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Among the data clustering algorithms, the k -means (KM) algorithm is one of the most popular clustering techniques because of its simplicity and efficiency. However, KM is sensitive to initial centers and it has a local optima problem. The k -harmonic means (KHM) clustering algorithm solves the initialization problem of the KM algorithm, but it also has a local optima problem. In this paper, we develop a new algorithm for solving this problem based on a modified version of particle swarm optimization (MPSO) algorithm and KHM clustering. In the proposed algorithm, MPSO is equipped with the cuckoo search algorithm and two new concepts used in PSO in order to improve the efficiency, fast convergence, and escape from local optima. MPSO updates the positions of particles based on a combination of global worst, global best with personal worst, and personal best to dynamically be used in each iteration of the MPSO. The experimental result on eight real-world data sets and two artificial data sets confirms that this modified version is superior to KHM and the regular PSO algorithm. The results of the simulation show that the new algorithm is able to create promising solutions with fast convergence, high accuracy, and correctness while markedly improving the processing time.

In this paper, intuitionistic fuzzy local binary for texture feature extraction (IFLBP) has been proposed to encode local texture from the input image. The proposed method extends the fuzzy local binary pattern approach by incorporating intuitionistic fuzzy sets in the representation of local patterns of texture in images. Intuitionistic fuzzy local binary pattern also contributes to more than one bin in the distribution of IFLBP values, which can further be used as a feature vector in the various fields of image processing. The performance of the proposed method has been demonstrated on various medical images and processing images of size 256×256. The obtained results validated the effectiveness and usefulness of our proposed method over the other reported methods, and new improvements are suggested.

In this paper, an alternative active contour model (ACM) driven by an oppositional fruit fly algorithm (OFA) is presented. Unlike the traditional ACM variant, which is frequently caught in a local minimum, this methodology helps the focalizing of control points toward the global least of the energy function. In the proposed system, energy minimization is performed through a fruit fly algorithm, and every control point is compelled in a local search window. As for the local search window, the rectangular-shaped approach has been viewed. The results demonstrated that the fruit fly strategy utilizing polar coordinates is, for the most part, desirable over the fruit fly performed in rectangular shapes. Three performance metrics, such as the Jaccard index, the Dice index, and the Hausdorff distance, were utilized to validate the proposed strategy in real agricultural and synthetic images. From the results, it is clear that the proposed OFA technique shows a great option for the agricultural plant image segmentation process, considering any kind of disease that occurred in plant leaves.

The present paper describes a hybrid group search optimization (GSO) and center-based genetic algorithm (CBGA)-based model for task scheduling in cloud computing. The proposed hybrid model combines the GSO, which has been successful in its application in task scheduling, with the use of the CBGA. The basic scheme of our approach is to utilize the benefits of both the GSO algorithm and CBGA excluding their disadvantages. In our work, we introduce the hybrid clouds, which are needed to determine which task to be outsourced and to what cloud provider. These choices ought to minimize the expense of running an allotment of the aggregate task on one or various public cloud providers while considering the application prerequisites, e.g. deadline constraints and data requirements. In the hybridization approach (HGSOCBGA), each dimension of a solution represents a task and the solution as a whole signifies all the task priorities. The vital issue is how to allocate the user tasks to exploit the profit of the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider while promising the quality of service (QoS). The generated solution proficiently assures the user-level QoS and improves the IaaS providers’ credibility and economic benefit. The HGSOCBGA method also designs the hybridization process and suitable fitness function of the corresponding task. According to the evolved results, it has been found that our algorithm always outperforms the traditional algorithms.

In the current cyber world, one of the most severe cyber threats are distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which make websites and other online resources unavailable to legitimate clients. It is different from other cyber threats that breach security parameters; however, DDoS is a short-term attack that brings down the server temporarily. Appropriate selection of features plays a crucial role for effective detection of DDoS attacks. Too many irrelevant features not only produce unrelated class categories but also increase computation overhead. In this article, we propose an ensemble feature selection algorithm to determine which attribute in the given training datasets is efficient in categorizing the classes. The result of the ensemble algorithm when compared to a threshold value will enable us to decide the features. The selected features are deployed as training inputs for various classifiers to select a classifier that yields maximum accuracy. We use a multilayer perceptron classifier as the final classifier, as it provides better accuracy when compared to other conventional classification models. The proposed method classifies the new datasets into either attack or normal classes with an efficiency of 98.3% and also reduces the overall computation time. We use the CAIDA 2007 dataset to evaluate the performance of the proposed method using MATLAB and Weka 3.6 simulators.

This paper deals with the problem of the collaborative mapping of unknown indoor environments by a homogeneous mobile robot team. For this aim, a distributed multi-agent coordination approach is proposed for the mapping process to offer a global view of the entire environment. First, the scheme starts by assigning the most suitable robots to the different zones of the environment to be mapped based on a bidding strategy. Then, while a Robot agent of the group explores its local surroundings and collects information about its neighborhood, it sends mapping data to the Human/Machine Interface agent to integrate them into a single global map. Furthermore, a geometric map representation and an algorithm based on obstacles and environment limits detection are used to provide an explicitly geometric representation of the workspace. For validation purposes, Player/Stage simulator is used to show the effectiveness of the proposed distributed approach and algorithms without needing a real multi-robot system and environment. Finally, various scenarios have been carried out and results are compared in terms of (i) required mapping time, (ii) accuracy of the global generated map, and (iii) number of exchanged messages between the agents.

The main idea behind this work is to present three-dimensional (3D) image visualization through two-dimensional (2D) images that comprise various images. 3D image visualization is one of the essential methods for excerpting data from given pieces. The main goal of this work is to figure out the outlines of the given 3D geometric primitives in each part, and then integrate these outlines or frames to reconstruct 3D geometric primitives. The proposed technique is very useful and can be applied to many kinds of images. The experimental results showed a very good determination of the reconstructing process of 2D images.

University course timetabling is the scheduling of courses at different time slots in a university. The two important issues in this process are (i) the allocation of all events (professors, courses, and students) to resources (time slots daily/weekly and theory/practical classes) in a semester, and (ii) maximizing the satisfaction of common events (professors, courses, and students) among multiple departments. Accumulating evidences in university course timetabling problems suggest dividing the problem into several sub-problems. This study attempted to investigate the appropriateness of using the genetic algorithm (GA) and the imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA). The proposed technique consists of two steps: (i) using the proposed manipulated GA for solving the timetabling problem of each department, and (ii) eliminating the interference of common events among multiple departments and satisfying the hard and soft constraints by using ICA. Finally, a report on the efficiency of the methodology used in this study was obtained from the University of Tabriz in Iran and University of Udine in Italy. In this paper, the results are revealed in two ways: (i) reduction in the problems due to shrinking of the database and solving of the problems in parallel and (ii) solving the different parts of the problem by using various criterion results, increasing the common events satisfaction in that sub-problem. Eventually, the proposed model provided successful satisfaction of the hard constraints in <700 iterations with GA and elimination of interference in 40 iterations with ICA in most of the cases.

This paper introduces a new variant of the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, designed for global optimization of multidimensional functions. The goal of this variant, called ImPSO, is to improve the exploration and exploitation abilities of the algorithm by introducing a new operation in the iterative search process. The use of this operation is governed by a stochastic rule that ensures either the exploration of new regions of the search space or the exploitation of good intermediate solutions. The proposed method is inspired by collaborative human learning and uses as a starting point a basic PSO variant with constriction factor and velocity clamping. Simulation results that show the ability of ImPSO to locate the global optima of multidimensional functions are presented for 10 well-know benchmark functions from CEC-2013 and CEC-2005. These results are compared with the PSO variant used as starting point, three other PSO variants, one of which is based on human learning strategies, and three alternative evolutionary computing methods.

Co-clustering is used to analyze the row and column clusters of a dataset, and it is widely used in recommendation systems. In general, different co-clustering models often obtain very different results for a dataset because each algorithm has its own optimization criteria. It is an alternative way to combine different co-clustering results to produce a final one for improving the quality of co-clustering. In this paper, a semi-supervised co-clustering ensemble is illustrated in detail based on semi-supervised learning and ensemble learning. A semi-supervised co-clustering ensemble is a framework for combining multiple base co-clusterings and the side information of a dataset to obtain a stable and robust consensus co-clustering. First, the objective function of the semi-supervised co-clustering ensemble is formulated according to normalized mutual information. Then, a kernel probabilistic model for semi-supervised co-clustering ensemble (KPMSCE) is presented and the inference of KPMSCE is illustrated in detail. Furthermore, the corresponding algorithm is designed. Moreover, different algorithms and the proposed algorithm are used for experiments on real datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly outperform the compared algorithms in terms of several indices.

In this paper, we introduce the concept of the Pythagorean hesitant fuzzy set (PHFS), which is the generalization of the intuitionistic hesitant fuzzy set under the restriction that the square sum of its membership degrees is ≤1. In decision making with PHFSs, aggregation operators play a key role because they can be used to synthesize multidimensional evaluation values represented as Pythagorean hesitant fuzzy values into collective values. Under PHFS environments, Pythagorean hesitant fuzzy ordered weighted averaging and Pythagorean fuzzy ordered weighted geometric operators are used to aggregate the Pythagorean hesitant fuzzy values. The main advantage of these operators is that they provide more accurate and valuable results. Furthermore, these operators are applied to decision-making problems in which experts provide their preferences in the Pythagorean hesitant fuzzy environment to show the validity, practicality, and effectiveness of the new approach. Finally, we compare the proposed approach to the existing methods.

This article proposes an effectual process for soil classification. The input data of the proposed procedure is the Harmonized World Soil Database. Preprocessing aids to generate enhanced representation and will use minimum time. Then, the MapReduce framework divides the input dataset into a complimentary portion that is held by the map task. In the map task, principal component analysis is used to reduce the data and the outputs of the maps are then contributed to reduce the tasks. Lastly, the proposed process is employed to categorize the soil kind by means of an optimal neural network (NN) classifier. Here, the conventional NN is customized using the optimization procedure. In an NN, the weights are optimized using the grey wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm. Derived from the classifier, we categorize the soil category. The performance of the proposed procedure is assessed by means of sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure. The analysis results illustrate that the recommended artificial NN-GWO process has an accuracy of 90.46%, but the conventional NN and k -nearest neighbor classifiers have an accuracy value of 75.3846% and 75.38%, respectively, which is the least value compared to the proposed procedure. The execution is made by Java within the MapReduce framework using Hadoop.

