Publications Database

Welcome to the new Schulich Peer-Reviewed Publication Database!

The database is currently in beta-testing and will be updated with more features as time goes on. In the meantime, stakeholders are free to explore our faculty’s numerous works. The left-hand panel affords the ability to search by the following:

  • Faculty Member’s Name;
  • Area of Expertise;
  • Whether the Publication is Open-Access (free for public download);
  • Journal Name; and
  • Date Range.

At present, the database covers publications from 2012 to 2020, but will extend further back in the future. In addition to listing publications, the database includes two types of impact metrics: Altmetrics and Plum. The database will be updated annually with most recent publications from our faculty.

If you have any questions or input, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

 

Search Results

Sadorsky, P. (2021). "A Random Forests Approach to Predicting Clean Energy Stock Prices", Journal of Risk and Financial Management, 14(2), 48.

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Akbari, A., Ng, L. and Solnik, B. (2021). "Drivers of Global Market Integration: A Machine Learning Approach", 61, 82-102.

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Abstract We propose a new approach to identifying drivers of economic and financial integration, separately, and across emerging and developed countries. Our advanced machine learning technique allows for nonlinear relationships, corrects for over-fitting, and is less prone to noise. It also can tackle a large number of highly correlated explanatory variables and controls for multicollinearity. Results suggest that general economic growth, increasing international trade, and contained population growth have helped emerging countries catch up to the level of the economic integration of developed countries. However, slow financial development and a high level of investment riskiness have hindered the speed of emerging countries’ financial integration. Furthermore, the results suggest that integration is a gradual process and is not driven by cyclical or transitory events.

Babier, A., Chan, T., Diamant, A., Mahmood, R. and McNiven, A. (2020). "The Importance of Evaluating the Complete Knowledge-Based Automated Planning Pipeline", European Journal of Medical Physics, 72, 73-79 .

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Abstract We determine how prediction methods combine with optimization methods in two-stage knowledge-based planning (KBP) pipelines to produce radiation therapy treatment plans. We trained two dose prediction methods, a generative adversarial network (GAN) and a random forest (RF) with the same 130 treatment plans. The models were applied to 87 out-of-sample patients to create two sets of predicted dose distributions that were used as input to two optimization models. The first optimization model, inverse planning (IP), estimates weights for dose-objectives from a predicted dose distribution and generates new plans using conventional inverse planning. The second optimization model, dose mimicking (DM), minimizes the sum of one-sided quadratic penalties between the predictions and the generated plans using several dose-objectives. Altogether, four KBP pipelines (GAN-IP, GAN-DM, RF-IP, and RF-DM) were constructed and benchmarked against the corresponding clinical plans using clinical criteria; the error of both prediction methods was also evaluated. The best performing plans were GAN-IP plans, which satisfied the same criteria as their corresponding clinical plans (78%) more often than any other KBP pipeline. However, GAN did not necessarily provide the best prediction for the second-stage optimization models. Specifically, both the RF-IP and RF-DM plans satisfied the same criteria as the clinical plans 25% and 15% more often than GAN-DM plans (the worst performing plans), respectively. GAN predictions also had a higher mean absolute error (3.9 Gy) than those from RF (3.6 Gy). We find that state-of-the-art prediction methods when paired with different optimization algorithms, produce treatment plans with considerable variation in quality.

Chan, T., Diamant, A. and Mahmood, R. (2020). "Sampling from the Complement of a Polyhedron: An MCMC Algorithm for Data Augmentation", Operations Research Letters, 48(6), 744-751.

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Abstract We present an MCMC algorithm for sampling from the complement of a polyhedron. Our approach is based on the Shake-and-bake algorithm for sampling from the boundary of a set and provably covers the complement. We use this algorithm for data augmentation in a machine learning task of classifying a hidden feasible set in a data-driven optimization pipeline. Numerical results on simulated and MIPLIB instances demonstrate that our algorithm, along with a supervised learning technique, outperforms conventional unsupervised baselines.

Bai, X., Ge, Y., Li, Z. and Peng, Z. (Forthcoming). "What Will Be Popular Next? Predicting Hotspots inTwo-mode Social Networks", MIS Quarterly.

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Abstract In social networks, social foci are physical or virtual entities around which social individuals organize joint activities, for example, places and products (physical form) or opinions and services (virtual form). Forecasting which social foci will diffuse to more social individuals is important for managerial functions such as marketing and public management operations. Considering diffusive social adoptions, prior studies on user adoptive behavior in social networks have focused on single-item adoption in homogeneous networks. We advance this body of research by modeling scenarios with multi-item adoption and learning the relative propagation of social foci in concurrent social diffusions for online social networking platforms. To be specific, we distinguish two types of social nodes in our two-mode social network model: social foci and social actors. Based on social network theories, we identify and operationalize factors that drive social adoption within the two-mode social network. We also capture the interdependencies between social actors and social foci using a bilateral recursive process, specifically, a mutual reinforcement process that converges to an analytical form. Thus, we develop a gradient learning method based on mutual reinforcement process (GLMR) that targets the optimal parameter configuration for pairwise ranking of social diffusions. Further, we demonstrate analytical properties of the proposed method such as guaranteed convergence and the convergence rate. In the evaluation, we benchmark the proposed method against prevalent methods, and we demonstrate its superior performance using three real-world data sets that cover adoption of both physical and virtual entities in online social networking platforms.