Detection of changes in the employment environment in Japan based on the numbers of people leaving and entering employment using NMF

• Main Authors: Masao Kubo, Hiroshi Sato, Akihiro Yamaguchi, Yuji Aruka
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Atlantis Press 2017-02-01
• Series: Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life (JRNAL)
• Subjects: resilience; data mining; machine learning
• Online Access: https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/25872653.pdf

If there were no changes in the environment surrounding businesses, the numbers of people leaving and entering employment would stay almost the same. Therefore, understanding the numbers allow us to make assumptions about the changes inside and outside companies. However, when categorizing businesses into industry sectors and clusters of business, you will see that the numbers of people leaving and entering employment have been nearly opposed for the last 15 years, and it is difficult to detect changes in the employment environment of Japan’s businesses. This study tried to improve the sensitivity of detecting changes by applying NMF (non-negative matrix factorization) into the Survey of Employment Trends. While businesses maintain the number of people they employ at a certain level because of severe restrictions, we assumed they respond to the surroundings by changing the composition of employment. Accordingly, we identified the correlation between the numbers of people leaving and entering employment in each sector characterized by employment patterns that we found by applying NMF. As a result we successfully improved the sensitivity level of detecting changes, which we would like to report in this study.