Search Results (3)

Super Typhoon Rai damaged Siargao’s tourism industry. Despite the reconstruction projects, there was still evidence of limited resources, destructed infrastructures, and destroyed natural resources. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the significant factors influencing tourists’ intentions to revisit Siargao after Super Typhoon Rai using feature selection, logistic regression (LR), and an artificial neural network (ANN). It employed three feature-selection techniques, namely, the filter method’s permutation importance (PI), the wrapper method’s Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), and the embedded method’s Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO). Each feature-selection technique was integrated into LR and the ANN. LASSO-ANN, with a 97.8146% model accuracy, was found to be the best machine-learning algorithm. The LASSO model performed at its best with a 0.0007 LASSO alpha value, resulting in 35 subfeatures and 8 primary features. LASSO subsets underwent the ANN model procedure, and the optimal parameter combination was 70% training size, 30% testing size, 30 hidden-layer nodes, tanh hidden-layer activation, sigmoid output-layer activation, and Adam optimization. All eight features were found to be significant. Among them, hedonic motivation and awareness of Typhoon Rai’s impact were considered the top-tier post-typhoon tourism factors, as they maintained at least 97% prediction accuracy. The findings could be elaborated by combining feature-selection techniques, utilizing demographic characteristics, assessing Siargao’s tourism before the typhoon, and expanding the context and participant selection. Nevertheless, none of the existing studies explored the combination of feature selection, LR, and ANNs in a post-typhoon tourism context. These unique methods and significant findings represent the study’s novelty. Furthermore, practical contributions were provided through economic resolutions focusing on tourism activities and communication revamping by the government, media outlets, and transportation companies. Full article

In light field compression, graph-based coding is powerful to exploit signal redundancy along irregular shapes and obtains good energy compaction. However, apart from high time complexity to process high dimensional graphs, their graph construction method is highly sensitive to the accuracy of disparity information between viewpoints. In real-world light field or synthetic light field generated by computer software, the use of disparity information for super-rays projection might suffer from inaccuracy due to vignetting effect and large disparity between views in the two types of light fields, respectively. This paper introduces two novel projection schemes resulting in less error in disparity information, in which one projection scheme can also significantly reduce computation time for both encoder and decoder. Experimental results show projection quality of super-pixels across views can be considerably enhanced using the proposals, along with rate-distortion performance when compared against original projection scheme and HEVC-based or JPEG Pleno-based coding approaches. Full article

Type I collagen, the predominant protein of vertebrates, assembles into fibrils that orchestrate the form and function of bone, tendon, skin, and other tissues. Collagen plays roles in hemostasis, wound healing, angiogenesis, and biomineralization, and its dysfunction contributes to fibrosis, atherosclerosis, cancer metastasis, and brittle bone disease. To elucidate the type I collagen structure-function relationship, we constructed a type I collagen fibril interactome, including its functional sites and disease-associated mutations. When projected onto an X-ray diffraction model of the native collagen microfibril, data revealed a matrix interaction domain that assumes structural roles including collagen assembly, crosslinking, proteoglycan (PG) binding, and mineralization, and the cell interaction domain supporting dynamic aspects of collagen biology such as hemostasis, tissue remodeling, and cell adhesion. Our type III collagen interactome corroborates this model. We propose that in quiescent tissues, the fibril projects a structural face; however, tissue injury releases blood into the collagenous stroma, triggering exposure of the fibrils’ cell and ligand binding sites crucial for tissue remodeling and regeneration. Applications of our research include discovery of anti-fibrotic antibodies and elucidating their interactions with collagen, and using insights from our angiogenesis studies and collagen structure-function model to inform the design of super-angiogenic collagens and collagen mimetics. Full article