Data mining techniques have been widely applied to extract desirable knowledge from existing databases for specific purposes. In real-world applications, a database usually involves the time periods when transactions occurred and exhibition periods of items, in addition to the items bought in the transactions. To handle this kind of data, temporal data mining techniques are thus proposed to find temporal association rules from a database with time. Most of the existing studies only consider different item lifespans to find general temporal association rules, and this may neglect some useful information. For example, while an item within the whole exhibition period may not be a frequent one, it may be frequent within part of this time. To deal with this, the concept of a hierarchy of time is thus applied to temporal data mining along with suitable time granules, as defined by users. In this thesis, we thus handle the problem of mining temporal association rules with a hierarchy of time granules from a temporal database, and also propose three novel mining algorithms for different item lifespan definitions. In the first definition, the lifespan of an item in a time granule is calculated from the first appearance time to the end time in the time granule. In the second definition, the lifespan of an item in a time granule is evaluated from the publication time of the item to the end time in the time granule. Finally, in the third definition, the lifespan of an item in a time granule is measured by its entire exhibition period. The experimental results on a simulation dataset show the performance of the three proposed algorithms under different item lifespan definitions, and compare the mined temporal association rules with and without consideration of the hierarchy of time granules under different parameter settings.

Participating students¡¦ association at school can enhance the students¡¦ learning, all kinds of life skills and social abilities. It¡¦s not simply a part of curriculum courses, but with more significance on cultivating the concept of being gregarious and law-abiding. Arising out of this, it comprehends positively the purpose of being well-developed education. The subject of this thesis is ¡§the Operation and Administration on the Student Arts Association at Elementary Schools¡¨, enphasizing mainly on the influences on students who have already participated the arts asssociation. From my observation on the anterior research, they emphasized more on the study of music asssociation as well as pedagogy, instead of expanding thoroughly on the operation and administration on arts asssociation. This thesis takes seven arts organizations as case studies, they separately are: Orchestra, Choir, Taiwanese Golden Loin Dance, Jazz Dance Group, Arts Association, Recorder Association, and Pottery-flute Association. The purposes of this research are, firstly, make a thorough investigation on the operation mode of the Elementary Schools¡¦ Arts Association, by the theory and method of management; secondly, in order to comprehend the operation mode of Yen-Chen Elementary School¡¦s Arts association, the interviews of each individual case are applied. Also, the interview groups can be divided into five: administrants, professors, students, graduated students, and parents of students, to the amount of twenty-two cases. This thesis draws two main conclusions.One is the suggestions for operation and administration:(1)arts association demand clearer objectives;(2)they require stronger organization;(3)they call for a flexible staff;(4)they need concise plans which should be excuted with good use of resourses;(5)with the ideas of ¡¥positive aspiration¡¦ and ¡¥encouragement leadership¡¦, arts associations aim to converge comradship;(6)arts association are supposed to recruit new members and hold the old ones;(7)The mainipulation of funds should be made public;(8)Relations among arts associations should be intensified. The other part suggests that students not only learn professions, but also cultivate appreciation. Students make friends, develop abilities and have a good time in clubs. Therefore, most of students join the same association when they go to high schools. This thesis is devided into five chapters. Chapter One is the introduction about research background and theme; Chapter Two is the literature review and theory framework; Chapter Three is the method; Chapter Four is the research process; Chapter Five is the conclusion and suggestions.

¡§Kaohsiung Farm Irrigation Association¡¨ is taken as the researching topic. By means of ways of interviewing and documents reviewing, to observe how does the farmers from farm society make communicating relation through this farmer, unit by the nation¡H And how is the reaction of farmers from farm society to the sovereign of the nation¡H In the relation of mutual action between nation and society, the Water Conservancy Association is sometime the agent of idea and the executive of policy of the nation, also sometimes the unifier of farmers, opinions in farm society. This dual status makes the Water Conservancy Association the governmental and private function. So the Water Conservancy Association is the unit of half-official and half-civil. From the mutual action of association working station and farmers, we could find out why the nation to dominate this association. The farmers are controlled under the Water Conservancy Association and this Association will be the bridge between the nation and farmers. As to the function why the nation try to dominate the Water Conservancy Association, we could see the function of economical politics to be reached from the mutual action between the Association and farmers and the role the nation acted in the irrigation system. In the function of economical aspect, the Association meaning of existing is to promote the crop production and the quality of crop to improve the living level of farmers to reach the purpose of service. In the function of political aspect, the Association will be acted the important role during the election event. For example of ¡§Kaohsiung Farm Irrigation Association¡¨, it has been classified as the Red Party since Taiwan Restoration. The organization system of the Association is very tight and the member are numerous. The organization of this Association has the structure of Administration Dept., Working Station, Water Conservancy Team, Water Conservancy Section and basic members. Under the complete organization system, the chairman of this Association will control the huge power of the farmers, hence, the Water Conservancy Association is acted as the influential role of politics in the current society system. Anyway, the Association is still to be acted as the important role of ¡§election¡¨ in the function of politics. The Whole sovereign will be performed and realized by the particular tool or means. The nation is also not excepted. Because the nation controls the ¡§power of allocating the social resource¡¨ and ¡§personnel power of appointing ¡® removing to the chairman¡¨, the social qroup of this association could be under controllng. In other woeds, the Water Conservancy Association is under governing of the nation. and the nation policy could be performed even the farmers are dominated by the Association just because the above mentioned two powers and owned by the nation. Finally, the future developing direction of the Association will be discussed in this article. The Water Conservancy Association will face the transferring industrial society from agricultural society. The agricultural production will be largely reduced and the farming area will also be gradually decreased. In another aspect, after entering the WTO and under the liberalized demanding, the agriculture will be suffered from the serious impact. Under these situations, the farm service of this Association will also face the terrible strike. Plus the current financial trouble of the government, the Water Conservancy Association has to find out its own bright way -- Diversifying Investments.

