In this paper we construct thirteen different types of composite indices by linear combination of indicator variables (with and without outliers/data corruption). Weights of different indicator variables are obtained by maximization of the sum of squared (and, alternatively, absolute)...

Our objective in this paper is to compare the performance of the Differential Evolution (DE) and the Repulsive Particle Swarm (RPS) methods of global optimization. To this end, some relatively difficult test functions have been chosen. These functions are: Perm, Power-Sum, Bukin, Zero-Sum,...

In this paper we compare the performance of the Differential Evolution (DE) and the Repulsive Particle Swarm (RPS) methods of global optimization. To this end, seventy test functions have been chosen. Among these test functions, some are new while others are well known in the literature; some are...

The classical canonical correlation analysis is extremely greedy to maximize the squared correlation between two sets of variables. As a result, if one of the variables in the dataset-1 is very highly correlated with another variable in the dataset-2, the canonical correlation will be very high...

On many occasions we need to construct an index that represents a number of variables. Cost of living index, general price index, human development index, index of level of development, etc are some of the examples that are constructed by a weighted (linear) aggregation of a host of variables....

Meghalaya, a state in the North Eastern India, is inhabited by over 2.3 million of population of which 70 percent are Christian, 13 percent are Hindus and a little over 4 percent are Muslims as obtained in the Census 2001. In this study we investigate if numerical dominance of a community leads...

On many occasions we need to construct an index that represents a number of variables. Cost of living index, general price index, human development index, index of level of development, etc are some of the examples that are constructed by a weighted (linear) aggregation of a host of variables....

The objective of this paper is to introduce a new population-based (stochastic) heuristic to search the global optimum of a (continuous) multi-modal function and to assess its performance (on a fairly large number of benchmark functions) vis-à-vis that of two other well-established and very...