A Bayesian approach using wavelet coefficient modeling is proposed for de-noising additive white Gaussian noise in medical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In a parallel acquisition process, the magnetic resonance image is affected by white Gaussian noise, which is additive in nature. A normal inverse Gaussian probability distribution function is taken for modeling the wavelet coefficients. A Bayesian approach is implemented for filtering the noisy wavelet coefficients. The maximum likelihood estimator and median absolute deviation estimator are used to find the signal parameters, signal variances, and noise variances of the distribution. The minimum mean square error estimator is used for estimating the true wavelet coefficients. The proposed method is simulated on MRI. Performance and image quality parameters show that the proposed method has the capability to reduce the noise more effectively than other state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method provides 8.83%, 2.02%, 6.61%, and 30.74% improvement in peak signal-to-noise ratio, structure similarity index, Pratt’s figure of merit, and Bhattacharyya coefficient, respectively, over existing well-accepted methods. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated by using the mean squared difference (MSD) parameter. MSD shows the degree of dissimilarity and is 0.000324 for the proposed method, which is less than that of the other existing methods and proves the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method is capable of achieving better signal-to-noise ratio performance than other tested de-noising methods.

In this work, a new technique is introduced for optimal incorporation of shunt capacitors (SCs) in distribution networks. This technique has been compared to other sensitivity-based approaches such as loss sensitivity factor, index vector method, power loss index, and index of voltage stability. In the proposed technique, the optimal positions as well as the ratings of SCs are identified through an optimization algorithm. In sensitivity-based approaches, the positions of SCs are determined through a sensitivity approach and the optimal ratings of SCs are computed through an optimization algorithm. The main target of this study is to minimize the total annual cost and power loss of the network under load growth. This has been done through the population-based Gbest-guided artificial bee colony (GABC) optimization technique. Furthermore, the outcomes obtained through the GABC algorithm are compared to those from the iteration particle swarm optimization algorithm. The whole work along with the proposed methodology has been demonstrated on standard 34-bus and 118-bus distribution networks for SC placement. The results show that it reduces the total annual expense of the network to a great value. Consequently, it improves the total power loss reduction, enhances the voltage profile and power factor, and reduces the total voltage deviation. The obtained numerical outcomes through the proposed technique have been compared with the published literature outcomes to show the viability and superiority of the algorithm.

Hesitant fuzzy sets play a vital role in decision analysis. Although they have been proved to be a landmark in evaluating information, there are certain deficiencies in their structure. Also, in decision analysis with the aid of hesitant fuzzy sets, the relative importance of the decision makers according to their area of expertise is ignored completely, which may be misleading in some situations. These sorts of issues have been resolved in this work by using graded soft expert (GSE) sets. The proposed structure is a modified form of soft expert sets. Some basic operations have been introduced, and certain laws satisfied by them have carefully been investigated. With the aid of GSE sets, a decision-making algorithm (accompanied with an example) has been developed in which experts have been given due weightage according to their area of expertise.

Liver segmentation is important to speed up liver disease diagnosis. It is also useful for detection, recognition, and measurement of objects in liver images. Sufficient work has been carried out until now, but common methodology for segmenting liver image from CT scan, MRI scan, PET scan, etc., is not available. The proposed methodology is an effort toward developing a general algorithm to segment liver image from abdominal computerized tomography (CT) scan and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan images. In the proposed algorithm, pixel intensity range of the liver portion is obtained by cropping a random section of the liver. Using its histogram, threshold values are calculated. Further, threshold-based segmentation is performed, which separates liver from abdominal CT scan image/abdominal MRI scan image. Noise in the liver image is reduced using median filter, and the quality of the image is improved by sigmoidal function. The image is then converted into binary image. The Chan–Vese (C–V) model demands an initial contour, which evolves outward. A novel algorithm is proposed to identify the initial contour inside the liver without user intervention. This initial contour propagates outward and continues until the boundary of the liver is identified accurately. This process terminates by itself when the entire boundary of the liver is detected. The method has been validated on CT images and MRI images. Results on the variety of images are compared with existing algorithms, which reveal its robustness, effectiveness, and efficiency.

In a software development process, effective cost estimation is the most challenging activity. Software effort estimation is a crucial part of cost estimation. Management cautiously considers the efforts and benefits of software before committing the required resources to that project or order for a contract. Unfortunately, it is difficult to measure such preliminary estimation, as it has only little information about the project at an early stage. In this paper, a new approach is proposed; this is based on reasoning by the soft computing approach to calculate the effort estimation of the software. In this approach, rules are generated based on the input dataset. These rules are then clustered for better estimation. In our proposed method, we use modified fuzzy C means for clustering the dataset. Once the clustering is done, various rules are obtained and these rules are given as the input to the neural network. Here, we modify the neural network by incorporating optimization algorithms. The optimization algorithms employed here are the artificial bee colony (ABC), modified cuckoo search (MCS), and hybrid ABC-MCS algorithms. Hence, we obtain three optimized sets of rules that are used for the effort estimation process. The performance of our proposed method is investigated using parameters such as the mean absolute relative error and mean magnitude of relative error.

In a multilingual country like India, script recognition is an important pre-processing footstep necessary for feeding any document to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, which is, in general, script specific. The present work evaluates the performance of an ensemble of two MLP (multi-layer perceptron) classifiers, each trained on different feature sets. Here, two complementary sets of features, namely , gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) and Gabor wavelets transform coefficients are extracted from each of the handwritten text-line and word images written in 12 official scripts used in Indian subcontinent, which are then fed into an individual classifier. In order to improve the overall recognition rate, a powerful combination approach based on the Dempster–Shafer (DS) theory is finally employed to fuse the decisions of two MLP classifiers. The performance of the combined decision is compared with those of the individual classifiers, and it is noted that a significant improvement in recognition accuracy (about 4% for text-line data and 6% for word level data) has been achieved by the proposed methodology.

Outsourcing is the action of contracting a specific task, function, or process to an external company instead of using an organisation’s resources. The history of outsourcing goes back to the 1980s when it was used for cost reduction in non-core business operations. Over time, outsourcing has moved to more strategic areas and has become an important factor in business performance. The selection of the best alternative among alternative outsource manufacturers is a multi-criteria decision-making problem. In this study, the fuzzy set theory is used to capture the uncertainty embedded into the decision problem. In this paper, an interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process and Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution-based methodology is proposed, and an application is provided for the evaluation of outsource manufacturers.

Today, we witness the appearance of many lifelogging cameras that are able to capture the life of a person wearing the camera and which produce a large number of images everyday. Automatically characterizing the experience and extracting patterns of behavior of individuals from this huge collection of unlabeled and unstructured egocentric data present major challenges and require novel and efficient algorithmic solutions. The main goal of this work is to propose a new method to automatically assess day similarity from the lifelogging images of a person. We propose a technique to measure the similarity between images based on the Swain’s distance and generalize it to detect the similarity between daily visual data. To this purpose, we apply the dynamic time warping (DTW) combined with the Swain’s distance for final day similarity estimation. For validation, we apply our technique on the Egocentric Dataset of University of Barcelona (EDUB) of 4912 daily images acquired by four persons with preliminary encouraging results. Methods The search strategy was designed for high sensitivity over precision, to ensure that no relevant studies were lost. We performed a systematic review of the literature using academic databases (ACM, Scopus, etc.) focusing on themes of day similarity, automatically assess day similarity, assess day similarity on EDUB, and assess day similarity using visual lifelogs. The study included randomized controlled trials, cohort studies, and case-control studies published between 2006 and 2017.

Since the last decade, the collective intelligent behavior of groups of animals, birds or insects have attracted the attention of researchers. Swarm intelligence is the branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the implementation of intelligent systems by taking inspiration from the collective behavior of social insects and other societies of animals. Many meta-heuristic algorithms based on aggregative conduct of swarms through complex interactions with no supervision have been used to solve complex optimization problems. Data clustering organizes data into groups called clusters, such that each cluster has similar data. It also produces clusters that could be disjoint. Accuracy and efficiency are the important measures in data clustering. Several recent studies describe bio-inspired systems as information processing systems capable of some cognitive ability. However, existing popular bio-inspired algorithms for data clustering ignored good balance between exploration and exploitation for producing better clustering results. In this article, we propose a bio-inspired algorithm, namely social spider optimization (SSO), for clustering that maintains a good balance between exploration and exploitation using female and male spiders, respectively. We compare results of the proposed algorithm SSO with K means and other nature-inspired algorithms such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), ant colony optimization (ACO) and improved bee colony optimization (IBCO). We find it to be more robust as it produces better clustering results. Although SSO solves the problem of getting stuck in the local optimum, it needs to be modified for locating the best solution in the proximity of the generated global solution. Hence, we hybridize SSO with K means, which produces good results in local searches. We compare proposed hybrid algorithms SSO+K means (SSOKC), integrated SSOKC (ISSOKC), and interleaved SSOKC (ILSSOKC) with K means+PSO (KPSO), K means+genetic algorithm (KGA), K means+artificial bee colony (KABC) and interleaved K means+IBCO (IKIBCO) and find better clustering results. We use sum of intra-cluster distances (SICD), average cosine similarity, accuracy and inter-cluster distance to measure and validate the performance and efficiency of the proposed clustering techniques.

The classical approach to build an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system uses different feature extraction methods at the front end and various parameter classification techniques at the back end. The Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) and perceptual linear prediction (PLP) techniques are the conventional approaches used for many years for feature extraction, and the hidden Markov model (HMM) has been the most obvious selection for feature classification. However, the performance of MFCC-HMM and PLP-HMM-based ASR system degrades in real-time environments. The proposed work discusses the implementation of discriminatively trained Hindi ASR system using noise robust integrated features and refined HMM model. It sequentially combines MFCC with PLP and MFCC with gammatone-frequency cepstral coefficient (GFCC) to obtain MF-PLP and MF-GFCC integrated feature vectors, respectively. The HMM parameters are refined using genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). Discriminative training of acoustic model using maximum mutual information (MMI) and minimum phone error (MPE) is preformed to enhance the accuracy of the proposed system. The results show that discriminative training using MPE with MF-GFCC integrated feature vector and PSO-HMM parameter refinement gives significantly better results than the other implemented techniques.