Abridged version of the author's thesis, Cologne. / Bibliography: p. [237]-259.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan. / Bibliography: leaves 572-590.

I dagens konkurrensintensiva affärsvärld är företagets varumärke, som innefattar sin identitet, image och rykte, en central faktor för pålitliga och hållbara relationer mellan företaget och deras intressenter. Sponsring har blivit ett användbart arbetssätt som kan förbättra konsumenternas association till företag som traditionell reklam saknar. I tiden ligger också att arbeta med hållbar utveckling, därav används sponsring som ett verktyg inom CSR främst bland börsnoterade svenska företag. Syftet med studien är att öka förståelsen om vad som gör sponsring inom arbetet gällande hållbarhet framgångsrikt. Hur sponsring i företagandet blir ett verktyg i arbetet mot hållbar utveckling. Studien är baserad på fyra börsnoterade företag i Sverige som är verksamma inom olika branscher. Tillvägagångssättet var en multipel fallstudie av kvalitativ karaktär. Som teknik för insamling och bearbetning av data var sekundäranalys. En abduktiv ansats används då mer teori efter bearbetning av data behövdes.Vi anser att det idag finns begränsat med forskning som berör den svenska marknaden gällande hur arbetet med CSR-relaterad sponsring bör bedrivas. Därför var vår avsikt att bidra med mer kunskap som kan användas till framtida forskning inom ämnet sponsring. Vårt arbete skulle kunna ligga till grund till företag i Sverige som vill utveckla sitt hållbarhetsarbete via sponsring.Slutsatsen blev en modell som vi anser innehåller de viktigaste faktorerna för att lyckas med sponsring som ett verktyg inom hållbarhetsarbete. Modellen kan både fungera som en vägvisare för verksamheter som vill tillämpa CSR-relaterad sponsring eller som en analysmall när arbetet skall utvärderas. / In today's highly competitive business society, the company brand, which stands for its identity, image and reputation, function as a key factor for reliable and durable relationships between the company and its stakeholders. Sponsorship has become a useful approach that can improve the consumers association to companies that conventional advertising can´t. Working with sustainable development is very much in style at the moment. Sponsorship is therefore commonly used as a tool for CSR among listed Swedish companies. The purpose of this study is to increase the understanding to what makes CSR-related sponsorship successful. How sponsorship can be used as a tool while working towards sustainable development. The study is based on four listed companies in Sweden that operates in different industries. The approach we have chosen to take is a multiple-case study design using a qualitative perspective. We have also chosen to collect and process data using the technique of secondary analysis. An abductive reasoning was applied since more theory was needed to process the data collected.We feel that the studies available on the Swedish market today was very limited on the subject regarding how CSR-related sponsorship should be conducted. Therefore our main purpose was to provide more knowledge to be used in future research regarding the area of sponsorship. Our study could function as a guide to companies that want to develop their sustainability efforts through sponsorship.Our conclusion resulted in a model that we believe contain the most important factors to succeed in sponsorship as a tool of sustainability. The model can both act as a guide for companies that want to apply CSR-related sponsorship as well as an analysis template for evaluating existing work.

One of the main biological goals of recent years is to determine the genes in the human genome that cause disease. Recent technological advances have realised genome-wide association studies, which have uncovered numerous genetic regions implicated with human diseases. The current approach to analysing data from these studies is based on testing association at single SNPs but this is widely accepted as underpowered to detect rare and poorly tagged variants. In this thesis we propose several novel approaches to analysing large-scale association data, which aim to improve upon the power offered by traditional approaches. We combine an established imputation framework with a sophisticated disease model that allows for multiple disease causing mutations at a single locus. To evaluate our methods, we have developed a fast and realistic method to simulate association data conditional on population genetic data. The simulation results show that our methods remain powerful even if the causal variant is not well tagged, there are haplotypic effects or there is allelic heterogeneity. Our methods are further validated by the analysis of the recent WTCCC genome-wide association data, where we have detected confirmed disease loci, known regions of allelic heterogeneity and new signals of association. One of our methods also has the facility to identify the high risk haplotype backgrounds that harbour the disease alleles, and therefore can be used for fine-mapping. We believe that the incorporation of our methods into future association studies will help progress the understanding genetic diseases.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

No description available.

Cancer is the leading cause of deaths globally. Although liver cancer ranks only fourth in incidence worldwide among all types of cancer, its survivability rate is the lowest. Liver cancer is often diagnosed at an advanced stage, because in the early stages of the disease patients usually do not have signs or symptoms. After initial diagnosis, therapeutic options are limited and tend to be effective only for small size tumors with limited spread and minimal vascular invasion. As a result, long-term patient survival remains minimal, and has not improved in the past three decades. In order to reduce morbidity and mortality from liver cancer, improvement in early diagnosis and the evaluation of current treatments are essential. This study tested the applicability of the Apriori and FP-Growth association data mining algorithms to liver cancer patient data, obtained from the British Columbia Cancer Agency. The data was used to develop association rules which indicate what combinations of factors are most commonly observed with liver cancer incidence as well as with increased or decreased rates of mortality. Ideally, these association rules will be applied in future studies using liver cancer data extracted from other Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. The main objective of making these rules available is to facilitate early detection guidelines for liver cancer and to evaluate current treatment options. / Graduate / 0566 / 0984 / fabiola@uvic.ca