finally, Chapter VI "Conclusions", in order for both theory and practice in this article, so on Taiwan's current practice of juvenile law to make a benign-depth criticism, as the experience of corroborative evidence, and of amending the law.

Online mining association rules over data streams is an important issue in the area of data mining, where an association rule means that the presence of some items in a transaction will imply the presence of other items in the same transaction. There are many applications of using association rules in data streams, such as market analysis, network security, sensor networks and web tracking. Mining closed frequent itemsets is a further work of mining association rules, which aims to find the subsets of frequent itemsets that could extract all frequent itemsets. Formally, a closed frequent itemset is an frequent itemset which has no superset with the same support as it. Since data streams are continuous, high-speed, and unbounded, archiving everything from data streams is impossible. That is, we can only scan once for the data streams and it is a main-memory database. Therefore, previous algorithms to mine closed frequent itemsets in the traditional database are not suitable for data streams. On the other hand, many applications are interested in the most recent data, and there is a model to deal with the most recent data in data streams, called emph{Sliding Window Model}, which acquires the recent data with a window size meets this characteristic. One of well-known algorithms for mining closed frequent itemsets which based on the sliding window model is the NewMoment algorithm. However, the NewMoment algorithm could not efficiently mine closed frequent itemsets in data streams, since they will generate closed frequent itemsets and many unclosed frequent itemsets. Moreover, when data in the sliding window is incrementally updated, the NewMoment algorithm needs to reconstruct the whole tree structure. Therefore, in this thesis, we propose a sliding window approach, the Subset-Lattice algorithm, which embeds the subset property into the lattice structure to efficiently mine closed frequent itemsets. Basically, Our proposed algorithm considers five kinds of set concepts : (1) equivalent, (2) superset, (3) subset, (4) intersection, (5) empty relation, when data items are inserted. We judge closed frequent itemsets without generating unclosed frequent itemsets by these five kinds of set concepts. Moreover, when data in the sliding window is incrementally updated, our Subset-Lattice algorithm will not reconstruct the whole lattice structure. Therefore, our Subset-Lattice algorithm is more efficient than the Moment algorithm. Furthermore, we use the bit-pattern to represent the itemsets, and use bit-operations to speed up the set-checking. From our simulation results, we show that our Subset-Lattice algorithm needs less memory and less processing time than the NewMoment algorithm. When window slides, the execution time could be saved up to 50\%.

The Composite Rule Induction System proposed by Liang (1992) that uses the tabular approach and statistical inference to process qualitative and quantitative attributes separately for generating better classification rules. Yang (2007) extended the method by incorporating the second-order rules. This Study further extends the previous method by including a mechanism for detecting the existence of interaction effects. The detection method checks the degree of independence between attributes to determine whether the second-order rules should be processed. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, an enhanced prototype system was developed and both real and simulated data were used to compare its accuracy and rule complexity with existing systems. The result shows that the enhanced system performs at least as accurate as the existing system but is significantly better in the complexity of the resulting knowledge base.

<p>Event-triggered real-time systems are desirable to use in environments where the arrival of events are hard to predict. The semantics of an event-triggered system is well mapped to the behaviour of an active database management system (ADBMS), specified using event-condition-action (ECA) rules. The benefits of using an active database, such as persistent data storage, concurrency control, timely response to event occurrences etc. highlights the need for a development method for event-triggered real-time systems using active databases.</p><p>However, there are problems left to be solved before an ADBMS can be used with confidence in real-time environments. The behaviour of a real-time system must be predictable, which implies a thorough analysed specification with e.g. specified worst case execution times. The predictability requirement is an obstacle for specifying real-time systems as ECA rules, since the rules may affect each other in many intricate ways which makes them hard to analyse. The interaction between the rules implies that it is not enough to verify the correctness of single rules; an analysis must consider the behaviour of the entire rule set.</p><p>In this dissertation, an approach for developing active applications is presented. A method is examined which starts with an analysed high-level timed automaton specification and transforms the specified behaviour into an implicitly analysed rule set. For this method to be useful, the transformation from timed automata to rules must preserve the exact behaviour of the high level specification. Hence, the aim of this dissertation is to verify transformations between timed automaton specifications and ECA rules.</p><p>The contribution of this project is a structured set of general transformations between timed automata specifications and ECA rules. The transformations include both transformations of small timed automata constructs for deterministic environments and formally verified timed automata patterns specifying the behaviour of composite events in recent and chronicle context.</p>