The mussels wandering optimization (MWO) is a recent population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm inspired ecologically by mussels’ movement behavior. The MWO has been used successfully for solving several optimization problems. This paper proposes an enhanced version of MWO, known as the enhanced-mussels wandering optimization (E-MWO) algorithm. The E-MWO aims to overcome the MWO shortcomings, such as lack in explorative ability and the possibility to fall in premature convergence. In addition, the E-MWO incorporates the self-adaptive feature for setting the value of a sensitive algorithm parameter. Then, it is adapted for supervised training of artificial neural networks, whereas pattern classification of real-world problems is considered. The obtained results indicate that the proposed method is a competitive alternative in terms of classification accuracy and achieve superior results in training time.

Conventional integer order differential operators suffer from poor feature detection accuracy and noise immunity, which leads to image misalignment. A new affine-based fractional order feature detection algorithm is proposed to detect syntactic and semantic structures from the backscattered signal of a TerraSAR-X band stripmap image. To further improve the alignment accuracy, we propose to adapt a view synthesis approach in the standard pipeline of feature-based image alignment. Experiments were performed to test the effectiveness and robustness of the view synthesis approach using a fractional order feature detector. The evaluation results showed that the proposed method achieves high precision and robust alignment of look-angle-varied TerraSAR-X images. The affine features detected using the fractional order operator are more stable and have strong capacity to reduce sturdy speckle noise.

This research provides a comparative study of intelligent systems in structural damage assessment after the occurrence of an earthquake. Seismic response data of a reinforced concrete structure subjected to 100 different levels of seismic excitation are utilized to study the structural damage pattern described by a well-known damage index, the maximum inter-story drift ratio (MISDR). Through a time-frequency analysis of the accelerograms, a set of seismic features is extracted. The aim of this study is to analyze the performance of three different techniques for the set of the proposed seismic features: an artificial neural network (ANN), a Mamdani-type fuzzy inference system (FIS), and a Sugeno-type FIS. The performance of the models is evaluated in terms of the mean square error (MSE) between the actual calculated and estimated MISDR values derived from the proposed models. All models provide small MSE values. Yet, the ANN model reveals a slightly better performance.

In this paper, we introduce the notion of Einstein aggregation operators, such as the interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy Einstein weighted averaging aggregation operator and the interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy Einstein ordered weighted averaging aggregation operator. We also discuss some desirable properties, such as idempotency, boundedness, commutativity, and monotonicity. The main advantage of using the proposed operators is that these operators give a more complete view of the problem to the decision makers. These operators provide more accurate and precise results as compared the existing method. Finally, we apply these operators to deal with multiple-attribute group decision making under interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy information. For this, we construct an algorithm for multiple-attribute group decision making. Lastly, we also construct a numerical example for multiple-attribute group decision making.

In the industrial and manufacturing fields, many problems require tuning of the parameters of complex models by means of exploitation of empirical data. In some cases, the use of analytical methods for the determination of such parameters is not applicable; thus, heuristic methods are employed. One of the main disadvantages of these approaches is the risk of converging to “suboptimal” solutions. In this article, the use of a novel type of genetic algorithm is proposed to overcome this drawback. This approach exploits a fuzzy inference system that controls the search strategies of genetic algorithm on the basis of the real-time status of the optimization process. In this article, this method is tested on classical optimization problems and on three industrial applications that put into evidence the improvement of the capability of avoiding the local minima and the acceleration of the search process.

Inspired by the nonlinear weighted average operator, this paper proposes several generalized power average operators to aggregate hesitant fuzzy linguistic decision information. It is worth noting that the new operators take both the location and date weight information and the relative closeness of the decision-making information into consideration, a characteristic that results in objectivity and fairness in a group decision making. Moreover, we demonstrate some useful properties of the operators and discuss their associations. A new approach based on the designed operators is then proposed for hesitant fuzzy linguistic multiple attribute group decision-making problems, in which the attribute weights are known or unknown. Finally, this paper demonstrates the efficiency and feasibility of the proposed method through a numerical example.

Group decision-making is a very useful technique for ranking the group of alternatives. The ordered weighted distance (OWD) operator is a new tool in group decision-making problems. In this paper, we apply the OWD operator on cubic information. We develop a new operator, the so-called cubic OWD (COWD) operator, and study the different properties of it. We also discuss some particular cases of COWD. Finally, we develop a general algorithm for group decision-making problems using the COWD operator and give an application to the group decision-making problem.

Nowadays, electrical power system is considered as one of the most complicated artificial systems all over the globe, as social and economic development depends on intact, consistent, stable and economic functions. Owing to diverse random causes, accidental failures occur in electrical power systems. Considering this issue, this article aimed to propose the use of deep belief network (DBN) in detecting and classifying fault signals such as transient, sag and swell in the transmission line. Here, wavelet-decomposed fault signals are extracted and the fault is diagnosed based on the decomposed signal by the DBN model. Further, this article provides the performance analysis by determining the types I and II measures and root-mean-square-error (RMSE) measure. In the performance analysis, it compares the performance of the DBN model to various conventional models like linear support vector machine (SVM), quadratic SVM, radial basis function SVM, polynomial SVM, multilayer perceptron SVM, Levenberg-Marquardt neural network and gradient descent neural network models. The simulation results validate that the proposed DBN model effectively detects and classifies the fault signal in power distribution system when compared to the traditional model.

Diabetes is a chronic disease caused by insulin deficiency, and it should be detected in the early stages for effective treatment. In this paper, the Diabetes-Network (Dia-Net) is proposed to increase diabetes predictive accuracy. The proposed Dia-Net is a dual-stage network. It combines both optimized probabilistic neural network (OPNN) and optimized radial basis function neural network (ORBFNN) in the first stage. Hence, Dia-Net possesses the advantages of both the models. In the second stage, the linear support vector machine is used. As the dataset size increases, both RBFNN and PNN perform better, but both suffers from complexity and computational problems. To address these problems, in this paper, particle swarm optimization-based clustering is employed for discovering centers in high-dense regions. This reduces the size of the hidden layer of both RBFNN and PNNs. Experiments are carried out on the Pima Indians Diabetes dataset. The Experimental results showed that the proposed Dia-Net model outperformed individual as well as state-of-the-art models.

Ultrasound (US) imaging has been broadly utilized as part of kidney diagnosis because of its ability to show structural abnormalities like cysts, stones, and infections as well as information about kidney function. The main aim of this research is to effectively classify normal and abnormal kidney images through US based on the selection of relevant features. In this study, abnormal kidney images were classified through gray-scale conversion, region-of-interest generation, multi-scale wavelet-based Gabor feature extraction, probabilistic principal component analysis-based feature selection and adaptive artificial neural network technique. The anticipated method is executed in the working platform of MATLAB, and the results were analyzed and contrasted. Results show that the proposed approach had 94% accuracy and 100% specificity. In addition, its false-acceptance rate is 0%, whereas that of existing methods is not <27%. This shows the precise prediction level of the proposed approach, compared with that of existing methods.

The main intention of this research is to develop a novel ranking measure for content-based image retrieval system. Owing to the achievement of data retrieval, most commercial search engines still utilize a text-based search approach for image search by utilizing encompassing textual information. As the text information is, in some cases, noisy and even inaccessible, the drawback of such a recovery strategy is to the extent that it cannot depict the contents of images precisely, subsequently hampering the execution of image search. In order to improve the performance of image search, we propose in this work a novel algorithm for improving image search through a multi-kernel fuzzy c-means (MKFCM) algorithm. In the initial step of our method, images are retrieved using four-level discrete wavelet transform-based features and the MKFCM clustering algorithm. Next, the retrieved images are analyzed using fuzzy c-means clustering methods, and the rank of the results is adjusted according to the distance of a cluster from a query. To improve the ranking performance, we combine the retrieved result and ranking result. At last, we obtain the ranked retrieved images. In addition, we analyze the effects of different clustering methods. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is analyzed with the help of precision, recall, and F-measures.

Compression of compound records and images can be more cumbersome than the original information since they can be a mix of text, picture and graphics. The principle requirement of the compound record or images is the nature of the compressed data. In this paper, diverse procedures are used under block-based classification to distinguish the compound image segments. The segmentation process starts with separation of the entire image into blocks by spare decomposition technique in smooth blocks and non smooth blocks. Gray wolf-optimization based FCM (fuzzy C-means) algorithm is employed to segment background, text, graphics, images and overlap, which are then individually compressed using adaptive Huffman coding, embedded zero wavelet and H.264 coding techniques. Exploratory outcomes demonstrate that the proposed conspire expands compression ratio, enhances image quality and additionally limits computational complexity. The proposed method is implemented on the working platform of MATLAB.

Fuzzy c-means is an efficient algorithm that is amply used for data clustering. Nonetheless, when using this algorithm, the designer faces two crucial choices: choosing the optimal number of clusters and initializing the cluster centers. The two choices have a direct impact on the clustering outcome. This paper presents an improved algorithm called automatic genetic fuzzy c-means that evolves the number of clusters and provides the initial centroids. The proposed algorithm uses a genetic algorithm with a new crossover operator, a new mutation operator, and modified tournament selection; further, it defines a new fitness function based on three cluster validity indices. Real data sets are used to demonstrate the effectiveness, in terms of quality, of the proposed algorithm.

