Shouyang Wang

Youcheng Lou, Yiguang Hong, Shouyang Wang

In this paper, we investigate the distributed shortest distance optimization problem for a multi-agent network to cooperatively minimize the sum of the quadratic distances from some convex sets, where each set is only associated with one agent. To deal with the optimization problem with projection uncertainties, we propose a distributed continuous-time dynamical protocol based on a new concept of approximate projection. Here each agent can only obtain an approximate projection point on the boundary of its convex set, and communicate with its neighbors over a time-varying communication graph. First, we show that no matter how large the approximate angle is, the system states are always bounded for any initial condition, and uniformly bounded with respect to all initial conditions if the inferior limit of the stepsize is greater than zero. Then, in the two cases, nonempty intersection and empty intersection of convex sets, we provide stepsize and approximate angle conditions to ensure the optimal convergence, respectively. Moreover, we give some characterizations about the optimal solutions for the empty intersection case and also present the convergence error between agents' estimates and the optimal point in the case of constant stepsizes and approximate angles.

Dan Bi, Ju-e Guo, Erlong Zhao et al.

With the booming of the unconventional oil and gas industry, its inevitable damage to the environment and human health has attracted public attention. We applied text mining on a total 6057 the type of Environmental Health and Safety compliance reports from 2008 to 2018 lunched by the Department of Environmental Protection in Pennsylvania, USA, to discover the intern mechanism of environmental violations.

Shaolong Suna, Dan Bi, Ju-e Guo et al.

The accurate seasonal and trend forecasting of tourist arrivals is a very challenging task. In the view of the importance of seasonal and trend forecasting of tourist arrivals, and limited research work paid attention to these previously. In this study, a new adaptive multiscale ensemble (AME) learning approach incorporating variational mode decomposition (VMD) and least square support vector regression (LSSVR) is developed for short-, medium-, and long-term seasonal and trend forecasting of tourist arrivals. In the formulation of our developed AME learning approach, the original tourist arrivals series are first decomposed into the trend, seasonal and remainders volatility components. Then, the ARIMA is used to forecast the trend component, the SARIMA is used to forecast seasonal component with a 12-month cycle, while the LSSVR is used to forecast remainder volatility components. Finally, the forecasting results of the three components are aggregated to generate an ensemble forecasting of tourist arrivals by the LSSVR based nonlinear ensemble approach. Furthermore, a direct strategy is used to implement multi-step-ahead forecasting. Taking two accuracy measures and the Diebold-Mariano test, the empirical results demonstrate that our proposed AME learning approach can achieve higher level and directional forecasting accuracy compared with other benchmarks used in this study, indicating that our proposed approach is a promising model for forecasting tourist arrivals with high seasonality and volatility.

Shaolong Sun, Yanzhao Li, Ju-e Guo et al.

The availability of tourism-related big data increases the potential to improve the accuracy of tourism demand forecasting, but presents significant challenges for forecasting, including curse of dimensionality and high model complexity. A novel bagging-based multivariate ensemble deep learning approach integrating stacked autoencoders and kernel-based extreme learning machines (B-SAKE) is proposed to address these challenges in this study. By using historical tourist arrival data, economic variable data and search intensity index (SII) data, we forecast tourist arrivals in Beijing from four countries. The consistent results of multiple schemes suggest that our proposed B-SAKE approach outperforms benchmark models in terms of level accuracy, directional accuracy and even statistical significance. Both bagging and stacked autoencoder can effectively alleviate the challenges brought by tourism big data and improve the forecasting performance of the models. The ensemble deep learning model we propose contributes to tourism forecasting literature and benefits relevant government officials and tourism practitioners.