Informatica

In recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) received great attention because of their important applications in many areas. Consequently, a need for improving their performance and efficiency, especially in energy awareness, is of a great interest. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a lifetime improvement fixed clustering energy awareness routing protocol for WSNs named Load Balancing Cluster Head (LBCH) protocol. LBCH mainly aims at reducing the energy consumption in the network and balancing the workload over all nodes within the network. A novel method for selecting initial cluster heads (CHs) is proposed. In addition, the network nodes are evenly distributed into clusters to build balanced size clusters. Finally, a novel scheme is proposed to circulate the role of CHs depending on the energy and location information of each node in each cluster. Multihop technique is used to minimize the communication distance between CHs and the base station (BS) thus saving nodes energy. In order to evaluate the performance of LBCH, a thorough simulation has been conducted and the results are compared with other related protocols (i.e. ACBEC-WSNs-CD, Adaptive LEACH-F, LEACH-F, and RRCH). The simulations showed that LBCH overcomes other related protocols for both continuous data and event-based data models at different network densities. LBCH achieved an average improvement in the range of 2–172%, 18–145.5%, 10.18–62%, 63–82.5% over the compared protocols in terms of number of alive nodes, first node died (FND), network throughput, and load balancing, respectively.

We investigate applicability of quantitative methods to discover the most fundamental structural properties of the most reliable political data in Lithuania. Namely, we analyze voting data of the Lithuanian Parliament. Two most widely used techniques of structural data analysis (clustering and multidimensional scaling) are compared. We draw some technical conclusions which can serve as recommendations in more purposeful application of these methods.

This paper is concerned with the problem of image analysis based detection of local defects embedded in particleboard surfaces. Though simple, but efficient technique developed is based on the analysis of the discrete probability distribution of the image intensity values and the 2D discrete Walsh transform. Robust global features characterizing a surface texture are extracted and then analyzed by a pattern classifier. The classifier not only assigns the pattern into the quality or detective class, but also provides the certainty value attributed to the decision. A 100% correct classification accuracy was obtained when testing the technique proposed on a set of 200 images.

In this paper, the relative multidimensional scaling method is investigated. This method is designated to visualize large multidimensional data. The method encompasses application of multidimensional scaling (MDS) to the so-called basic vector set and further mapping of the remaining vectors from the analyzed data set. In the original algorithm of relative MDS, the visualization process is divided into three steps: the set of basis vectors is constructed using the k-means clustering method; this set is projected onto the plane using the MDS algorithm; the set of remaining data is visualized using the relative mapping algorithm. We propose a modification, which differs from the original algorithm in the strategy of selecting the basis vectors. The experimental investigation has shown that the modification exceeds the original algorithm in the visualization quality and computational expenses. The conditions, where the relative MDS efficiency exceeds that of standard MDS, are estimated.

This paper presents model-based forecasting of the Lithuanian education system in the period of 2001–2010. In order to obtain satisfactory forecasting results, development of models used for these aims should be grounded on some interactive data mining. The process of the development is usually accompanied by the formulation of some assumptions to background methods or models. The accessibility and reliability of data sources should be verified. Special data mining of data sources may verify the assumptions. Interactive data mining of the data, stored in the system of the Lithuanian teachers' database, and that of other sources representing the state of the education system and demographic changes in Lithuania was used. The models cover the estimation of data quality in the databases, analysis of the flow of teachers and pupils, clustering of schools, the model of dynamics of the pedagogical staff and pupils, and the quality analysis of teachers. The main results of forecasting and integrated analysis of the Lithuanian teachers' database with other data reflecting the state of the education system and demographic changes in Lithuania are presented.