The patient admission scheduling (PAS) problem is an optimization problem in which we assign patients automatically to beds for a specific period of time while preserving their medical requirements and their preferences. In this paper, we present a novel solution to the PAS problem using the harmony search (HS) algorithm. We tailor the HS to solve the PAS problem by distributing patients to beds randomly in the harmony memory (HM) while respecting all hard constraints. The proposed algorithm uses five neighborhood strategies in the pitch adjustment stage. This technique helps in increasing the variations of the generated solutions by exploring more solutions in the search space. The PAS standard benchmark datasets are used in the evaluation. Initially, a sensitivity analysis of the HS algorithm is studied to show the effect of its control parameters on the HS performance. The proposed method is also compared with nine methods: non-linear great deluge (NLGD), simulated annealing with hyper-heuristic (HH-SA), improved with equal hyper-heuristic (HH-IE), simulated annealing (SA), tabu search (TS), simple random simulated annealing with dynamic heuristic (DHS-SA), simple random improvement with dynamic heuristic (DHS-OI), simple random great deluge with dynamic heuristic (DHS-GD), and biogeography-based optimization (BBO). The proposed HS algorithm is able to produce comparably competitive results when compared with these methods. This proves that the proposed HS is a very efficient alternative to the PAS problem, which can be efficiently used to solve many scheduling problems of a large-scale data.

The main objective of this paper is to explore parameters usually adopted by the JPEG method and use them in speech signal compression. Speech compression is the technique of encoding the speech signal in some way that allows the same speech parameters to represent the whole signal. In other words, it is to eliminate redundant features of speech and keep only the important ones for the next stage of speech reproduction. In this paper, the proposed method is to adopt the JPEG scheme, which is usually used in digital image compression and digital speech signal compression. This will open the door to use some methods that are already designed to fit two-dimensional (2D) signals and use them in a 1D signal world. The method includes many priori steps for preparing the speech signal to make it more comparable with the JPEG technique. In order to examine the quality of the compressed data using the JPEG method, different quantization matrices with different compression levels have been employed within the proposed method. Comparison results between the original signal and the reproduced (decompressed) signal show a huge matching. However, different quantization matrices could reduce the quality of the reproduced signal, but in general, it is still within the range of acceptance.

In many biometric applications, limited data speaker verification plays a significant role in practical-oriented systems to verify the speaker. The performance of the speaker verification system needs to be improved by applying suitable techniques to limited data condition. The limited data represent both train and test data duration in terms of few seconds. This article shows the importance of the speaker verification system under limited data condition using feature- and score-level fusion techniques. The baseline speaker verification system uses vocal tract features like mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, linear predictive cepstral coefficients and excitation source features like linear prediction residual and linear prediction residual phase as features along with i-vector modeling techniques using the NIST 2003 data set. In feature-level fusion, the vocal tract features are fused with excitation source features. As a result, on average, equal error rate (EER) is approximately equal to 4% compared to individual feature performance. Further in this work, two different types of score-level fusion are demonstrated. In the first case, fusing the scores of vocal tract features and excitation source features at score-level-maintaining modeling technique remains the same, which provides an average reduction approximately equal to 2% EER compared to feature-level fusion performance. In the second case, scores of the different modeling techniques are combined, which has resulted in EER reduction approximately equal to 4.5% compared with score-level fusion of different features.

This paper explains about the web page recommendation system. This procedure encompasses consumers’ upcoming demand and web page recommendations. In the proposed web page recommendation system, potential and non-potential data can be categorized by use of the Levenberg–Marquardt firefly neural network algorithm, and forecast can be made by using the K-means clustering algorithm. Consequently, the projected representation demonstrates the infrequent contact format with the help of the representation that integrates the comparable consumer access model data that belong to the further consumer. Thereafter, the impending user data are specified to the clustering progression. The third phase of the projected process is collecting potential data with the aid of the improved fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm. The last step of our projected process is envisaging the upcoming demand for the subsequent consumer. The presentation of the projected procedure will be compared to the obtainable procedure.

Computational models are based on symbolic architecture. For this reason, computational models function problematically in dynamic, noisy, and continuous environments. The ACT/R (Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational) model is also problematic, as it is purely based on symbolic architecture like other computational models. The ACT/R decision-making process is based on the production operator on the input subject set. This approach firstly does not make a non-linear mapping between input and the decision-making result in ACT/R. Secondly, it is not possible to decide on the input subjects with a continuous input range because of the need to introduce numerous rules. The objective of presenting the ACT/R-radial basis function (RBF) hybrid architecture method was to create a communication network between input concepts in which the reception of and decision making on a combination of subjects and symbols are possible. Moreover, a non-linear mapping between input and the decision-making result can be created. The said capabilities have been obtained by the combination of ACT/R with an RBF neural network and calculation of the decision-making centers in the said network using clustering. The empirical experiments indicate desirable results in this regard.

Human disease identification from the scanned body parts helps medical practitioners make the right decision in lesser time. Image segmentation plays a vital role in automated diagnosis for the delineation of anatomical organs and anomalies. There are many variants of segmentation algorithms used by current researchers, whereas there is no universal algorithm for all medical images. This paper classifies some of the widely used medical image segmentation algorithms based on their evolution, and the features of each generation are also discussed. The comparative analysis of segmentation algorithms is done based on characteristics like spatial consideration, region continuity, computation complexity, selection of parameters, noise immunity, accuracy, and computation time. Finally, in this work, some of the typical segmentation algorithms are implemented on real-time datasets using Matlab 2010 software, and the outcome of this work will be an aid for the researchers in medical image processing.

Image de-blurring is an inverse problem whose intent is to recover an image from the image affected badly with different environmental conditions. Usually, blurring can happen in various ways; however, de-blurring from a motion problem with or without noise can pose an important problem that is difficult to solve with less computation task. The quality of the restored image in iterative methods of blind motion de-blurring depends on the regularization parameter and the iteration number, which can be automatically or manually stopped. Blind de-blurring and restoration employing image de-blurring and whiteness measures are proposed in this paper to automatically decide the number of iterations. The technique has three modules, namely image de-blurring module, whiteness measures module, and image estimation module. New whiteness measures of hole entropy and mean-square contingency coefficient have been proposed in the whiteness measures module. Initially, the blurred image is de-blurred by the employment of edge responses and image priors using point-spread function. Later, whiteness measures are computed for the de-blurred image and, finally, the best image is selected. The results are obtained for all eight whiteness measures by employing evaluation metrics of increase in signal-to-noise ratio (ISNR), mean-square error, and structural similarity index. The results are obtained from standard images, and performance analysis is made by varying parameters. The obtained results for synthetically blurred images are good even under a noisy condition with ΔISNR average values of 0.3066 dB. The proposed whiteness measures seek a powerful solution to iterative de-blurring algorithms in deciding automatic stopping criteria.

Credit risk analysis is important for financial institutions that provide loans to businesses and individuals. Banks and other financial institutions generally face risks that are mostly of financial nature; hence, such institutions must balance risks and returns. Analyzing or determining risk levels involved in credits, finances, and loans can be performed through predictive analytic techniques, such as an extreme learning machine (ELM). In this work, we empirically evaluated the performance of an ELM for credit risk problems and compared it to naive Bayes, decision tree, and multi-layer perceptron (MLP). The comparison was conducted on the basis of a German credit risk dataset. The simulation results of statistical measures of performance corroborated that the ELM outperforms naive Bayes, decision tree, and MLP classifiers by 1.8248%, 16.6346%, and 5.8934%, respectively.

Many recommender systems frequently make suggestions for group consumable items to the individual users. There has been much work done in group recommender systems (GRSs) with full ranking, but partial ranking (PR) where items are partially ranked still remains a challenge. The ultimate objective of this work is to propose rank aggregation technique for effectively handling the PR problem. Additionally, in real applications, most of the studies have focused on PR without ties (PRWOT). However, the rankings may have ties where some items are placed in the same position, but where some items are partially ranked to be aggregated may not be permutations. In this work, in order to handle problem of PR in GRS for PRWOT and PR with ties (PRWT), we propose a novel approach to GRS based on genetic algorithm (GA) where for PRWOT Spearman foot rule distance and for PRWT Kendall tau distance with bucket order are used as fitness functions. Experimental results are presented that clearly demonstrate that our proposed GRS based on GA for PRWOT (GRS-GA-PRWOT) and PRWT (GRS-GA-PRWT) outperforms well-known baseline GRS techniques.

In this paper, the improvements in the recently developed end to end spoken query system to access the agricultural commodity prices and weather information in Kannada language/dialects is demonstrated. The spoken query system consists of interactive voice response system (IVRS) call flow, automatic speech recognition (ASR) models and agricultural commodity prices, and weather information databases. The task specific speech data used in the earlier spoken query system had a high level of background and other types of noises as it is collected from the farmers of Karnataka state (a state in India that speaks the Kannada language) under uncontrolled environment. The different types of noises present in collected speech data had an adverse effect on the on-line and off-line recognition performances. To improve the recognition accuracy in spoken query system, a noise elimination algorithm is proposed in this work, which is a combination of spectral subtraction with voice activity detection (SS-VAD) and minimum mean square error spectrum power estimator based on zero crossing (MMSE-SPZC). The noise elimination algorithm is added in the system before the feature extraction part. In addition to this, alternate acoustic models are developed using subspace Gaussian mixture models (SGMM) and deep neural network (DNN). The experimental results show that these modeling techniques are more powerful than the conventional Gaussian mixture model (GMM) – hidden Markov model (HMM), which was used as a modeling technique for the development of ASR models to design earlier spoken query systems. The fusion of noise elimination technique and SGMM/DNN-based modeling gives a better relative improvement of 7% accuracy compared to the earlier GMM-HMM-based ASR system. The least word error rate (WER) acoustic models could be used in spoken query system. The on-line speech recognition accuracy testing of developed spoken query system (with the help of Karnataka farmers) is also presented in this work.

Handwritten words can never complement printed words because the former are mostly written in either skewed or slanted form or in both. This very nature of handwriting adds a huge overhead when converting word images into machine-editable format through an optical character recognition system. Therefore, slope and slant corrections are considered as the fundamental pre-processing tasks in handwritten word recognition. For solving this, researchers have followed a two-pass approach where the slope of the word is corrected first and then slant correction is carried out subsequently, thus making the system computationally expensive. To address this issue, we propose a novel one-pass method, based on fitting an oblique ellipse over the word images, to estimate both the slope and slant angles of the same. Furthermore, we have developed three databases considering word images of three popular scripts used in India, namely Bangla, Devanagari, and Roman, along with ground truth information. The experimental results revealed the effectiveness of the proposed method over some state-of-the-art methods used for the aforementioned problem.

