Title: A hybrid model to deal with missing values in nuclear safeguards' evaluation

Authors: Rosa M. Rodriguez, Da Ruan, Jun Liu, Luis Martinez

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, University of Jaen, Jaen 23071, Spain. ' Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK – CEN), Boeretang 200, 2400 Mol, Belgium; Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Ghent University, Krijgslaan 281 (S9), 9000 Gent, Belgium. ' School of Computing and Mathematics, University of Ulster, N. Ireland BT37 0QB, UK. ' Department of Computer Science, University of Jaen, Jaen 23071, Spain

Abstract: Nuclear safeguards| evaluation aims to verify countries not misusing nuclear programmes for nuclear weapon purposes. This is a complex process in which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) uses information from different available sources. Initially, the research was focused on developing the evaluation framework to handle the complexity of the safeguards| evaluation and the uncertainty inherent to the information involved. Consequently, different models were obtained to cope with the complexity by means of a multi-level hierarchical process, and the uncertainty managed by modelling the information linguistically. However, another challenge in nuclear safeguards is to handle the incomplete information due to the missing values that could bias the final evaluation results. There exist different strategies to treat missing values in nuclear safeguards. This paper presents a new approach for dealing with missing values that hybridises the previous ones to increase the trustworthiness of nuclear safeguards| evaluation results.

Keywords: nuclear safeguards; fuzzy linguistics; missing values; trustworthiness; imputation; nuclear safety; nuclear weapons; nuclear power; nuclear energy; nuclear security; security evaluation; uncertainty management; modelling; incomplete information; trustworthy results.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNKM.2011.040942

International Journal of Nuclear Knowledge Management, 2011 Vol.5 No.2, pp.194 - 218

Published online: 18 Feb 2015 *

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