A combined SMOTE and PSO based RBF classifier for two-class imbalanced problems

This contribution proposes a powerful technique for two-class imbalanced classification problems by combining the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) and the particle swarm optimisation (PSO) aided radial basis function (RBF) classifier. In order to enhance the significance of the small and specific region belonging to the positive class in the decision region, the SMOTE is applied to generate synthetic instances for the positive class to balance the training data set. Based on the over-sampled training data, the RBF classifier is constructed by applying the orthogonal forward selection procedure, in which the classifier's structure and the parameters of RBF kernels are determined using a PSO algorithm based on the criterion of minimising the leave-one-out misclassification rate. The experimental results obtained on a simulated imbalanced data set and three real imbalanced data sets are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.

Working-class household consumption smoothing in interwar Britain

We examine the strategies interwar working-class British households used to “smooth” consumption over time and guard against negative contingencies such as illness, unemployment, and death. Newly discovered returns from the U.K. Ministry of Labour's 1937/38 Household Expenditure Survey are used to fully categorize expenditure smoothing via nineteen credit/savings vehicles. We find that households made extensive use of expenditure-smoothing devices. Families' reliance on expenditure-smoothing is shown to be inversely related to household income, while households also used these mechanisms more intensively during expenditure crisis phases of the family life cycle, especially the years immediately after new household formation.

Daisy's diary: issues surrounding teaching history through drama

In what Williams (1975) described as a dramatised world, a great deal of children’s historical knowledge is acquired through dramatised versions of historical events. As the characters who actually took part in historical events become the dramatis personae of re-enacted accounts, their stories are edited not only to meet dramatic necessities but the social, psychological and cultural needs of both storytellers and audience. The process of popularising history in this way thus becomes as much about the effects of events on people as the events themselves, so mirroring debates within history education regarding the teaching of ‘facts’ and the development of empathy. In this article, Andy Kempe explores how stories of evacuees and other ‘war children’ have been dramatised in traditional playscripts and through structured ‘process dramas’ in schools in the British Isles. It argues that drama and history as curriculum subjects may find common ground, and indeed complement each other, in the development of a critical literacy concerned not so much with either fact or empathy as with interrogating both why and how stories are told.

Exploring the construction of social class in educational discourse: the rational order of the nation state vs. global uncertainties

This article aims to create intellectual space in which issues of social inequality and education can be analyzed and discussed in relation to the multifaceted and multi-levelled complexities of the modern world. It is divided into three sections. Section One locates the concept of social class in the context of the modern nation state during the period after the Second World War. Focusing particularly on the impact of ‘Fordism’ on social organization and cultural relations, it revisits the articulation of social justice issues in the United Kingdom, and the structures put into place at the time to alleviate educational and social inequalities. Section Two problematizes the traditional concept of social class in relation to economic, technological and sociocultural changes that have taken place around the world since the mid-1980s. In particular, it charts some of the changes to the international labour market and global patterns of consumption, and their collective impact on the re-constitution of class boundaries in ‘developed countries’. This is juxtaposed with some of the major social effects of neo-classical economic policies in recent years on the sociocultural base in developing countries. It discusses some of the ways these inequalities are reflected in education. Section Three explores tensions between the educational ideals of the ‘knowledge economy’ and the discursive range of social inequalities that are emerging within and beyond the nation state. Drawing on key motifs identified throughout, the article concludes with a reassessment of the concept of social class within the global cultural economy. This is discussed in relation to some of the major equity and human rights issues in education today.

Asset allocation, cross-class correlation and the structure of property returns

Practical applications of portfolio optimisation tend to proceed on a “top down” basis where funds are allocated first at asset class level (between, say, bonds, cash, equities and real estate) and then, progressively, at sub-class level (within property to sectors, office, retail, industrial for example). While there are organisational benefits from such an approach, it can potentially lead to sub-optimal allocations when compared to a “global” or “side-by-side” optimisation. This will occur where there are correlations between sub-classes across the asset divide that are masked in aggregation – between, for instance, City offices and the performance of financial services stocks. This paper explores such sub-class linkages using UK monthly stock and property data. Exploratory analysis using clustering procedures and factor analysis suggests that property performance and equity performance are distinctive: there is little persuasive evidence of contemporaneous or lagged sub-class linkages. Formal tests of the equivalence of optimised portfolios using top-down and global approaches failed to demonstrate significant differences, whether or not allocations were constrained. While the results may be a function of measurement of market returns, it is those returns that are used to assess fund performance. Accordingly, the treatment of real estate as a distinct asset class with diversification potential seems justified.

Exact design manifold control of a class of nonlinear singularly perturbed systems

The integral manifold approach captures from a geometric point of view the intrinsic two-time-scale behavior of singularly perturbed systems. An important class of nonlinear singularly perturbed systems considered in this note are fast actuator-type systems. For a class of fast actuator-type systems, which includes many physical systems, an explicit corrected composite control, the sum of a slow control and a fast control, is derived. This corrected control will steer the system exactly to a required design manifold.

Exact design manifold control of a class of nonlinear singularly perturbed systems

The integral manifold approach captures from a geometric point of view the intrinsic two-time-scale behavior of singularly perturbed systems. An important class of nonlinear singularly perturbed systems considered in this note are fast actuator-type systems. For a class of fast actuator-type systems, which includes many physical systems, an explicit corrected composite control, the sum of a slow control and a fast control, is derived. This corrected control will steer the system exactly to a required design manifold.

On the numerical integration of a class of singular perturbation problems

A three-point difference scheme recently proposed in Ref. 1 for the numerical solution of a class of linear, singularly perturbed, two-point boundary-value problems is investigated. The scheme is derived from a first-order approximation to the original problem with a small deviating argument. It is shown here that, in the limit, as the deviating argument tends to zero, the difference scheme converges to a one-sided approximation to the original singularly perturbed equation in conservation form. The limiting scheme is shown to be stable on any uniform grid. Therefore, no advantage arises from using the deviating argument, and the most accurate and efficient results are obtained with the deviation at its zero limit.