The main objective of the research is to provide a multi-agent data mining system for diagnosing diabetes. Here, we use multi-agents for diagnosing diabetes such as user agent, connection agent, updation agent, and security agent, in which each agent performs their own task under the coordination of the connection agent. For secure communication, the user symptoms are encrypted with the help of Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Optimal Advanced Encryption Standard. In Optimal Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm, the key values are optimally selected by means of differential evaluation algorithm. After receiving the encrypted data, the suggested method needs to find the diabetes level of the user through multiple kernel support vector machine algorithm. Based on that, the agent prescribes the drugs for the corresponding user. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated by classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, recall, execution time and memory value. The proposed method will be implemented in JAVA platform.

Word searching or keyword spotting is an important research problem in the domain of document image processing. The solution to the said problem for handwritten documents is more challenging than for printed ones. In this work, a two-stage word searching schema is introduced. In the first stage, all the irrelevant words with respect to a search word are filtered out from the document page image. This is carried out using a zonal feature vector, called pre-selection feature vector, along with a rule-based binary classification method. In the next step, a holistic word recognition paradigm is used to confirm a pre-selected word as search word. To accomplish this, a modified histogram of oriented gradients-based feature descriptor is combined with a topological feature vector. This method is experimented on a QUWI English database, which is freely available through the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition 2015 competition entitled “Writer Identification and Gender Classification.” This technique not only provides good retrieval performance in terms of recall, precision, and F-measure scores, but it also outperforms some state-of-the-art methods.

Pythagorean fuzzy set is one of the successful extensions of the intuitionistic fuzzy set for handling uncertainties in information. Under this environment, in this paper, we introduce the notion of Pythagorean fuzzy Einstein hybrid averaging (PFEHA) aggregation operator along with some of its properties, namely idempotency, boundedness, and monotonicity. PFEHA aggregation operator is the generalization of Pythagorean fuzzy Einstein weighted averaging aggregation operator and Pythagorean fuzzy Einstein ordered weighted averaging aggregation operator. The operator proposed in this paper provides more accurate and precise results as compared to the existing operators. Therefore, this method plays a vital role in real-world problems. Finally, we applied the proposed operator and method to multiple-attribute group decision making.

Event studies in finance have focused on traditional news headlines to assess the impact an event has on a traded company. The increased proliferation of news and information produced by social media content has disrupted this trend. Although researchers have begun to identify trading opportunities from social media platforms, such as Twitter, almost all techniques use a general sentiment from large collections of tweets. Though useful, general sentiment does not provide an opportunity to indicate specific events worthy of affecting stock prices. This work presents an event clustering algorithm, utilizing natural language processing techniques to generate newsworthy events from Twitter, which have the potential to influence stock prices in the same manner as traditional news headlines. The event clustering method addresses the effects of pre-news and lagged news, two peculiarities that appear when connecting trading and news, regardless of the medium. Pre-news signifies a finding where stock prices move in advance of a news release. Lagged news refers to follow-up or late-arriving news, adding redundancy in making trading decisions. For events generated by the proposed clustering algorithm, we incorporate event studies and machine learning to produce an actionable system that can guide trading decisions. The recommended prediction algorithms provide investing strategies with profitable risk-adjusted returns. The suggested language models present annualized Sharpe ratios (risk-adjusted returns) in the 5–11 range, while time-series models produce in the 2–3 range (without transaction costs). The distribution of returns confirms the encouraging Sharpe ratios by identifying most outliers as positive gains. Additionally, machine learning metrics of precision, recall, and accuracy are discussed alongside financial metrics in hopes of bridging the gap between academia and industry in the field of computational finance.

In this study, we present a novel approach to efficiently detect the flame in multiple scenes in an image. The method uses a set of parametric representation named as Gradient Features (GF), to learn the features of flame color changes in the image. Different from the traditional color features of the flame, GF represents the color changes in RGB channels for further consideration. In this study, support vector machine was applied to generate a set of candidate regions and the decision tree model was used to judge flame regions based on GF. Some exclusive experiments were conducted to verify the validity and effectiveness of the proposed method. The results showed that the proposed method can accurately differentiate between yellow color light and sunrise scenes. A comparison with the state-of-the-art preceding methods showed that this method can utilize the symmetry of flame regions and achieve a better result.

Controlling liquid flow is one of the most important parameters in the process control industry. It is challenging to optimize the liquid flow rate for its highly nonlinear nature. This paper proposes a model of liquid flow processes using an artificial neural network (NN) and optimizes it using a flower pollination algorithm (FPA) to avoid local minima and improve the accuracy and convergence speed. In the first phase, the NN model was trained by the dataset obtained from the experiments, which were carried out. In these conditions, the liquid flow rate was measured at different sensor output voltages, pipe diameter and liquid conductivity. The model response was cross-verified with the experimental results and found to be satisfactory. In the second phase of work, the optimized conditions of sensor output voltages, pipe diameter and liquid conductivity were found to give the minimum flow rate of the process using FPA. After cross-validation and testing subdatasets, the accuracy was nearly 94.17% and 99.25%, respectively.

Interpretation of different writing styles, unconstrained cursiveness and relationship between different primitive parts is an essential and challenging task for recognition of handwritten characters. As feature representation is inadequate, appropriate interpretation/description of handwritten characters seems to be a challenging task. Although existing research in handwritten characters is extensive, it still remains a challenge to get the effective representation of characters in feature space. In this paper, we make an attempt to circumvent these problems by proposing an approach that exploits the robust graph representation and spectral graph embedding concept to characterise and effectively represent handwritten characters, taking into account writing styles, cursiveness and relationships. For corroboration of the efficacy of the proposed method, extensive experiments were carried out on the standard handwritten numeral Computer Vision Pattern Recognition, Unit of Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata dataset. The experimental results demonstrate promising findings, which can be used in future studies.

Text clustering problem (TCP) is a leading process in many key areas such as information retrieval, text mining, and natural language processing. This presents the need for a potent document clustering algorithm that can be used effectively to navigate, summarize, and arrange information to congregate large data sets. This paper encompasses an adaptation of the grey wolf optimizer (GWO) for TCP, referred to as TCP-GWO. The TCP demands a degree of accuracy beyond that which is possible with metaheuristic swarm-based algorithms. The main issue to be addressed is how to split text documents on the basis of GWO into homogeneous clusters that are sufficiently precise and functional. Specifically, TCP-GWO, or referred to as the document clustering algorithm, used the average distance of documents to the cluster centroid (ADDC) as an objective function to repeatedly optimize the distance between the clusters of the documents. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed TCP-GWO was demonstrated on a sufficiently large number of documents of variable sizes, documents that were randomly selected from a set of six publicly available data sets. Documents of high complexity were also included in the evaluation process to assess the recall detection rate of the document clustering algorithm. The experimental results for a test set of over a part of 1300 documents showed that failure to correctly cluster a document occurred in less than 20% of cases with a recall rate of more than 65% for a highly complex data set. The high F-measure rate and ability to cluster documents in an effective manner are important advances resulting from this research. The proposed TCP-GWO method was compared to the other well-established text clustering methods using randomly selected data sets. Interestingly, TCP-GWO outperforms the comparative methods in terms of precision, recall, and F-measure rates. In a nutshell, the results illustrate that the proposed TCP-GWO is able to excel compared to the other comparative clustering methods in terms of measurement criteria, whereby more than 55% of the documents were correctly clustered with a high level of accuracy.

All over the world, breast cancer is the second leading cause of death in women above 40 years of age. To design an efficient classification system for breast cancer diagnosis, one has to use efficient algorithms for feature selection to reduce the feature space of mammogram classification. The current work investigates the use of hybrid genetic ensemble method for feature selection and classification of masses. Genetic algorithm (GA) is used to select a subset of features and to evaluate the fitness of the selected features, Adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) and Random Forest (RF) ensembles with 10-fold cross-validation are employed. The selected features are used to classify masses into benign or malignant using AdaBoost, RF, and single Decision Tree (DT) classifiers. The performance evaluation of classifiers indicates that AdaBoost outperforms both RF and single DT classifiers. AdaBoost achieves an accuracy of 96.15%, with 97.32% sensitivity, 95.90% specificity, and area under curve of A Z = 0.982 ± 0.004. The results obtained with the proposed method are better when compared with extant research work.

One of the major objectives of any classification technique is to categorise the incoming input values based on their various attributes. Many techniques have been described in the literature, one of them being the probabilistic neural network (PNN). There were many comparisons made between the various published techniques depending on their precision. In this study, the researchers investigated the search capability of the grey wolf optimiser (GWO) algorithm for determining the optimised values of the PNN weights. To the best of our knowledge, we report for the first time on a GWO algorithm along with the PNN for solving the classification of time series problem. PNN was used for obtaining the primary solution, and thereby the PNN weights were adjusted using the GWO for solving the time series data and further decreasing the error rate. In this study, the main goal was to investigate the application of the GWO algorithm along with the PNN classifier for improving the classification precision and enhancing the balance between exploitation and exploration in the GWO search algorithm. The hybrid GWO-PNN algorithm was used in this study, and the results obtained were compared with the published literature. The experimental results for six benchmark time series datasets showed that this hybrid GWO-PNN outperformed the PNN algorithm for the studied datasets. It has been seen that hybrid classification techniques are more precise and reliable for solving classification problems. A comparison with other algorithms in the published literature showed that the hybrid GWO-PNN could decrease the error rate and could also generate a better result for five of the datasets studied.

In this study, we developed an approach to investigate multiple attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) problems, in which the attribute values take the form of Pythagorean fuzzy numbers whose information about attribute weights is incompletely known. First, the Pythagorean fuzzy Choquet integral geometric operator is utilized to aggregate the given decision information to obtain the overall preference value of each alternative by experts. In order to obtain the weight vector of the criteria, an optimization model based on the basic ideal of the traditional gray relational analysis method is established, and the calculation steps for solving Pythagorean fuzzy MAGDM problems with incompletely known weight information are given. The degree of gray relation between every alternative and positive-ideal solution and negative-ideal solution is calculated. Then, a relative relational degree is defined to determine the ranking order of all alternatives by calculating the degree of gray relation to both the positive-ideal solution and negative-ideal solution simultaneously. Finally, an illustrative example is given to verify the developed approach and to demonstrate its practicality and effectiveness.

