Prediction of customer churn has been one of the most interesting and challenging tasks facing most telecommunication companies recently. For the past decade, researchers together with practitioners have been working and designing models that can correctly make more accurate customer churn predictions (CCP). However, most of these models have less accuracy than expected which is hugely affecting the intended purpose. Consequently, most of these CCP models add little or nothing to the revenue growth of telecommunication industries. This work aims at improving the reliability of CCP in the telecommunication sector. To achieve this objective, a new attribute to be factored in CCP, known as the regional churn rate (RCR), is presented. Basically, RCR gives an idea about the rate of churning in a particular locality or region. Thus, a prediction model with a more accurate CCP using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier is proposed. The performance of the proposed model is critically evaluated using five metrics i.e. misclassification error, precision, recall, specificity and f-measure. At the same time, the performance of the proposed classifier (CCP with RCR) is compared with another SVM classifier which doesn’t consider RCR (CCP without RCR). Results show that the proposed model which considers the RCR of a customer’s location gives the highest accuracies for four performance metrics i.e. precision, recall, misclassification error and f-measure. Therefore, the proposed SVM-based CCP model gives a more clear indication as to whether a customer is a potential churner or not.

Handwritten Identification is an ability of the computer to receive and translate the intelligible handwritten text into machine-editable text. It is classified into two types based on the way input is given namely: off-line and online. In Off-line handwritten recognition, the input is given in the form of the image while in online input is entered on a touch screen device. The research on off-line and online handwritten Sindhi character identification is on its very initial stage in comparison to other languages. Sindhi is one of the subcontinent's oldest languages with extensive literature and rich culture. Therefore, this paper aims to identify off-line Sindhi handwritten characters. In the proposed work, major steps involve in characters identification are training and testing of the system. Training is performed using a feed-forward neural network based on the efficient accelerative technique, the Back Propagation (BP) learning algorithm with momentum term and adaptive learning rate. The dataset of 304 Sindhi handwritten characters is collected from 16 different Sindhi writers, each with 19 characters. The novelty of proposed work is the comparison of the recognition rate for the single character, two characters and three characters at a time. Results showed that the recognition rate achieved for a single character is more than the recognition rate of multiple characters at a time.

In the oil industry, the evaluation of oil viscosity is one of the important issues. Generally, the viscosity of crude oil depends on pressure and temperature. In this study, the prediction issue of oil viscosity has been viewed applying empirical correlations as Beggs-Robinson, Labedi, modified Kartoatmodjo, Elsharkawy and Alikhan, Al-Khafaji. Original field data reports have been obtained from Guneshli oil field of Azerbaijan sector of Caspian Basin. The correlation models used in the evaluation of viscosity of Azerbaijan oil have been implemented in the Python software environment. The obtained values on empirical correlations have been compared to experimental data obtained from Guneshli oil field. Statistical analysis in terms of percent absolute deviation (% AD) and the percent absolute average deviation (% AAD), mean absolute error (% MAE), correlation coefficient (% ), root mean square error (% RMSE) are used to subject the evaluation of the viscosity correlations. According to statistical analysis, it has been known that the Beggs-Robinson model has shown the lowest value on AAD (10.5614%), MAE (12.4427 %), RMSE (20.0853 %). The Labedi model has presented the worst result on every four criterions. Even though the Elsharkawy-Alikhan model has presented the highest result (99.9272%) on correlation coefficient, in the evaluation of viscosity of Azerbaijan crude oil, the Beggs-Robinson model can be considered more acceptable.

Obstacle detection is a challenging problem that has attracted much attention recently, especially in the context of research in self-driving car technologies. A number of obstacle detection technologies exist. Ultrasound is among the commonly used technologies due to its low cost compared to other technologies. This paper presents some findings on the research that has been carried out by the authors with regard to vehicle driver assistance and profiling. It discusses an experiment for detection of obstacles in a vehicle driver’s operational environment using ultrasound technology. Experiment results clearly depict the capabilities and limitations of ultrasound technology in detection of obstacles under motion and obstacles with varied surfaces. Ultrasound’s wavelength, beam width, directionality among others are put into consideration. Pros and cons of other technologies that could replace ultrasound, for instance RADAR and LIDAR technologies are also discussed. The study recommends sensor fusion where several types of sensor technologies are combined to complement one another. The study was a technical test of configurable technology that could guide future studies on obstacle detection intending to use infrared, sound, radio or laser technologies particularly when both the sensor and obstacle are in motion and when obstacles have differing unpredictable surface properties.

Recommender Systems (RSs) are essential tools of an e-commerce portal in making intelligent decisions for an individual to obtain product recommendations. Neighborhood-based approaches are traditional techniques for collaborative recommendations and are very popular due to their simplicity and efficiency. Neighborhood-based recommender systems use numerous kinds of similarity measures for finding similar users or items. However, the existing similarity measures function only on common ratings between a pair of users (i.e. ignore the uncommon ratings) thus do not utilize all ratings made by a pair of users. Furthermore, the existing similarity measures may either provide inadequate results in many situations that frequently occur in sparse data or involve very complex calculations. Therefore, there is a compelling need to define a similarity measure that can deal with such issues. This research proposes a new similarity measure for defining the similarities between users or items by using the rating data available in the user-item matrix. Firstly, we describe a way for applying the simple matching coefficient (SMC) to the common ratings between users or items. Secondly, the structural information between the rating vectors is exploited using the Jaccard index. Finally, these two factors are leveraged to define the proposed similarity measure for better recommendation accuracy. For evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed method, several experiments have been performed using standardized benchmark datasets (MovieLens-1M, 10M, and 20M). Results obtained demonstrate that the proposed method provides better predictive accuracy (in terms of MAE and RMSE) along with improved classification accuracy (in terms of precision-recall).

The Agent Petri Nets (APN) formalism provides a set of adapted and specific tools, relations and functions for modeling multi-agent systems (MAS). However, there is a lack of tools for verifying the APN models. In order to fill some of these gaps, we propose in this paper, a meta-modeling approach based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). The Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) permits to define a generic APN Meta-model in Ecore informal format. Its abstraction level is very high, it offers as a basis for developing system models dedicated to various specific domains. In addition, the Object Constraint Language (OCL) aims to increase the structural verification level of the model and the Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF), for its part, is concerned with generating a graphical editor associated with the APN meta-model. Thus, we combine the rigor of APN formalism with the power of the MDA-based meta-modeling tools for verifying APN models.