Xiaowen Zhuang

Systemic interaction mechanisms exist in the impact of renewable energy investment on regional economic growth, yet most existing research adopts fragmented analytical perspectives. This study integrates behavioral variables—environmental cognition and risk perception, typically treated as exogenous moderators—as endogenous components within a socio-technical systems framework, examining investment effects and transmission mechanisms across economic, behavioral, and spatial dimensions based on data from 31 Chinese provinces from 2010 to 2022. Findings reveal that investment significantly promotes regional economic growth, with environmental cognition exerting moderating effects and spatial spillover effects being notably significant. Transmission pathways encompass industrial upgrading, technological innovation, green finance, and cognition enhancement, with effects exhibiting pronounced regional heterogeneity. The findings are consistent with the presence of non-additive interaction effects across subsystems, providing empirical foundations for formulating differentiated energy transition policies.

The cryptocurrency market has attracted significant attention from global investors, with Cardano (ADA) ranking among the top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. However, predicting ADA returns remains challenging due to the complex, multi-scale dynamics influenced by Federal Reserve policies, geopolitical events, and high-frequency trading. This study proposes a “Sliding EMD–Multi Variables” framework for cryptocurrency return prediction, leveraging Empirical Mode Decomposition’s multi-scale fractal properties to capture nonlinear dynamics at different time scales. The sliding window decomposition method addresses data leakage issues while incorporating key economic and policy variables at the component level. The empirical results demonstrate that the Sliding EMD system significantly outperforms univariate and multivariate benchmarks. Compared to the univariate system, it improves MSE, RMSE, SMAPE, and DSTAT by 0.83%, 0.42%, 5.23%, and 0.43%, respectively, while enhancing investment metrics (maximum drawdown, Sharpe ratio, Sortino ratio, Calmar ratio) by 0.19, 0.36, 0.95, and 0.15. Against the multivariate system, improvements reach 5.52%, 3.14%, 5.74%, and 17.62% in prediction accuracy, with investment performance gains of 0.47, 1.69, 4.27, and 0.31. Incorporating economic variables at the component level yields additional improvements of 0.94%, 0.47%, and 0.78% in MSE, RMSE, and MAE. These findings offer valuable insights for cryptocurrency portfolio optimization using fractal-based decomposition methods.

This study explores changes in the transmission patterns between domestic and global grain prices under different grain price regulation policies. Price transmission is influenced by both policy interventions and external market dynamics. We conducted a segmented regression analysis to examine these relationships. The analysis focuses on how changes in international grain prices are transmitted to domestic prices before and after key policy adjustments. We interpret the results as shifts in price transmission coefficients across different policy regimes rather than as definitive causal impacts of specific policies. The study focuses on four major grains: wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans. We evaluated policy tools such as minimum purchase prices, temporary storage programs, target pricing mechanisms, and producer subsidies. Our findings show that the correlation between international and domestic grain prices became more strongly positive after specific policy changes. These changes include the introduction of the wheat minimum purchase price in 2006, the implementation of temporary storage for corn and soybeans in 2008, and the shift to producer subsidies for corn in 2016. These results indicate a shift towards more interconnected and resilient price transmission within the grain market system. In contrast, before the reduction in the rice minimum purchase price in 2018, international rice prices exhibited a slightly negative association with domestic prices. This negative association became more pronounced after the policy change. A similar shift occurred for soybeans, where the transmission pattern of global prices shifted from positive to negative following the adjustment of soybean price regulations in March 2017. These findings provide guidance for optimizing national grain pricing policies and strengthening the overall resilience and adaptability of food security systems, with an emphasis on their complex, interrelated nature.

A university campus is a composite built environment integrating research, daily life, culture, and ecological green space. Its landscape elements shape environmental perception and overall spatial quality. This study assesses spatial quality by identifying key features and optimizing their joint effects across three perceptions: safety, comfort, and belonging. Using a Chinese campus, we captured street-view images, applied semantic segmentation to quantify elements (grass, trees, buildings, roads, sidewalks), and used explainable machine learning with data augmentation to identify the features most relevant to these perceptions. This study then employed fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to reveal configuration pathways that enhance spatial quality. Results show that data augmentation mitigates class imbalance and improves prediction accuracy. Key features include sky, river, bridge, people, grass, and sidewalks, and path analysis indicates that greater sky openness and higher densities of people, roads, sidewalks, and grass, together with fewer buildings, cars, and bare earth, enhance safety, comfort, and belonging. This study delivers globally transferable design rules and a replicable, policy-ready workflow that enables evidence-based campus upgrades across diverse regions.

