The International Arab Journal of Information Technology (IAJIT)

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Financial Development Indicators: A Comparative Study between Lebanon and Middle East Countries

Fighting poverty is one of the main objectives of sustainable development program. In a country like Lebanon, where poverty is a real threat and hidden under a good living looking, the situation should be explored in depth. This paper aims to evaluate the position of Lebanon compared to other Middle East countries in sustainable development. Furthermore, our goal is to reveal the power and weaknesses of resources management, based on income and non-income indicators retrieved from World data bank. For this purpose, we adopted a combination of data mining techniques as tools to study the relationship between these indicators. The K-means clustering technique is used to define the different levels of living. In order to extract the most relevant non-income indicators to our study, information gain as feature selection technique was applied. Finally, k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classification technique was used for the predicting model.


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[12] Wu x. and Kumar V., the Top Ten Algorithms in Data Mining Book, a Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2009. Denis Hamad is professor at the University of Littoral Côte d’Opale. He obtained a HDR (Habilitation à Diriger la Recherche) degree in neural networks for unsupervised pattern classification and a PhD degree in detection and validation of measurements in complex systems from the University of Lille-France in 1997 resp. in 1986. Between 1998 and 2002, he was Professor at the University of Picardie Jules Vernes, Amiens-France. His main research interests are machine learning, image and signal processing. Ali Kalakech is a professor at the Information Systems Department in the Lebanese University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. He got his Master Degree in Computer Systems from the National Institute of Applied Sciences, Toulouse, France in 2001. He received his Ph.D. degree from the National Polytechnic Institute, Toulouse, France in 2005. His Research interests include Data Mining, dependability of computer systems, networking and performance evaluation. Mariam Kalakech is anassociate professor at the Information Systems Department in the Lebanese University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. She got her Master Degree in Information Systems from the National Institute of Applied Sciences, Lyon, France in 2007. She received her Ph.D. degree in Automatics and Industrial Computingfrom the University of Lille-France in 2011. HerResearch interests include machine learning, image and signal processing. Souha el Katat obtained her bachelor in Computer engineering from CNAM University – Beirut, and then completed the Master degree in Business Computer from the Lebanese University – Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. Her research interests include Data Mining and machine Learning.