Renewable energies constitute an alternative to fossil energies for several reasons. The microgrid can be assumed as the ideal way to integrate a renewable energy source in the production of electricity and give the consumer the opportunity to participate in the electricity market not just like a consumer but also like a producer. In this paper, we present a multi-agent system based on wind and photovoltaic power prediction using the extreme learning machine algorithm. This algorithm was tested on real weather data taken from the region of Tetouan City in Morocco. The process aimed to implement a microgrid located in Tetouan City and composed of different generation units (solar and wind energies were combined together to increase the efficiency of the system) and storage units (batteries were used to ensure the availability of power on demand as much as possible). In the proposed architecture, the microgrid can exchange electricity with the main grid; therefore, it can buy or sell electricity. Thus, the goal of our multi-agent system is to control the amount of power delivered or taken from the main grid in order to reduce the cost and maximize the benefit. To address uncertainties in the system, we use fuzzy logic control to manage the flow of energy, to ensure the availability of power on demand, and to make a reasonable decision about storing or selling electricity.

Trademark recognition and retrieval is a vital appliance component of content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Reduction in the semantic gap, attaining more accuracy, reduction in computation complexity, and hence in execution time, are the major challenges in designing and developing a trademark retrieval system. The direction of the proposed work takes into account these challenges by implementing trademark image retrieval through deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) integrated with a relevant feedback mechanism. The dataset features are optimized through particle swarm optimization (PSO), reducing the search space. These best/optimized features are given to the self-organizing map (SOM) for clustering at the preprocessing stage. The CNN model is trained on feature representations of relevant and irrelevant images, using the feedback information from the user bringing the marked relevant images closer to the query. Experimentation proved a significant performance when evaluated using FlickrLogos-27, FlickrLogos-32, and FlickrLogos-32 PLUS datasets, as illustrated in the performance results section.

This paper attempts to investigate some aspects related to problems involved in textual inter-cognitive communication in the context of search queries. Furthermore, it aims at stressing on the root-pattern and morpho-phonetic dimension of a word meaning within a query, and its effects on understanding and predicting the intended information conveyed by some search patterns in a human language. As humans are inclined to use very few words possibly pervaded with vague and uncertain interpretational potential for requesting information, misinterpreting conveyed information in a query term might critically influence an inter-cognitive communication, particularly in case of Arabic- and Semitic-based computer systems. Furthermore, as phonetic patterns are involved in the mental word perception, an abstract morpho-phonetic query model is proposed based on the non-linearity of the morpho-phonetic characteristic of Arabic word cognition. This model suggests forming the intended query information by constructing morpho-phonetic query patterns relying on the most associative root-pattern subnetworks. An important advantage of this model resides in introducing the concept of query abstract morpho-phonetic vectors expressing query vector space. Furthermore, this approach suggests employing the fuzzy subsethood theorem as an assessment reflecting model accuracy and the closeness to human associative word-networks. Finally, it opens the discussion to consider indexing based on a higher level of abstraction, such as utilising patterns as cognitive search variables. Furthermore, as this model is capable of predicting most human associative query key terms, integrating these within certain human-machine interaction would improve inter-cognitive communications.

This paper presents an alternative method for predicting biochar yields from biomass thermochemical processes. As biochar is considered a renewable and sustainable energy source, it has received more attention. Several methods have been presented to predict biochar, such as neural network (NN) and least square support vector machine (LS-SVM). However, each of them has its own drawbacks, such as getting stuck in a local optimum, which occurs in NN, and lack of uncertainty and time complexity, as in LS-SVM. Therefore, this paper avoids this limitation by using a hybrid method between the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) and gray wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm. The proposed method is called ANFIS-GWO, which consists of two stages. In the first stage, GWO is used to learn the parameters of ANFIS using the training set. Meanwhile, in the second stage, the testing set is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed ANFIS-GWO method. Three experiments were performed to assess the performance of the proposed method. The first experiment used a set of UCI (University of California, Irvine) benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of ANFIS-GWO. The aim of the second experiment was to evaluate the performance of the proposed ANFIS-GWO method to predict biochar yield from manure pyrolysis. The third experiment aimed to estimate the values of input parameters of pyrolysis that maximize biochar production. The obtained results were compared to those of other methods, such as ANFIS using gradient descent, practical swarm optimization, genetic algorithm, whale optimization algorithm, sine-cosine algorithm, and LS-SVM. The results of the ANFIS-GWO method were >35% of the standard ANFIS and also better than those of other methods.

Deep learning is an effective approach to solving image recognition problems. People draw intuitive conclusions from trading charts. This study uses the characteristics of deep learning to train computers in imitating this kind of intuition in the context of trading charts. The main goal of our approach is combining the time-series modeling and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to build a trading model. We propose three steps to build the trading model. First, we preprocess the input data from quantitative data to images. Second, we use a CNN, which is a type of deep learning, to train our trading model. Third, we evaluate the model’s performance in terms of the accuracy of classification. The experimental results show that if the strategy is clear enough to make the images obviously distinguishable the CNN model can predict the prices of a financial asset. Hence, our approach can help devise trading strategies and help clients automatically obtain personalized trading strategies.

An automatic speech recognition (ASR) system translates spoken words or utterances (isolated, connected, continuous, and spontaneous) into text format. State-of-the-art ASR systems mainly use Mel frequency (MF) cepstral coefficient (MFCC), perceptual linear prediction (PLP), and Gammatone frequency (GF) cepstral coefficient (GFCC) for extracting features in the training phase of the ASR system. Initially, the paper proposes a sequential combination of all three feature extraction methods, taking two at a time. Six combinations, MF-PLP, PLP-MFCC, MF-GFCC, GF-MFCC, GF-PLP, and PLP-GFCC, are used, and the accuracy of the proposed system using all these combinations was tested. The results show that the GF-MFCC and MF-GFCC integrations outperform all other proposed integrations. Further, these two feature vector integrations are optimized using three different optimization methods, particle swarm optimization (PSO), PSO with crossover, and PSO with quadratic crossover (Q-PSO). The results demonstrate that the Q-PSO-optimized GF-MFCC integration show significant improvement over all other optimized combinations.

The quantification of the fuzzy fault tree analysis (FFTA) is based on fuzzy arithmetic operations. It is well known that the weakest t-norm (T w )-based fuzzy arithmetic operations have some advantages. The T w -based fuzzy arithmetic operations provide fuzzy results with less fuzziness and preserve the shape of fuzzy numbers. The purpose of this study is to develop a T w -based fuzzy fault tree analysis (TBFFTA) to assess system reliability when only qualitative data such as expert opinions or decisions are available and described in linguistic terms. The developed TBFFTA applies T w -based fuzzy arithmetic operations to evaluate the lower bound, best estimate, and upper bound top event probability of a system fault tree, where occurrence possibilities of basic events are characterized by triangular fuzzy membership functions. To demonstrate the applicability and feasibility of TBFFTA, a case study has been performed. The computed results have been compared with results analyzed by existing fuzzy approach. The comparative study concludes that TBFFTA reduces fuzzy spreads (uncertainty interval) and provides more exact fuzzy results.

The term “big data” means a large amount of data, and big data management refers to the efficient handling, organization, or use of large volumes of structured and unstructured data belonging to an organization. Due to the gradual availability of plenty of raw data, the knowledge extraction process from big data is a very difficult task for most of the classical data mining and machine learning tools. In a previous paper, the correlative naive Bayes (CNB) classifier was developed for big data classification. This work incorporates the fuzzy theory along with the CNB classifier to develop the fuzzy CNB (FCNB) classifier. The proposed FCNB classifier solves the big data classification problem by using the MapReduce framework and thus achieves improved classification results. Initially, the database is converted to the probabilistic index table, in which data and attributes are presented in rows and columns, respectively. Then, the membership degree of the unique symbols present in each attribute of data is found. Finally, the proposed FCNB classifier finds the class of data based on training information. The simulation of the proposed FCNB classifier uses the localization and skin segmentation datasets for the purpose of experimentation. The results of the proposed FCNB classifier are analyzed based on the metrics, such as sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy, and compared with the various existing works.

Mixed-variable optimization problems consist of the continuous, integer, and discrete variables generally used in various engineering optimization problems. These variables increase the computational cost and complexity of optimization problems due to the handling of variables. Moreover, there are few optimization algorithms that give a globally optimal solution for non-differential and non-convex objective functions. Initially, the Jaya algorithm has been developed for continuous variable optimization problems. In this paper, the Jaya algorithm is further extended for solving mixed-variable optimization problems. In the proposed algorithm, continuous variables remain in the continuous domain while continuous domains of discrete and integer variables are converted into discrete and integer domains applying bound constraint of the middle point of corresponding two consecutive values of discrete and integer variables. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is evaluated through examples of mixed-variable optimization problems taken from previous research works, and optimum solutions are validated with other mixed-variable optimization algorithms. The proposed algorithm is also applied to two-plane balancing of the unbalanced rigid threshing rotor, using the number of balance masses on plane 1 and plane 2. It is found that the proposed algorithm is computationally more efficient and easier to use than other mixed optimization techniques.

This paper presents a robust, dynamic, and unsupervised fuzzy learning algorithm (RDUFL) that aims to cluster a set of data samples with the ability to detect outliers and assign the numbers of clusters automatically. It consists of three main stages. The first (1) stage is a pre-processing method in which possible outliers are determined and quarantined using a concept of proximity degree. The second (2) stage is a learning method, which consists in auto-detecting the number of classes with their prototypes for a dynamic threshold. This threshold is automatically determined based on the similarity among the detected prototypes that are updated at the exploration of a new data. The last (3) stage treats quarantined samples detected from the first stage to determine whether they belong to some class defined in the second phase. The effectiveness of this method is assessed on eight real medical benchmark datasets in comparison to known unsupervised learning methods, namely, the fuzzy c-means (FCM), possibilistic c-means (PCM), and noise clustering (NC). The obtained accuracy of our scheme is very promising for unsupervised learning problems.