<p>Databases nowadays used in all kinds of application areas often differ greatly in a number of properties. These varieties add complexity to the handling of databases, especially when two or more different databases are dependent.</p><p>The approach described here to propagate updates in an application scenario with heterogeneous, dependent databases is the use of a rule-based mediator. The system EruS (ECA rules updating SCOP) applies active database technologies in a bioinformatics scenario. Reactive behaviour based on rules is used for databases holding protein structures.</p><p>The inherent heterogeneities of the Structural Classification of Proteins (SCOP) database and the Protein Data Bank (PDB) cause inconsistencies in the SCOP data derived from PDB. This complicates research on protein structures.</p><p>EruS solves this problem by establishing rule-based interaction between the two databases. The system is built on the rule engine ruleCore with Event-Condition-Action rules to process PDB updates. It is complemented with wrappers accessing the databases to generate the events, which are executed as actions. The resulting system processes deletes and modifications of existing PDB entries and updates SCOP flatfiles with the relevant information. This is the first step in the development of EruS, which is to be extended in future work.</p><p>The project improves bioinformatics research by providing easy access to up-to-date information from PDB to SCOP users. The system can also be considered as a model for rule-based mediators in other application areas.</p>

<p>Det pågår en intensiv debatt i Sverige om revisionspliktens vara eller inte vara i små aktiebolag. Sverige är ett av få europeiska länder som fortfarande har kvar en lagstadgad revisionsplikt för samtliga aktiebolag, och debatten är även av än mer intresse när Svensk redovisnings- och revisionsstandard alltmer anpassas till internationell standard. Ett medlemsland i Europeiska Unionen har möjligheten att undanta små aktiebolag från revisionsplikt. Men på grund av rådande regler i Sverige ska alla aktiebolag följa samma regler, något som ifrågasätts i debatten. Debatten om revisionsplikten är aktuell och viktig eftersom ungefär 200 000 aktiebolag skulle påverkas om revisionsplikten skulle tas bort.</p><p>Det övergripande syftet med uppsatsen är att bidra till debatten om revisionsplikt för små aktiebolag, genom att gå bakom “ja- och nejdebatte.” Vi kommer att beskriva och förklara attityderna till revisionsplikten, samt till de existerande redovisningsreglerna hos mikroföretag i två olika branscher.</p><p>För att uppfylla syftet har vi genomfört en kvalitativ studie. Vi har intervjuat ägarna till sex mikroföretag från två olika branscher, nämligen organisationskonsulter och byggnadsentreprenörer.</p><p>De viktigaste slutsatserna från den här studien är, att oberoende av deras respektive attityd till revisionsplikten är det ingen av respondenterna, som skulle vilja ta bort revisionsplikten för små aktiebolag. Vidare uppfattar respondenterna inom byggnadsentreprenörsbranschen redovisningsreglerna som mer komplicerade än respondenterna inom organisationskonsultbranschen och en förenkling av reglerna skulle inte förändra någon av respon-denternas attityd till revisionsplikten</p> / <p>There is an extensive debate going on in Sweden about the being or not being of the statutory audit for small limited companies. Sweden is one of the few European countries that still have a statutory audit for all limited companies, and the debate is even more of immediate interest when the Swedish accounting and auditing standards are converging more and more to international standards. A member state in the European Union has the possibility to exempt small limited companies from the statutory audit. But due to the current regulations in Sweden, all limited companies are to follow the same rules, which is questioned in the debate. This debate is a current and important issue due to that approximately 200 000 limited companies would be affected if the statutory audit would be abolished.</p><p>The overall purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the debate about the statutory audit for small limited companies, by moving beyond the “yes and no debate”. We will describe and explain the attitudes towards the statutory audit and the existing accounting regulations among micro companies in two different business sectors.</p><p>In order to fulfil the purpose, we have conducted a qualitative study. We have interviewed the owners of six micro companies from two different business sectors, namely organizational consultants and building contractors.</p><p>The main conclusions from this study are that independent of their respective attitudes towards the statutory audit, none of the respondents would like the statutory audit to be abolished for small limited companies. Further, the respondents within the building contractors business perceive the accounting rules as more complicated than the respondents within the organizational consultants sector do, and a simplification of regulation would not change any of the respondents’ attitudes towards the statutory audit.</p>