A number of choice experiment (CE) studies have shown that survey respondents employ heuristics such as attribute non‐attendance (ANA) while evaluating food products. This paper addresses a set of ...related methodological questions using empirical consumer data from a CE on poultry meat with sustainability labels. First, it assesses whether there are differences in terms of marginal willingness to pay estimates between the two most common ways of collecting stated ANA (serial and choice task level). Second, it validates the self‐reported ANA behaviour across both approaches. Third, it explores the concordance of stated methods with that of the inferred method. Results show that WTP estimates from serial‐level data differ from those from choice task‐level data. Also, self‐reported measures on choice task ANA are found to be more congruent with model estimates than those for serial ANA, as well as with inferred ANA.
Sales, product design, and engineering teams benefit immensely from better understanding customer perspectives. How do customers combine a product's technical specifications (i.e., engineered ...attributes) to form abstract product benefits (i.e., meta-attributes)? To address this question, the authors use machine learning and natural language processing to develop a methodological framework that extracts a hierarchy of product attributes based on contextual information of how attributes are expressed in consumer reviews. The attribute hierarchy reveals linkages between engineered attributes and meta-attributes within a product category, enabling flexible sentiment analysis that can identify how consumers receive meta-attributes, and which engineered attributes are main drivers. The framework can guide managers to monitor only portions of review content that are relevant to specific attributes of interest. Moreover, managers can compare products within and between brands, where different names and attribute combinations are often associated with similar benefits. The authors apply the framework to the tablet computer category to generate dashboards and perceptual maps and provide validations of the attribute hierarchy using both primary and secondary data. Resultant insights allow the exploration of substantive questions, such as how Apple improved successive generations of iPads and why Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba discontinued their tablet product lines.
Information management is a common paradigm in modern decision-making. A wide range of decision-making techniques have been proposed in the literature to model complex business and engineering ...processes. In this Special Issue, 16 selected and peer-reviewed original research articles contribute to business information management in various current real-world problems by proposing crisp or uncertain multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) models and techniques, mostly including multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) approaches, in addition to a single paper proposing an interactive multi-objective decision-making (MODM) approach. Particular attention is devoted to information aggregation operators—65% of papers dealt with this item. The topics of this Special Issue gained attention in Europe and Asia. A total of 48 authors from seven countries contributed to this Issue. The papers are mainly concentrated in three application areas: supplier selection and rational order allocation, the evaluation and selection of goods or facilities, and personnel selection/partner selection. A number of new approaches are proposed that are expected to attract great interest from the research community.
Model learning from class imbalanced training data is a long-standing and significant challenge for machine learning. In particular, existing deep learning methods consider mostly either class ...balanced data or moderately imbalanced data in model training, and ignore the challenge of learning from significantly imbalanced training data. To address this problem, we formulate a class imbalanced deep learning model based on batch-wise incremental minority (sparsely sampled) class rectification by hard sample mining in majority (frequently sampled) classes during model training. This model is designed to minimise the dominant effect of majority classes by discovering sparsely sampled boundaries of minority classes in an iterative batch-wise learning process. To that end, we introduce a Class Rectification Loss (CRL) function that can be deployed readily in deep network architectures. Extensive experimental evaluations are conducted on three imbalanced person attribute benchmark datasets (CelebA, X-Domain, DeepFashion) and one balanced object category benchmark dataset (CIFAR-100). These experimental results demonstrate the performance advantages and model scalability of the proposed batch-wise incremental minority class rectification model over the existing state-of-the-art models for addressing the problem of imbalanced data learning.
Face attribute estimation has many potential applications in video surveillance, face retrieval, and social media. While a number of methods have been proposed for face attribute estimation, most of ...them did not explicitly consider the attribute correlation and heterogeneity (e.g., ordinal versus nominal and holistic versus local) during feature representation learning. In this paper, we present a Deep Multi-Task Learning (DMTL) approach to jointly estimate multiple heterogeneous attributes from a single face image. In DMTL, we tackle attribute correlation and heterogeneity with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) consisting of shared feature learning for all the attributes, and category-specific feature learning for heterogeneous attributes. We also introduce an unconstrained face database (LFW+), an extension of public-domain LFW, with heterogeneous demographic attributes (age, gender, and race) obtained via crowdsourcing. Experimental results on benchmarks with multiple face attributes (MORPH II, LFW+, CelebA, LFWA, and FotW) show that the proposed approach has superior performance compared to state of the art. Finally, evaluations on a public-domain face database (LAP) with a single attribute show that the proposed approach has excellent generalization ability.