The Cuckoo search (CS) algorithm is an efficient evolutionary algorithm inspired by the nesting and parasitic reproduction behaviors of some cuckoo species. Mutation is an operator used in evolutionary algorithms to maintain the diversity of the population from one generation to the next. The original CS algorithm uses the Lévy flight method, which is a special mutation operator, for efficient exploration of the search space. The major goal of the current paper is to experimentally evaluate the performance of the CS algorithm after replacing the Lévy flight method in the original CS algorithm with seven different mutation methods. The proposed variations of CS were evaluated using 14 standard benchmark functions in terms of the accuracy and reliability of the obtained results over multiple simulations. The experimental results suggest that the CS with polynomial mutation provides more accurate results and is more reliable than the other CS variations.

Nowadays, medical imaging and telemedicine are increasingly being utilized on a huge scale. The expanding interest in storing and sending medical images brings a lack of adequate memory spaces and transmission bandwidth. To resolve these issues, compression was introduced. The main aim of lossless image compression is to improve accuracy, reduce the bit rate, and improve the compression efficiency for the storage and transmission of medical images while maintaining an acceptable image quality for diagnosis purposes. In this paper, we propose lossless medical image compression using wavelet transform and encoding method. Basically, the proposed image compression system comprises three modules: (i) segmentation, (ii) image compression, and (iii) image decompression. First, the input medical image is segmented into region of interest (ROI) and non-ROI using a modified region growing algorithm. Subsequently, the ROI is compressed by discrete cosine transform and set partitioning in hierarchical tree encoding method, and the non-ROI is compressed by discrete wavelet transform and merging-based Huffman encoding method. Finally, the compressed image combination of the compressed ROI and non-ROI is obtained. Then, in the decompression stage, the original medical image is extracted using the reverse procedure. The experimentation was carried out using different medical images, and the proposed method obtained better results compared to different other methods.

Vehicle-activated signs (VAS) are speed-warning signs activated by radar when the driver speed exceeds a pre-set threshold, i.e. the trigger speed. The trigger speed is often set relative to the speed limit and is displayed for all types of vehicles. It is our opinion that having a static setting for the trigger speed may be inappropriate, given that traffic and road conditions are dynamic in nature. Further, different vehicle classes (mainly cars and trucks) behave differently, so a uniform trigger speed of such signs may be inappropriate to warn different types of vehicles. The current study aims to investigate an automatic VAS, i.e. one that could warn vehicle users with an appropriate trigger speed by taking into account vehicle types and road conditions. We therefore investigated different vehicle classes, their speeds, and the time of day to be able to conclude whether different trigger speeds of VAS are essential or not. The current study is entirely data driven; data are initially presented to a self-organising map (SOM) to be able to partition the data into different clusters, i.e. vehicle classes. Speed, time of day, and length of vehicle were supplied as inputs to the SOM. Further, the 85th percentile speed for the next hour is predicted using appropriate prediction models. Adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems and random forest (RF) were chosen for speed prediction; the mean speed, traffic flow, and standard deviation of vehicle speeds were supplied as inputs for the prediction models. The results achieved in this work show that RF is a reliable model in terms of accuracy and efficiency, and can be used in finding appropriate trigger speeds for an automatic VAS.

Recommender systems have focused on algorithms for a recommendation for individuals. However, in many domains, it may be recommending an item, for example, movies, restaurants etc. for a group of persons for which some remarkable group recommender systems (GRSs) has been developed. GRSs satisfy a group of people optimally by considering the equal weighting of the individual preferences. We have proposed a multi-expert scheme (MES) for group recommendation using genetic algorithm (GA) MES-GRS-GA that depends on consensus techniques to further improve group recommendations. In order to deal with this problem of GRS, we also propose a consensus scheme for GRSs where consensus from multiple experts are brought together to make a single recommended list of items in which each expert represents an individual inside the group. The proposed GA based consensus scheme is modeled as many consensus schemes within two phases. In the consensus phase, we have applied GA to obtain the maximum utility offer for each expert and generated the most appropriate rating for each item in the group. In the recommendation generation phase, again GA has been employed to produce the resulting group profile, i.e. the list of ratings with the minimum sum of distances from the group members. Finally, the results of computational experiments that bear close resemblance to real-world scenarios are presented and compared to baseline GRS techniques that illustrate the superiority of the proposed model.

This paper explores a multi-strategy technique that aims at enriching text documents for improving clustering quality. We use a combination of entity linking and document summarization in order to determine the identity of the most salient entities mentioned in texts. To effectively enrich documents without introducing noise, we limit ourselves to the text fragments mentioning the salient entities, in turn, belonging to a knowledge base like Wikipedia, while the actual enrichment of text fragments is carried out using WordNet. To feed clustering algorithms, we investigate different document representations obtained using several combinations of document enrichment and feature extraction. This allows us to exploit ensemble clustering, by combining multiple clustering results obtained using different document representations. Our experiments indicate that our novel enriching strategies, combined with ensemble clustering, can improve the quality of classical text clustering when applied to text corpora like The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) NEWS.

In recent internet era, micro-blogging sites produce enormous amount of short textual information, which appears in the form of opinions or sentiments of users. Sentiment analysis is a challenging task in short text, due to use of formal language, misspellings, and shortened forms of words, which leads to high dimensionality and sparsity. In order to deal with these challenges, this paper proposes a novel, simple, and yet effective feature selection method, to select frequently distributed features related to each class. In this paper, the feature selection method is based on class-wise information, to identify the relevant feature related to each class. We evaluate the proposed feature selection method by comparing with existing feature selection methods like chi-square ( χ 2 ), entropy, information gain, and mutual information. The performances are evaluated using classification accuracy obtained from support vector machine, K nearest neighbors, and random forest classifiers on two publically available datasets viz., Stanford Twitter dataset and Ravikiran Janardhana dataset. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed feature selection method, we conducted extensive experimentation by selecting different feature sets. The proposed feature selection method outperforms the existing feature selection methods in terms of classification accuracy on the Stanford Twitter dataset. Similarly, the proposed method performs competently equally in terms of classification accuracy compared to other feature selection methods in most of the feature subsets on Ravikiran Janardhana dataset.

Poor design choices at the early stages of software development and unprincipled maintenance practices usually deteriorate software modularity and subsequently increase system complexity. In object-oriented software, improper distribution of classes among packages is a key factor, responsible for modularity degradation. Many optimization techniques to improve the software modularity have been proposed in the literature. The focus of these optimization techniques is to produce modularization solutions by optimizing different design quality criteria. Such modularization solutions are good from the different aspect of quality; however, they require huge modifications in the existing modular structure to realize the suggested solution. Thus these techniques are costly and time consuming if applied at early stages of software maintenance. This paper proposes a search-based optimization technique to improve the modularity of the software system with minimum possible variation between the existing and produced modularization solution. To this contribution, a penalized fitness function, namely, penalized modularization quality, is designed in terms of modularization quality and the Move or Join Effectiveness Measure metric. Furthermore, this fitness function is used in both single-objective genetic algorithm (SGA) and multi-objective genetic algorithm (MGA) to generate the modularization. The effectiveness of the proposed remodularization approach is evaluated over five open-source and three random generated software systems. The experimentation results show that the proposed approach is able to generate modularization solutions with improved quality along with lesser perturbation compared to their non-penalty counterpart and at the same time it performs better with the MGA compared to the SGA. The proposed approach can be very useful, especially when total remodularization is not feasible/desirable due to lack of time or high cost.

In agile software processes, the issue of team size is an important one. In this work we look at how to find the optimal, or near optimal, self-organizing team size using a genetic algorithm (GA) which considers team communication efforts. Communication, authority, roles, and learning are the team’s performance characteristics. The GA has been developed according to performance characteristics. A survey was used to evaluate the communication weight factors, which were qualitatively assessed and used in the algorithm’s objective function. The GA experiments were performed in different stages: each stage results were tested and compared with the previous results. The results show that self-organizing teams of sizes ranged from five to nine members scored more. The model can be improved by adding other team characteristics, i.e. software development efforts and costs.

Because of exponential growth in the number of people who purchase products online, e-commerce organizations are vying for each other to offer innovative and improved services to its customers. Current platforms give its customers innovative services such as product recommendations based on their purchase histories and location, product comparison, and most importantly, a platform for expressing their experience and feedback. It is important for any e-commerce organization to analyze this feedback and to find out the sentiment of the customers for giving them better products and services. As large reviews may contain feedback in a mixed manner where a customer gives his opinion on different product features in the same review, finding out the exact sentiment is tedious. This work proposes aspect-specific sentiment analysis of product reviews using a well-sophisticated topic modeling algorithm called latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). The topic words, thus, extracted are mapped with various aspects of an entity to perform the aspect-specific sentiment analysis on product reviews. Experiments with synthetic and real dataset show promising results compared to existing methods of sentiment analysis.

Text documents are significant arrangements of various words, while images are significant arrangements of various pixels/features. In addition, text and image data share a similar semantic structural pattern. With reference to this research, the feature pair is defined as a pair of adjacent image features. The innovative feature pair index graph (FPIG) is constructed from the unique feature pair selected, which is constructed using an inverted index structure. The constructed FPIG is helpful in clustering, classifying and retrieving the image data. The proposed FPIG method is validated against the traditional KMeans++, KMeans and Farthest First cluster methods which have the serious drawback of initial centroid selection and local optima. The FPIG method is analyzed using Iris flower image data, and the analysis yields 88% better results than Farthest First and 28.97% better results than conventional KMeans in terms of sum of squared errors. The paper also discusses the scope for further research in the proposed methodology.

