Feature selection can efficiently identify the most informative features with respect to the target feature used in training. However, state-of-the-art vector-based methods are unable to encapsulate the relationships between feature samples into the feature selection process, thus leading to significant information loss. To address this problem, we propose a new graph-based structurally interacting elastic net method for feature selection. Specifically, we commence by constructing feature graphs that can incorporate pairwise relationship between samples. With the feature graphs to hand, we propose a new information theoretic criterion to measure the joint relevance of different pairwise feature combinations with respect to the target feature graph representation. This measure is used to obtain a structural interaction matrix where the elements represent the proposed information theoretic measure between feature pairs. We then formulate a new optimization model through the combination of the structural interaction matrix and an elastic net regression model for the feature subset selection problem. This allows us to a) preserve the information of the original vectorial space, b) remedy the information loss of the original feature space caused by using graph representation, and c) promote a sparse solution and also encourage correlated features to be selected. Because the proposed optimization problem is non-convex, we develop an efficient alternating direction multiplier method (ADMM) to locate the optimal solutions. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Due to cultural differences, ethnic minority construction workers are more difficult to manage and more vulnerable to accidents. This study aims to identify the major barriers faced by ethnic minority workers from their own perspectives and to determine potential strategies to enhance the safety climate of construction projects, thus ultimately improving their safety performance. A survey with the modified nordic safety climate questionnaire was conducted for a certain subcontractor in Hong Kong. In-depth interviews, status quo description, major challenge investigation and safety knowledge tests were also carried out. The top three most important safety challenges identified were improper stereotypes from the whole industry, lack of opportunities for job assignment and language barriers. To improve the safety performance, employers should allocate sufficient personal protective equipment and governments should organize unannounced site visits more frequently. Also, the higher-level management should avoid giving contradictory instructions to foremen against the standards of supervisors.

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Abstract. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending is an online platform to facilitate borrowing and investment transactions. A central problem for these P2P platforms is how to identify the most influential factors that are closely related to the credit risks. This problem is inherently complex due to the various forms of risks and the numerous influencing factors involved. Moreover, raw data of P2P lending are often high-dimension, highly correlated and unstable, making the problem more untractable by traditional statistical and machine learning approaches. To address these problems, we develop a novel filter-based feature selection method for P2P lending analysis. Unlike most traditional feature selection methods that use vectorial features, the proposed method is based on graph-based features and thus incorporates the relationships between pairwise feature samples into the feature selection process. Since the graph-based features are by nature completed weighted graphs, we use the steady state random walk to encapsulate the main characteristics of the graph-based features. Specifically, we compute a probability distribution of the walk visiting the vertices. Furthermore, we measure the discriminant power of each graph-based feature with respect to the target feature, through the Jensen-Shannon divergence measure between the probability distributions from the random walks. We select an optimal subset of features based on the most relevant graph-based features, through the Jensen-Shannon divergence measure. Unlike most existing state-of-the-art feature selection methods, the proposed method can accommodate both continuous and discrete target features. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed feature selection algorithm on the problem of P2P lending platforms in China.