Mature Cooperative Groups Seeking New Identities: The Case of Belgium

The cooperative sector in Belgium has always been very much linked to other social movements. In the 1990s the backbone of the sector, namely the cooperative banks, have undergone major transformations. In this article, the two most important cooperative financial holdings that were created to replace the stand-alone cooperative banks are looked at: the Cera and the ARCO-group. We see that they follow a similar path but have opted for a slightly different positioning in the Belgian social and economic landscape. Both have sought a new identity by repositioning themselves vis-à-vis the market, civil society and the state. The consequences of the new “cooperative trilemma†are gradually becoming clear.cooperative, social movement, sustainable development, corporate social responsibility, cooperative trilemma, Agribusiness,

Fast robust correlation for high-dimensional data

The product moment covariance is a cornerstone of multivariate data analysis, from which one can derive correlations, principal components, Mahalanobis distances and many other results. Unfortunately the product moment covariance and the corresponding Pearson correlation are very susceptible to outliers (anomalies) in the data. Several robust measures of covariance have been developed, but few are suitable for the ultrahigh dimensional data that are becoming more prevalent nowadays. For that one needs methods whose computation scales well with the dimension, are guaranteed to yield a positive semidefinite covariance matrix, and are sufficiently robust to outliers as well as sufficiently accurate in the statistical sense of low variability. We construct such methods using data transformations. The resulting approach is simple, fast and widely applicable. We study its robustness by deriving influence functions and breakdown values, and computing the mean squared error on contaminated data. Using these results we select a method that performs well overall. This also allows us to construct a faster version of the DetectDeviatingCells method (Rousseeuw and Van den Bossche, 2018) to detect cellwise outliers, that can deal with much higher dimensions. The approach is illustrated on genomic data with 12,000 variables and color video data with 920,000 dimensions

Discussion of "The power of monitoring"

This is an invited comment on the discussion paper "The power of monitoring: how to make the most of a contaminated multivariate sample" by A. Cerioli, M. Riani, A. Atkinson and A. Corbellini that will appear in the journal Statistical Methods & Applications

Finding Outliers in Surface Data and Video

Surface, image and video data can be considered as functional data with a bivariate domain. To detect outlying surfaces or images, a new method is proposed based on the mean and the variability of the degree of outlyingness at each grid point. A rule is constructed to flag the outliers in the resulting functional outlier map. Heatmaps of their outlyingness indicate the regions which are most deviating from the regular surfaces. The method is applied to fluorescence excitation-emission spectra after fitting a PARAFAC model, to MRI image data which are augmented with their gradients, and to video surveillance data

Comparing reverse complementary genomic words based on their distance distributions and frequencies

In this work we study reverse complementary genomic word pairs in the human DNA, by comparing both the distance distribution and the frequency of a word to those of its reverse complement. Several measures of dissimilarity between distance distributions are considered, and it is found that the peak dissimilarity works best in this setting. We report the existence of reverse complementary word pairs with very dissimilar distance distributions, as well as word pairs with very similar distance distributions even when both distributions are irregular and contain strong peaks. The association between distribution dissimilarity and frequency discrepancy is explored also, and it is speculated that symmetric pairs combining low and high values of each measure may uncover features of interest. Taken together, our results suggest that some asymmetries in the human genome go far beyond Chargaff's rules. This study uses both the complete human genome and its repeat-masked version.Comment: Post-print of a paper accepted to publication in "Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences" (ISSN: 1913-2751, ESSN: 1867-1462

Monitoring inland waters with the APEX sensor, a wavelet approach

In this study a new curve fitting approach is presented to derive TSM, CHL and CDOM concentrations in inland and coastal waters from water leaving-reflectance spectra. The approach is based on the wavelet transform and is tested on simulated water-leaving reflectance spectra. For simulations SIOPS and water concentrations, representative for the Scheldt river, were used. The results shown that the approach is less sensitive to errors in the atmospheric correction or specific sensor noise. The idea is based on the development of a new minimization criteria for curve fitting. Instead of minimizing the difference between modeled and measured spectra using a simple RMSE, the RMSE is now combined with specific wavelet features. Several types of errors and noise are added to the simulated spectra to find robust features. Two minimization criteria were found which are almost insensitive to a white error and less sensitive to adjacency effects

Le Secteur Associatif en Belgique: Une Analyse Quantitative et Qualitative

The book is divided in three parts. The first deals with the problem of defining the third sector in Belgium; the second part presents a quantitative analysis of the sector, and the third chapter provides a detailed analysis of the employment in the sector. The appendix includes interviews to representatives of non-profit organisations about the management of the organisations

Dissimilar Symmetric Word Pairs in the Human Genome

In this work we explore the dissimilarity between symmetric word pairs, by comparing the inter-word distance distribution of a word to that of its reversed complement. We propose a new measure of dissimilarity between such distributions. Since symmetric pairs with different patterns could point to evolutionary features, we search for the pairs with the most dissimilar behaviour. We focus our study on the complete human genome and its repeat-masked version.Comment: Submitted 13-Feb-2017; accepted, after a minor revision, 17-Mar-2017; 11th International Conference on Practical Applications of Computational Biology & Bioinformatics, PACBB 2017, Porto, Portugal, 21-23 June, 201