User driven multi-criteria source selection

A new evaluation framework for the assessment of wastewater heat recovery potential coupled with wastewater reuse

The integration of wastewater heat recovery (WWHR) and wastewater reuse offers a numerous advantage, making its application possible in various sectors. Nevertheless, this concept faced challenges to the identification of appropriate location. Existing research lacks comprehensive evaluation methods that encompass a various factor for effective decision-making. This study introduces a new evaluation framework that involves different aspects, including thermal energy potential and spatial distribution analysis. The novelty of this research lies in its unique focus on the combination of WWHR and wastewater reuse. Moreover, it introduces a structured evaluation framework that considers multiple criteria and expert opinions, enhancing decision-making precision. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) was applied to select assessment criteria, which were categorized into three aspects: water-energy supplier, water-energy consumers, and water-energy station. The relative importance of criteria was determined using the analytical hierarchical process (AHP). The results of the AHP highlight significance of factors: treated wastewater flow rate; treated wastewater temperature; water-energy supply distance, and type of water-energy consumer. These factors were assigned weight values of 0.297, 0.186, 0.123, and 0.096, respectively. It is emphasizing their influence in the decision-making process that potential locations depend on the water-energy supplier and water-energy consumer as supply and demand sources.

Fairness-Aware Data Integration

Machine learning can be applied in applications that take decisions that impact people’s lives. Such techniques have the potential to make decision making more objective, but there also is a risk that the decisions can discriminate against certain groups as a result of bias in the underlying data. Reducing bias, or promoting fairness, has been a focus of significant investigation in machine learning, for example based on pre-processing the training data, changing the learning algorithm, or post-processing the results of the learning. However, prior to these activities, data integration discovers and integrates the data that is used for training, and data integration processes have the potential to produce data that leads to biased conclusions. In this paper, we propose an approach that generates schema mappings in ways that take into account: (i) properties that are intrinsic to mapping results that may give rise to bias in analyses; and (ii) bias observed in classifiers trained on the results of different sets of mappings. The approach explores a space of different ways of integrating the data, using a tabu search algorithm, guided by bias-aware objective functions that represent different types of bias.The resulting approach is evaluated using Adult Census and German Credit datasets, to explore the extent to which and the circumstances in which the approach can increase the fairness of the results of the data integration process.

Data Source Selection Based on an Improved Greedy Genetic Algorithm

The development of information technology has led to a sharp increase in data volume. The tremendous amount of data has become a strategic capital that allows businesses to derive superior market intelligence or improve existing operations. People expect to consolidate and utilize data as much as possible. However, too much data will bring huge integration cost, such as the cost of purchasing and cleaning. Therefore, under the context of limited resources, obtaining more data integration value is our expectation. In addition, the uneven quality of data sources make the multi-source selection task more difficult, and low-quality data sources can seriously affect integration results without the desired quality gain. In this paper, we have studied how to balance data gain and cost in the source selection, specifically, maximizing the gain of data on the premise of a given budget. We proposed an improved greedy genetic algorithm (IGGA) to solve the problem of source selection, and carried out a wide range of experimental evaluations on the real and synthetic dataset. The empirical results show considerable performance in favor of the proposed algorithm in terms of solution quality.