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A previously developed model that describes the dynamics of social tension in a society divided into two groups: the elite and the people was considered. This model took into account the impact of economic situation changes and the elite–people interaction. The model has been modified by including in the equation describing the tension of the people, a term that takes into account the adaptation of the people to the current situation.

The model coefficients estimation is an important task, the solution of which allows obtaining information about the nature of the interaction between elite and people. We believe that the solution of the system of model equations with optimal coefficients is closest to the values of the indicator characterizing social tension. We used the normalized level of homicide rate as an indicator of social tension.

The model contains seven coefficients. Two coefficients characterizing the influence of economic situation changes on elite and people are taken equal to each other and the same for all countries. We obtained their estimations using a simplified model that takes into account only the change in the economic situation and allows an analytical solution.

The Bayesian approach was used to estimate the remaining five coefficients of model for post-Soviet countries. The prior probability densities of the four coefficients for all countries under consideration were taken to be the same. The prior probability density of fifth coefficient was considered to depend on the regime of government (authoritarian or «transitional»). We assumed that the calculated tension matches with the corresponding indicator of tension in cases where the difference between them does not exceed 5%.

The calculations showed that for the post-Soviet countries, a good coincidence was obtained between the calculated values of the people tension and the normalized level of homicide rate. The coincidence is satisfactory only on average.

The following main results was obtained at the work: under the influence of some «significant» events in 40% of post-Soviet countries, there was a rapid change in the nature of interaction between the elite and the people; regional feature have some influence on the elite–people interaction; the type of government does not significantly affect the elite–people interaction; the method for assessing the stability of the country by the value of the model coefficients is proposed.

Examining the spectral response of plants from data collected using remote sensing has a lot of potential for solving real-world problems in different fields of research. In this study, we have used the spectral property to identify the invasive plant Heracleum sosnowskyi Manden from satellite imagery. H. sosnowskyi is an invasive plant that causes many harms to humans, animals and the ecosystem at large. We have used data collected from the years 2018 to 2020 containing sample geolocation data from the Moscow Region where this plant exists and we have used Sentinel-2 imagery for the spectral analysis towards the aim of detecting it from the satellite imagery. We deployed a Random Forest (RF) machine learning model within the framework of Google Earth Engine (GEE). The algorithm learns from the collected data, which is made up of 12 bands of Sentinel-2, and also includes the digital elevation together with some spectral indices, which are used as features in the algorithm. The approach used is to learn the biophysical parameters of H. sosnowskyi from its reflectances by fitting the RF model directly from the data. Our results demonstrate how the combination of remote sensing and machine learning can assist in locating H. sosnowskyi, which aids in controlling its invasive expansion. Our approach provides a high detection accuracy of the plant, which is 96.93%.

The paper considers a method for studying panel data based on the use of agglomerative hierarchical clustering — grouping objects based on the similarities and differences in their features into a hierarchy of clusters nested into each other. We used 2 alternative methods for calculating Euclidean distances between objects — the distance between the values averaged over observation interval, and the distance using data for all considered years. Three alternative methods for calculating the distances between clusters were compared. In the first case, the distance between the nearest elements from two clusters is considered to be distance between these clusters, in the second — the average over pairs of elements, in the third — the distance between the most distant elements. The efficiency of using two clustering quality indices, the Dunn and Silhouette index, was studied to select the optimal number of clusters and evaluate the statistical significance of the obtained solutions. The method of assessing statistical reliability of cluster structure consisted in comparing the quality of clustering on a real sample with the quality of clustering on artificially generated samples of panel data with the same number of objects, features and lengths of time series. Generation was made from a fixed probability distribution. At the same time, simulation methods imitating Gaussian white noise and random walk were used. Calculations with the Silhouette index showed that a random walk is characterized not only by spurious regression, but also by “spurious clustering”. Clustering was considered reliable for a given number of selected clusters if the index value on the real sample turned out to be greater than the value of the 95% quantile for artificial data. A set of time series of indicators characterizing production in the regions of the Russian Federation was used as a sample of real data. For these data only Silhouette shows reliable clustering at the level p < 0.05. Calculations also showed that index values for real data are generally closer to values for random walks than for white noise, but it have significant differences from both. Since three-dimensional feature space is used, the quality of clustering was also evaluated visually. Visually, one can distinguish clusters of points located close to each other, also distinguished as clusters by the applied hierarchical clustering algorithm.

This paper considers the problem of water consumption in the regions of Russia with low water availability. We provide a review of the existing methods to control quality and quantity of water resources at different scales — from households to worldwide. The paper itself considers regions with low “water availability” parameter which is amount of water per person per year. Special attention is paid to the regions, where this parameter is low because of natural features of the region, not because of high population. In such regions many resources are spend on water processing infrastructure to store water and transport water from other regions. In such regions the main water consumers are industry and agriculture.

We propose dynamic two-level hierarchical model which matches water consumption of a region with its gross regional product. On the top level there is a regional administration (supervisor) and on the lower level there are region enterprises (agents). The supervisor sets fees for water consumption. We study the model with Pontryagin’s maximum principle and provide agents’s optimal control in analytical form. For the supervisor’s control we provide numerical algorithm. The model has six free coefficients, which can be chosen so the model represents a particular region. We use data from Russia Federal State Statistics Service for identification process of a model. For numerical analysis we use trust region reflective algorithms. We provide calculations for a few regions with low water availability. It is shown that it is possible to reduce water consumption of a region more than by 20% while gross regional product drop is less than 10%.