Yes / The main aim of this paper is to investigate how far applying suitably conceived and designed credit scoring models can properly account for the incidence of default and help improve the decision-making process. Four statistical modelling techniques, namely, discriminant analysis, logistic regression, multi-layer feed-forward neural network and probabilistic neural network are used in building credit scoring models for the Indian banking sector. Notably actual misclassification costs are analysed in preference to estimated misclassification costs. Our first-stage scoring models show that sophisticated credit scoring models, in particular probabilistic neural networks, can help to strengthen the decision-making processes by reducing default rates by over 14%. The second-stage of our analysis focuses upon the default cases and substantiates the significance of the timing of default. Moreover, our results reveal that State of residence, equated monthly instalment, net annual income, marital status and loan amount, are the most important predictive variables. The practical implications of this study are that our scoring models could help banks avoid high default rates, rising bad debts, shrinking cash flows and punitive cost-cutting measures.

The non-recurring congestion, caused by incidents, is the main cause of traffic delays and causes up to 60 percent of the freeway delay in the United States. When severe incidents occur on freeways, capacity reduction due to lane blockages may cause an extremely high amount of traffic delay. In many cases, parallel surface arterials are available, and provide reasonably high speed and available capacity. In this scenario, to fully utilize the corridor capacity, diversion may be practical and necessary. With the changes of traffic demand levels and patterns on surface streets due to diversion, signal retiming for surface street intersections is necessary. A nonlinear programming model was formulated to provide an integrated traffic control strategy for a freeway corridor under incident conditions. The objective function of the optimization model considers the interactions among the corridor components, and clearly reflects the primary goals of corridor traffic control under freeway incident conditions: to divert as much traffic away from the freeway as possible, not to over-congest the arterial and surface streets; and properly reset the signal timing plans at all intersections to accommodate the changed traffic demand levels and patterns. The gradient projection method is employed to solve diversion and signal retiming control measures simultaneously. By using a specifically developed simple and realistic traffic flow model and employing a sequential optimization approach, the computer program COROPT can obtain optimal traffic control strategies quickly and effectively. The COROPT program also has the flexibility to deal with various corridor configurations, different size of the corridor system, and different timing phasings. The model can address the time-varying factor of traffic flow, and can handle changing traffic and incident conditions over the time. The model performance was evaluated and validated by running the simulation and optimization programs of TRANSYT-7F and INTEGRATION. It has been found that the proposed model and control strategy reduce the overall system delay, increase the throughput of the corridor, and thus improve the traffic conditions of the entire corridor. / Ph. D.

Yes / An ability to predict the time-to-contact (TTC) of moving objects that become momentarily hidden is advantageous in everyday life and could be particularly so in fast-ball sports. Prediction motion (PM) experiments have sought to test this ability using tasks where a disappearing target moves towards a stationary destination. Here, we developed two novel versions of the PM task in which the destination either moved away from (Chase) or towards (Attract) the moving target. The target and destination moved with different speeds such that collision occurred 750, 1000 or 1250ms after target occlusion. To determine if domain-specific experience conveys an advantage in PM tasks, we compared the performance of different sporting groups ranging from internationally competing athletes to non-sporting controls. There was no difference in performance between sporting groups and non-sporting controls but there were significant and independent effects on response error by target speed, destination speed and occlusion period. We simulated these findings using a revised version of the linear TTC model of response timing for PM tasks (Yakimoff et al. 1987, 1993) in which retinal input from the moving destination biases the internal representation of the occluded target. This revision closely reproduced the observed patterns of response error and thus describes a means by which the brain might estimate TTC when the target and destination are in motion.

This study compares alternative weighting strategies with traditional weighting strategies, to identify if investors could receive better risk-adjusted returns on the Swedish stock market. The reason for the emergence of the thesis is based on the criticism and questions raised against the traditional strategies, that they might be ineffective and suboptimal for investors. Previous studies extend our theoretical background where the market price of an asset is not representative of the intrinsic value. Data from listed firms on the Swedish market between 2003 and 2024 have been collected, to compose the Fundamental, Risk-adjusted, and Risk-timing portfolios. Our benchmarks have consisted of value-weighted-, equally weighted-, maximum Sharpe ratioand OMXS-30 portfolios. The empirical result of this study suggests that there is an indication that the portfolio strategies outperform the benchmark portfolios.

Research has shown beneficial performance gains from concurrent multimodal presentation of visual and tactile signaling. Studies have also suggested the importance of closely matching or emulating the spatial characteristics of tactile signaling to its visual counterpart, resulting in intuitive tactile signals that are easily learned and that provide immediate benefits in the absence or concurrent presentation of visual signaling. The purpose for this study is to inform display design regarding how closely the tactile signaling should match the visual signaling temporally, before the difference is detected by the observer. Participants observed a visual signal presentation of six different circular patterns, that spatially matched a concurrent tactile presentation, with the visual presentation temporally being faster, slower, or the same speed as the tactile presentation. Results showed that participants were better at identifying a difference between the visual and tactile stimuli when the visual stimuli were faster, and when they were presented in a clockwise pattern. The incremental nature of the faster and slower visual presentations results in helpful guidelines for multimodal display design on how perceptible the temporal difference is between the tactile and visual modalities.

