Recommending a retail business given a particular location of interest is nontrivial. Such a recommendation process requires careful study of demographics, trade area characteristics, sales performance, traffic, and environmental features. It is not only human effort taxing but often introduces inconsistency due to subjectivity in expert opinions. The process becomes more challenging when no sales data can be used to make a recommendation. As an attempt to overcome the challenges, this study used the machine learning approach that utilizes similarity measures to perform the recommendation. However, two challenges required careful attention when using the machine learning approach: (1) how to prepare a feature set that can commonly represent different types of retail business and (2) which similarity measure approach produces optimal recommendation accuracy? The data sets used in this study consist of points of interest, population, property, job type, and education level. Empirical studies were conducted to investigate (1) the overall accuracy of proposed similarity measure approaches to the retail business recommendation, and (2) whether the proposed approaches have a bias toward certain retail categories. In summary, the findings suggested that the proposed similarity-based techniques elicited an accuracy of above 70% and demonstrated higher accuracy when the recommendation was made within a set of similar retail businesses.
Studies have shown that certain features from geography, demography, trade area, and environment can play a vital role in retail site selection, largely due to the impact they asserted on retail performance. Although the relevant features could be elicited by domain experts, determining the optimal feature set can be intractable and labor-intensive exercise. The challenges center around (1) how to determine features that are important to a particular retail business and (2) how to estimate retail sales performance given a new location? The challenges become apparent when the features vary across time. In this light, this study proposed a nonintervening approach by employing feature selection algorithms and subsequently sales prediction through similarity-based methods. The results of prediction were validated by domain experts. In this study, data sets from different sources were transformed and aggregated before an analytics data set that is ready for analysis purpose could be obtained. The data sets included data about feature location, population count, property type, education status, and monthly sales from 96 branches of a telecommunication company in Malaysia. The finding suggested that (1) optimal retail performance can only be achieved through fulfillment of specific location features together with the surrounding trade area characteristics and (2) similarity-based method can provide solution to retail sales prediction.
In light of developing and industrialized nations, the G20 economies account for a whopping two-thirds of the world's population and are the largest economies globally. Public emergencies have occasionally arisen due to the rapid spread of COVID-19 globally, impacting many people's lives, especially in G20 countries. Thus, this study is written to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on stock market performance in G20 countries. This study uses daily stock market data of G20 countries from January 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020. The stock market data were divided into G7 countries and non-G7 countries. The data were analyzed using Long Short-Term Memory with a Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN) approach. The result indicated a gap between the actual stock market index and a forecasted time series that would have happened without COVID-19. Owing to movement restrictions, this study found that stock markets in six countries, including Argentina, China, South Africa, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, are affected negatively. Besides that, movement restrictions in the G7 countries, excluding the United States, and the non-G20 countries, excluding Argentina, China, South Africa, Turkey, and Saudi, significantly impact the stock market performance. Generally, LSTM prediction estimates relative terms, except for stock market performance in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea, South Africa, and Spain. The stock market performance in the United Kingdom and Spain countries has significantly reduced during and after the occurrence of COVID-19. It indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic considerably influenced the stock markets of 14 G20 countries, whereas less severely impacting 6 remaining countries. In conclusion, our empirical evidence showed that the pandemic had restricted effects on the stock market performance in G20 countries.
Sharing individual patient data (IPD) is a simple concept but complex to achieve due to data privacy and data security concerns, underdeveloped guidelines, and legal barriers. Sharing IPD is additionally difficult in big data-driven collaborations such as Bigdata@Heart in the Innovative Medicines Initiative, due to competing interests between diverse consortium members. One project within BigData@Heart, case study 1, needed to pool data from seven heterogeneous data sets: five randomized controlled trials from three different industry partners, and two disease registries. Sharing IPD was not considered feasible due to legal requirements and the sensitive medical nature of these data. In addition, harmonizing the data sets for a federated data analysis was difficult due to capacity constraints and the heterogeneity of the data sets. An alternative option was to share summary statistics through contingency tables. Here it is demonstrated that this method along with anonymization methods to ensure patient anonymity had minimal loss of information. Although sharing IPD should continue to be encouraged and strived for, our approach achieved a good balance between data transparency while protecting patient privacy. It also allowed a successful collaboration between industry and academia.
The stock market is heavily influenced by global sentiment, which is full of uncertainty and is characterized by extreme values and linear and nonlinear variables. High-frequency data generally refer to data that are collected at a very fast rate based on days, hours, minutes, and even seconds. Stock prices fluctuate rapidly and even at extremes along with changes in the variables that affect stock fluctuations. Research on investment risk estimation in the stock market that can identify extreme values is nonlinear, reliable in multivariate cases, and uses high-frequency data that are very important. The extreme value theory (EVT) approach can detect extreme values. This method is reliable in univariate cases and very complicated in multivariate cases. The purpose of this research was to collect, characterize, and analyze the investment risk estimation literature to identify research gaps. The literature used was selected by applying the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) and sourced from Sciencedirect.com and Scopus databases. A total of 1107 articles were produced from the search at the identification stage, reduced to 236 in the eligibility stage, and 90 articles in the included studies set. The bibliometric networks were visualized using the VOSviewer software, and the main keyword used as the search criteria is "VaR." The visualization showed that EVT, the Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models, and historical simulation are models often used to estimate the investment risk; the application of the machine learning (ML)-based investment risk estimation model is low. There has been no research using a combination of EVT and ML to estimate the investment risk. The results showed that the hybrid model produced better Value-at-Risk (VaR) accuracy under uncertainty and nonlinear conditions. Generally, models only use daily return data as model input. Based on research gaps, a hybrid model framework for estimating risk measures is proposed using a combination of EVT and ML, using multivariable and high-frequency data to identify extreme values in the distribution of data. The goal is to produce an accurate and flexible estimated risk value against extreme changes and shocks in the stock market. Mathematics Subject Classification: 60G25; 62M20; 6245; 62P05; 91G70.
In the last 2 years, there has been a significant upswing in oil prices, leading to a decline in economic activity and demand. This trend holds substantial implications for the global economy, particularly within the emerging business landscape. Among the influential risk factors impacting the returns of shipping stocks, none looms larger than the volatility in oil prices. Yet, only a limited number of studies have explored the complex relationship between oil price shocks and the dynamics of the liner shipping industry, with specific focus on uncertainty linkages and potential diversification strategies. This study aims to investigate the co-movements and asymmetric associations between oil prices (specifically, West Texas Intermediate and Brent) and the stock returns of three prominent shipping companies from Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan. The results unequivocally highlight the indispensable role of oil prices in shaping both short-term and long-term shipping stock returns. In addition, the research underscores the statistical significance of exchange rates and interest rates in influencing these returns, with their effects varying across different time horizons. Notably, shipping stock prices exhibit heightened sensitivity to positive movements in oil prices, while exchange rates and interest rates exert contrasting impacts, one being positive and the other negative. These findings collectively illuminate the profound influence of market sentiment regarding crucial economic indicators within the global shipping sector.