Mobile phone location data is a newly emerging data source of great potential to support human mobility research. However, recent studies have indicated that many users can be easily re-identified based on their unique activity patterns. Privacy protection procedures will usually change the original data and cause a loss of data utility for analysis purposes. Therefore, the need for detailed da...

Reputation systems aim to reduce the risk of loss due to untrustworthy participants. This loss is aggravated by dishonest advisors trying to pollute the e-market environment for their selfinterest. A major task of a reputation system is to promote and encourage advisors who repeatedly respond with fair advice and to apply an opinion filtering or honesty checking mechanism to detect and resist d...

This paper examines the life cycle profile of disaggregated nondurable expenditures for Chinese urban households. The result shows that aggregated expenditure conceals substantial heterogeneity in the life-cycle pattern of expenditure subcomponents and underestimates the uninsurable permanent income risk that households face. Based on the observed empirical pattern, I test how much of the adjus...

BACKGROUND Using the aggregated data of all sentinel sero-surveys (1991 to 2007), this study aimed to report the HIV trend among Iranian prisoners. METHOD Overall, we analysed the aggregated data from 397 HIV sero-surveys conducted in 72 prisons (included 155,771 prisoners) from 1991 through 2007. RESULTS The overall HIV prevalence was 2.8% (95% CI: 1.8%-4.3%). In 1998, HIV prevalence drama...

Fuzzy control is one of the most important parts of fuzzy theory for which several approaches exist. Mamdani uses $alpha$-cuts and builds the union of the membership functions which is called the aggregated consequence function. The resulting function is the starting point of the defuzzification process. In this article, we define a more natural way to calculate the aggregated consequence funct...