As universities become increasingly open, campuses are no longer only places for study and daily life for students and faculty, but also essential spaces for public visits and cultural identity. Traditional perception evaluation methods that rely on manual surveys are limited by sample size and subjective bias, making it challenging to reveal differences in experiences between groups (students/visitors) and the complex relationships between spatial elements and perceptions. This study uses a comprehensive open university in China as a case study to address this. It proposes a research framework that combines street-view image semantic segmentation, perception survey scores, and interpretable machine learning with sample augmentation. First, full-sample modeling is used to identify key image semantic features influencing perception indicators (nature, culture, aesthetics), and then to compare how students and visitors differ in their perceptions and preferences across campus spaces. To overcome the imbalance in survey data caused by group–space interactions, the study applies the CTGAN method, which expands minority samples through conditional generation while preserving distribution authenticity, thereby improving the robustness and interpretability of the model. Based on this, attribution analysis with an interpretable decision tree algorithm further quantifies semantic features’ contribution, direction, and thresholds to perceptions, uncovering heterogeneity in perception mechanisms across groups. The results provide methodological support for perception evaluation of campus functional zones and offer data-driven, human-centered references for campus planning and design optimization.

Crude oil and grain, as two pivotal global commodities, exhibit significant price co-movement that profoundly affects national economic stability and food security. From the perspective of systems theory, the energy and grain markets do not exist in isolation but rather form a highly coupled complex system, characterized by nonlinear feedback, cross-market risk contagion, and cascading effects. This study systematically investigates the transmission mechanisms from international crude oil prices to the domestic prices of Chinese four major grains, employing the DY spillover index, Vector Error Correction Model (VECM), and a mediation effect framework. The empirical findings reveal three key insights. First, rising international crude oil prices significantly strengthen the pass-through of global grain prices to domestic markets, while simultaneously weakening the effectiveness of domestic price stabilization policies. Second, higher crude oil prices amplify international-to-domestic price spillovers by increasing maritime freight costs, a key channel in global grain trade logistics. Third, elevated oil prices stimulate demand for renewable biofuels, including biodiesel and ethanol, thereby boosting international demand for corn and soybeans and intensifying the transmission of price fluctuations in these commodities to the domestic market. These findings reveal the key pathways through which shocks in the energy market affect food security and highlight the necessity of studying the “energy–food” coupling mechanism within a systems framework, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of cross-market risk transmission.

Evaluating the restoration quality of university outdoor spaces is often constrained by subjective surveys and manual assessment, limiting scalability and objectivity. This study addresses this gap by applying explainable machine learning to predict restorative quality from campus imagery, enabling large-scale, data-driven evaluation and capturing complex nonlinear relationships that traditional methods may overlook. Using Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University as a case study, this study extracted road network data, generated 297 coordinates at 50-m intervals, and collected 1197 images. Surveys were conducted to obtain restorative quality scores. The Mask2Former model was used to extract landscape features, and decision tree algorithms (RF, XGBoost, GBR) were selected based on MAE, MSE, and EVS metrics. The combination of optimal algorithms and SHAP was employed to predict restoration quality and identify key features. This research also used a multivariate linear regression model to identify features with significant statistical impact but lower features importance ranking. Finally, the study also analyzed heterogeneity in scores for three restoration indicators and five campus zones using k-means clustering. Empirical results show that natural elements like vegetation and water positively affect psychological perception, while structural components like walls and fences have negative or nonlinear effects. On this basis, this study proposes spatial optimization strategies for different campus areas, offering a foundation for creating high-quality outdoor environments with restorative and social functions.

The prediction of agricultural commodity futures returns is crucial for understanding global economic trends, alleviating inflationary pressures, and optimizing investment portfolios. However, current research that uses full-sample decomposition to predict agricultural futures returns suffers from data leakage, and the resulting forecast bias leads to overly optimistic outcomes. Additionally, previous studies have lacked a comprehensive consideration of key economic variables that influence agricultural prices. To address these issues, this study proposes the “Rolling VMD-LASSO-Mixed Ensemble” forecasting framework and compares its performance with “Rolling VMD” against univariate models, “Rolling VMD-LASSO” against “Rolling VMD”, and “Rolling VMD-LASSO-Mixed Ensemble” against “Rolling VMD-LASSO”. Empirical results show that, on average, “Rolling VMD” improved MSE, MAE, Theil U, ARV, and DA by 3.05%, 1.09%, 1.52%, 2.96%, and 11.11%, respectively, compared to univariate models. “Rolling VMD-LASSO” improved these five indicators by 2.11%, 1.15%, 1.09%, 2.13%, and 1.00% over “Rolling VMD”. The decision tree-based “Rolling VMD-LASSO-Mixed Ensemble” outperformed “Rolling VMD-LASSO” by 1.98%, 0.96%, 1.28%, 2.55%, and 4.18% in the five metrics. Furthermore, the daily average return, maximum drawdown, Sharpe ratio, Sortino ratio, and Calmar ratio based on prediction results also show that “Rolling VMD” outperforms univariate forecasting, “Rolling VMD-LASSO” outperforms “Rolling VMD”, and “Rolling VMD-LASSO-Mixed Ensemble” outperforms “Rolling VMD-LASSO”. This study provides a more accurate and robust forecasting framework for the global agricultural futures market, offering significant practical value for investor risk management and policymakers in stabilizing prices.