Initial public offerings (IPO) are an important function for society to fund entrepreneurs. However, what explains the number is disputed. One may think that it should be explained by the need for capital but only a part can be explained by that. Instead, this thesis theories that the number of IPOs should be able to be explained by valuation. To test this hypothesis two variables have been thought to affect the valuation: the current market valuation and underpricing. To represent the current valuation the P/E ratio of OMXS30 was used and for underpricing the average underpricing was used. Which later was tested in a regression analysis against the number of IPOs. This study found that there exists a positive correlation between the current market valuation (P/E) and the number of IPOs. The study's result regarding if underpricing could explain the number of IPOs became inconclusive. The finding of P/E ratios correlation to the number of IPOs can in future forecasting be tested and used.

O objetivo desse estudo foi investigar os efeitos de diferentes estruturas de prática no processo adaptativo da aprendizagem de uma tarefa de timing coincidente em função da idade. Crianças (n=40), adultos (n=47) e idosos (n=57) foram distribuídos em grupos de prática constante, aleatória, constante-aleatória e aleatória-constante. A tarefa consistiu em tocar certos alvos de forma seqüencial em integração a um estímulo visual. O delineamento envolveu duas fases de aprendizagem: estabilização e adaptação. Os dados foram analisados em relação aos erros absoluto, variável, constante e de execução. Os resultados mostraram que o processo adaptativo na aprendizagem de crianças, adultos e idosos de uma tarefa de timing coincidente foi beneficiado pela prática constante-aleatória / The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of different practice schedule on the adaptive process of the coincident timing task learning in function of age. Children (n=40), adults (n=47) and elderly (n=57) were distributed in constant, random, constant-random and random-constant practices group. The task consisted of touching response keys sequentially in conjunction with a visual stimulus. The experimental design involved two learning phases: stabilization and adaptation. The data were analyzed in terms of absolute, variable, constant and execution errors. The results showed that adaptive process in the learning of children, adults and elderly of a coincident timing task was beneficed by constant-random practice

Digital communication systems invariably employ an underlying analog communication channel. At the transmitter, data is modulated to obtain an analog waveform which is input to the channel. At the receiver, the output of the channel needs to be mapped back into the discrete domain. To this effect, the continuous-time received waveform is sampled at instants chosen by the timing recovery block. Therefore, timing recovery is an essential component of digital communication systems. A widely used timing recovery method is based on a phase-locked loop (PLL), which updates its timing estimates based on a decision-directed device. Timing recovery performance is a strong function of the reliability of decisions, and hence, of the channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Iteratively decodable error-control codes (ECCs) like turbo codes and LDPC codes allow operation at SNRs lower than ever before, thus exacerbating timing recovery. We propose iterative timing recovery, where the timing recovery block, the equalizer and the ECC decoder exchange information, giving the timing recovery block access to decisions that are much more reliable than the instantaneous ones. This provides significant SNR gains at a marginal complexity penalty over a conventional turbo equalizer where the equalizer and the ECC decoder exchange information. We also derive the Cramer-Rao bound, which is a lower bound on the estimation error variance of any timing estimator, and propose timing recovery methods that outperform the conventional PLL and achieve the Cramer-Rao bound in some cases. At low SNR, timing recovery suffers from cycle slips, where the receiver drops or adds one or more symbols, and consequently, almost always the ECC decoder fails to decode. Iterative timing recovery has the ability to corrects cycle slips. To reduce the number of iterations, we propose cycle slip detection and correction methods. With iterative timing recovery, the PLL with cycle slip detection and correction recovers most of the SNR loss of the conventional receiver that separates timing recovery and turbo equalization.

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Med hjälp av digitala ljudbibliotek kan man få tillgång till ljudet av en orkester, men hur kan man återskapa känslan av en riktig orkester? Det finns flera metoder för att digitalt återskapa ett mänskligt framförande, två av de vanligaste är realtidsinspelning och datorsimulering. Båda metoderna kan användas för att efterlikna/återskapa mänskliga karaktärsdrag i musikaliska framföranden.I detta arbete jämfördes dessa metoder ur lyssnarens perspektiv, för att ta reda på vilken metod som bäst gynnar kompositörer av digital orkestral musik. Undersökningen utnyttjade en kvantitativ metod i form av en internetbaserad enkät där respondenterna fick svara på frågor och rangordna deras upplevelse av de olika metoderna.Resultatet visade bland annat att den generella upplevelsen av metoderna inte skiljde sig åt i genomsnitt, men att det fanns trender mellan olika lyssningsvanor och vilken metod som föredrogs. Mängden insamlad data var inte tillräcklig för att dra konkreta slutsatser, arbetet visar dock tendenser och kan användas som underlag till vidare forskning.