Three-way concept analysis is a newly proposed area of formal concept analysis from which one can obtain both the inclusion decision and the exclusion decision. In general, given a context, some ...attributes may not be essential in three-way concept analysis, such as forming three-way concept lattice. So in this paper, we study the attribute reductions of three-way concept lattices in order to make the data easily be understood. Firstly, based on different criteria generated from object-induced three-way concept (OE-concept), four kinds of attribute reductions are proposed. The four reductions together embody different characteristics of a formal context and can be used in different occasions. Secondly, we discuss their relationships, including their advantages and disadvantages and the relationships among consistent sets and among the cores. Thirdly, based on attribute-induced three-way concept (AE-concept), we also give four attribute-induced three-way attribute reductions and discuss their relationships. Finally, the approaches to computing these attribute reductions are presented and the obtained results are demonstrated and verified by an empirical case. In this paper, we systematically investigate the attribute reductions of three-way concept lattices which enriches the study of formal concept analysis.
Facial attribute editing aims to manipulate single or multiple attributes on a given face image, i.e., to generate a new face image with desired attributes while preserving other details. Recently, ...the generative adversarial net (GAN) and encoder-decoder architecture are usually incorporated to handle this task with promising results. Based on the encoder-decoder architecture, facial attribute editing is achieved by decoding the latent representation of a given face conditioned on the desired attributes. Some existing methods attempt to establish an attribute-independent latent representation for further attribute editing. However, such attribute-independent constraint on the latent representation is excessive because it restricts the capacity of the latent representation and may result in information loss, leading to over-smooth or distorted generation. Instead of imposing constraints on the latent representation, in this work, we propose to apply an attribute classification constraint to the generated image to just guarantee the correct change of desired attributes, i.e., to change what you want. Meanwhile, the reconstruction learning is introduced to preserve attribute-excluding details, in other words, to only change what you want. Besides, the adversarial learning is employed for visually realistic editing. These three components cooperate with each other forming an effective framework for high quality facial attribute editing, referred as AttGAN. Furthermore, the proposed method is extended for attribute style manipulation in an unsupervised manner. Experiments on two wild datasets, CelebA and LFW, show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art on realistic attribute editing with other facial details well preserved.
Attribute reduction serves as a pivotal topic of rough set theory for data analysis. The ideas of tri-level thinking from three-way decision can shed new light on three-level attribute reduction. ...Existing classification-specific and class-specific attribute reducts consider only macro-top and meso-middle levels. This paper introduces a micro-bottom level of object-specific reducts. The existing two types of reducts apply to the global classification with all objects and a local class with partial objects, respectively. The new type applies to an individual object. These three types of reducts constitute tri-level attribute reducts. Their development and hierarchy are worthy of systematical explorations. Firstly, object-specific reducts are defined by object consistency from dependency, and they improve both classification-specific and class-specific reducts. Secondly, tri-level reducts are unified by tri-level consistency. Hierarchical relationships between object-specific reducts and class-specific, classification-specific reducts are analyzed, and relevant connections of three-way classifications of attributes are given. Finally, tri-level reducts are systematically analyzed, and two approaches, i.e., the direct calculation and hierarchical transition, are suggested for constructing a specific reduct. We build a framework of tri-level thinking and analysis of attribute reduction to enrich three-way granular computing. Tri-level reducts lead to the sequential development and hierarchical deepening of attribute reduction, and their results profit intelligence processing and system reasoning.
•Object-specific attribute reducts are proposed by object consistency from dependency.•Object-specific reducts improve classification-specific and class-specific reducts.•Tri-level attribute reducts present both series development and hierarchy deepening.•Tri-level reducts gain hierarchical relationships and transitions, direct calculations.•Tri-level thinking and analysis of attribute reduction enrich three-way Gr-Computing.
Multiple attribute decision making (MADM) problems often consists of quantitative and qualitative attributes which can be assessed by numerical values and subjective judgments. Subjective judgments ...can be evaluated by linguistic variables, and both numerical values and subjective judgments can be accurate or uncertain. The evidential reasoning (ER) approach provides a process for dealing with MADM problems of both a quantitative and qualitative nature under uncertainty. The existing ER approach considers both benefit and cost attributes in the evidence combination process. In this paper, deviated interval and fixed interval attributes are introduced into ER based MADM approach and the frames of discernment for representing these two kinds of attributes are given. The transformation rules from the assessment values of deviated interval attributes to belief degrees in the ER structure are then studied. An ave-entropy based weight assignment method considering the risk preference of decision maker is also shown to deal with uncertain assessment situation, such as belief distribution with qualitative attribute and uncertain utility function. Some programming models to generate interval weights and utilities are constructed. The rationality and efficiency of the methods in supporting MADM problems are discussed. Two case studies are provided to demonstrate the applicability and validity of the proposed approaches and the potential in supporting MADM under uncertainty.
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