In today’s rapidly changing and highly competitive industrial environment, a new and emerging business model—fast fashion—has started a revolution in the apparel industry. Due to the lack of historical data, constantly changing fashion trends, and product demand uncertainty, accurate demand forecasting is an important and challenging task in the fashion industry. This study integrates k-means clustering (KM), extreme learning machines (ELMs), and support vector regression (SVR) to construct cluster-based KM-ELM and KM-SVR models for demand forecasting in the fashion industry using empirical demand data of physical and virtual channels of a case company to examine the applicability of proposed forecasting models. The research results showed that both the KM-ELM and KM-SVR models are superior to the simple ELM and SVR models. They have higher prediction accuracy, indicating that the integration of clustering analysis can help improve predictions. In addition, the KM-ELM model produces satisfactory results when performing demand forecasting on retailers both with and without physical stores. Compared with other prediction models, it can be the most suitable demand forecasting method for the fashion industry.

Influenza is a serious public health issue, as it can cause acute suffering and even death, social disruption, and economic loss. Effective forecasting of influenza outpatient visits is beneficial to anticipate and prevent medical resource shortages. This study uses regional data on influenza outpatient visits to propose a two-dimensional hierarchical decision tree scheme for forecasting influenza outpatient visits. The Taiwan weekly influenza outpatient visit data were collected from the national infectious disease statistics system and used for an empirical example. The 788 data points start in the first week of 2005 and end in the second week of 2020. The empirical results revealed that the proposed forecasting scheme outperformed five competing models and was able to forecast one to four weeks of anticipated influenza outpatient visits. The scheme may be an effective and promising alternative for forecasting one to four steps (weeks) ahead of nationwide influenza outpatient visits in Taiwan. Our results also suggest that, for forecasting nationwide influenza outpatient visits in Taiwan, one- and two-time lag information and regional information from the Taipei, North, and South regions are significant.

Based on the concept of high returns as the preference to low returns, this study discusses the adjustable security proportion for excess investment and shortage investment based on the selected guaranteed return rates in a fuzzy environment, in which the return rates for selected securities are characterized by fuzzy variables. We suppose some securities are for excess investment because their return rates are higher than the guaranteed return rates, and the other securities whose return rates are lower than the guaranteed return rates are considered for shortage investment. Then, we solve the proposed expected fuzzy returns by the concept of possibility theory, where fuzzy returns are quantified by possibilistic mean and risks are measured by possibilistic variance, and then we use linear programming model to maximize the expected value of a portfolio’s return under investment risk constraints. Finally, we illustrate two numerical examples to show that the expected return rate under a lower guaranteed return rate is better than a higher guaranteed return rates in different levels of investment risks. In shortage investments, the investment proportion for the selected securities are almost zero under higher investment risks, whereas the portfolio is constructed from those securities in excess investments.

Green supply chain management has become enormously significant over the last two decades. Traditional supply chain risk management is inept at dealing with the intangible criteria related to environmental issues. Contrary to most of the previous research, which emphasized risks in merely one or two phases of the green supply chain, this study provides a systematic checklist of the cradle-to-grave approach to risk identification and prioritization using a hybrid method. Based on a world-leading Taiwanese laptop manufacturer, we first identified the risk factors of the green supply chain with respect to the components and subcomponents of Risk Priority Numbers (RPN) on the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). Second, we used the Analytic Network Process (ANP) to derive the relative weights of the subcomponents of RPN. Third, we combined grey relational analysis and ANP weights to derive the relative importance of each risk criterion in each risk factor in the green supply chain. The empirical results verified that our proposed method can be applied to the laptop manufacturing industry and found industry-specific green risk criteria in each factor. Therefore, following this, enterprises can control the possible risks for continuous improvement in their green activities.