Estimating the effects of introducing a range of smart mobility solutions within an urban area is a crucial concern in urban planning. The lack of a simulator for the assessment of mobility initiatives forces local public authorities and mobility service providers to base their decisions on guidelines derived from common heuristics and best practices. These approaches can help planners in shaping mobility solutions; however, given the high number of variables to consider, the effects are not guaranteed. Therefore, a solution conceived respecting the available guidelines can result in a failure in a different context. In particular, difficult aspects to consider are the interactions between different mobility services available in a given urban area and the acceptance of a given mobility initiative by the inhabitants of the area. In order to fill this gap, we introduce Tangramob, an agent-based simulation framework capable of assessing the impacts of a smart mobility initiative within an urban area of interest. Tangramob simulates how urban traffic is expected to evolve as citizens start experiencing newly offered traveling solutions. This allows decision makers to evaluate the efficacy of their initiatives, taking into account the current urban system. In this paper, we provide an overview of the simulation framework along with its design. To show the potential of Tangramob, three mobility initiatives are simulated and compared in the same scenario. This demonstrates how it is possible to perform comparative experiments so as to align mobility initiatives to the user goals.

This article introduces a simple and effective new algorithm for image encryption using a chaotic system which is based on the magic squares. This novel 3D chaotic system is invoked to generate a random key to encrypt any color image. A number of chaotic keys equal to the size of the image are generated by this chaotic system and arranged into a matrix then divided into non-overlapped submatrices. The image to be encrypted is also divided into sub-images, and each sub-image is multiplied by a magic matrix to produce another set of matrices. The XOR operation is then used on the resultant two sets of matrices to produce the encrypted image. The strength of the encryption method is tested in two folds. The first fold is the security analysis which includes key space analysis and sensitivity analysis. In the second fold, statistical analysis was performed, which includes the correlation coefficients, information entropy, the histogram, and analysis of differential attacks. Finally, the time of encryption and decryption was computed and show very good results.

This paper aims to propose a method for data hiding in video by utilizing the least significant bit (LSB) method and improving it by utilizing the knight tour algorithm for concealing the data inside the AVI video file and using a key function encryption method for encrypting the secret message. First, the secret message is encrypted by utilizing a mathematical equation. The key used in the equation is a set of random numbers. These numbers differ in each implementation to warrant the safety of the hidden message and to increase the security of the secret message. Then, the cover video was converted from a set of frames into separated images to take the advantage of the large size of video file. Afterward, the knight tour algorithm is utilized for random selecting of the pixels inside the frame utilized for embedding the secret message inside it to overcome the shortcoming of the conventional LSB method that utilized the serial selection of pixel and to increase the robustness and security of the proposed method. Afterward, the encrypted secret message is embedded inside the selected pixels by utilizing the LSB method in bits (7 and 8). The observational results have drawn that the proposed method has a superior performance compared to the previous steganography method in terms of quality by a high PSNR of 67.3638 dB and the lowest MSE of 0.2578. Furthermore, this method preserves the security where the secret message cannot be drawn out without knowing the decoding rules.

This work intends to apprehend and emphasize the contribution of image-processing techniques and computer vision in the treatment of clay-based material known in Meknes region. One of the various characteristics used to describe clay in a qualitative manner is porosity, as it is considered one of the properties that with “kill or cure” effectiveness. For this purpose, we use scanning electron microscopy images, as they are considered the most powerful tool for characterising the quality of the microscopic pore structure of porous materials. We present various existing methods of segmentation, as we are interested only in pore regions. The results show good matching between physical estimation and Voronoi diagram-based porosity estimation.

In this paper, a fresh method is offered regarding training of particular neural networks. This technique is a combination of the adaptive genetic (AG) and cuckoo search (CS) algorithms, called the AGCS method. The intention of training a particular artificial neural network (ANN) is to obtain the finest weight load. With this protocol, a particular weight is taken into account as feedback, which is optimized by means of the hybrid AGCS protocol. In the beginning, a collection of weights is initialized and the similar miscalculation is discovered. Finally, during training of an ANN, we can easily overcome the training complications involving ANNs and also gain the finest overall performance with training of the ANN. We have implemented the proposed system in MATLAB, and the overall accuracy is about 93%, which is much better than that of the genetic algorithm (86%) and CS (88%) algorithm.

The paper presents an approach to encrypt the color images using bit-level permutation and alternate logistic map. The proposed method initially segregates the color image into red, green, and blue channels, transposes the segregated channels from the pixel-plane to bit-plane, and scrambles the bit-plane matrix using Arnold cat map (ACM). Finally, the red, blue, and green channels of the scrambled image are confused and diffused by applying alternate logistic map that uses a four-dimensional Lorenz system to generate a pseudorandom number sequence for the three channels. The parameters of ACM are generated with the help of Logistic-Sine map and Logistic-Tent map. The intensity values of scrambled pixels are altered by Tent-Sine map. One-dimensional and two-dimensional logistic maps are used for alternate logistic map implementation. The performance and security parameters histogram, correlation distribution, correlation coefficient, entropy, number of pixel change rate, and unified averaged changed intensity are computed to show the potential of the proposed encryption technique.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been playing a significant role in acoustic modeling. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the advanced version of DNNs that achieve 4–12% relative gain in the word error rate (WER) over DNNs. Existence of spectral variations and local correlations in speech signal makes CNNs more capable of speech recognition. Recently, it has been demonstrated that bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) produces higher recognition rate in acoustic modeling because they are adequate to reinforce higher-level representations of acoustic data. Spatial and temporal properties of the speech signal are essential for high recognition rate, so the concept of combining two different networks came into mind. In this paper, a hybrid architecture of CNN-BLSTM is proposed to appropriately use these properties and to improve the continuous speech recognition task. Further, we explore different methods like weight sharing, the appropriate number of hidden units, and ideal pooling strategy for CNN to achieve a high recognition rate. Specifically, the focus is also on how many BLSTM layers are effective. This paper also attempts to overcome another shortcoming of CNN, i.e. speaker-adapted features, which are not possible to be directly modeled in CNN. Next, various non-linearities with or without dropout are analyzed for speech tasks. Experiments indicate that proposed hybrid architecture with speaker-adapted features and maxout non-linearity with dropout idea shows 5.8% and 10% relative decrease in WER over the CNN and DNN systems, respectively.

The paper represents a Punjabi corpus in the agriculture domain. There are various dialects in the Punjabi language and the main concentration is on major dialects, i.e. Majhi, Malwai and Doabi for the present study. A speech corpus of 125 isolated words is taken into consideration. These words are uttered by 100 speakers, i.e. 60 Malwi dialect speakers (30 male and 30 female), 20 Majhi dialect speakers (10 male and 10 female) and 20 Doabi dialect speakers (10 male and 10 female). Tonemes, adhak (geminated) and nasal words are selected from the corpus. Recordings have been processed through two mediums. The paper also elaborates some distinctive features of the corpus. This corpus is of quite significance for the speech recognition system. Prosodic characteristics such as intonation, rhythm and stress create a crucial impact on the speech recognition system. These characteristics vary from language to language as well as various dialects of a language. This paper portrays a comparative analysis of isolated words prosodic features of Malwi, Majhi and Doabi dialects of Punjabi language. Analysis is done using the PRAAT tool. Pitch, intensity, formant I and formant II values are extracted for toneme, adhak, nasal (bindi) and nasal (tippi) words. For all kinds of words, there is a significant variation in pitch (fundamental frequency), intensity, formant I and formant II values of male and female speakers of Malwi, Majhi and Doabi dialects. A detailed analysis has been discussed throughout this paper.

The aim of this paper is to define some new operation laws for the trapezoidal linguistic cubic fuzzy number and Hamming distance. Furthermore, we define and use the trapezoidal linguistic cubic fuzzy TOPSIS method to solve the multi criteria decision making (MCDM) method. The new ranking method for trapezoidal linguistic cubic fuzzy numbers (TrLCFNs) are used to rank the alternatives. Finally, an illustrative example is given to verify and prove the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Histopathological lung cancer segmentation using region of interest is one of the emerging research area in the field of health monitoring system. In this paper, the histopathological images were collected from the database Stanford Tissue Microarray Database (TMAD). After image collection, pre-processing was performed using a normalization technique, which enhances the quality of the histopathological image by eliminating unwanted noise. After pre-processing, segmentation was carried out using the modified kernel-based fuzzy c-means clustering (KFCM) approach along with the edge bridge and fill technique (EBFT). It was a flexible high-level machine learning technique to localize the object in a complex template. The experimental result shows that the proposed approach segments the normal and abnormal cancer regions by means of precision, recall, specificity, accuracy, and Jaccard coefficient. The proposed methodology improved the classification accuracy in lung cancer segmentation up to 2.5–5% compared to the existing methods deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) and diffusion-weighted approach.

We propose a novel edge detector in the presence of Gaussian noise with the use of proximal support vector machine (PSVM). The edges of a noisy image are detected using a two-stage architecture: smoothing of image is first performed using regularized anisotropic diffusion, followed by the classification using PSVM, termed as regularized anisotropic diffusion-based PSVM (RAD-PSVM) method. In this process, a feature vector is formed for a pixel using the denoised coefficient’s class and the local orientations to detect edges in all possible directions in images. From the experiments, conducted on both synthetic and benchmark images, it is observed that our RAD-PSVM approach outperforms the other state-of-the-art edge detection approaches, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Precise and timely diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease is important to control its progression among subjects. Currently, a neuroimaging technique called dopaminergic imaging that uses single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) with 123 I-Ioflupane is popular among clinicians for detecting Parkinson’s disease in early stages. Unlike other studies, which consider only low-level features like gray matter, white matter, or cerebrospinal fluid, this study explores the non-linear relation between different biomarkers (SPECT + biological) using deep learning and multivariate logistic regression. Striatal binding ratios are obtained using 123 I-Ioflupane SPECT scans from four brain regions which are further integrated with five biological biomarkers to increase the diagnostic accuracy. Experimental results indicate that this investigated approach can differentiate subjects with 100% accuracy. The obtained results outperform the ones reported in the literature. Furthermore, logistic regression model has been developed for estimating the Parkinson’s disease onset probability. Such models may aid clinicians in diagnosing this disease.

In recent years, the important and fast growth in the development and demand of multimedia products is contributing to an insufficiency in the bandwidth of devices and network storage memory. Consequently, the theory of data compression becomes more significant for reducing data redundancy in order to allow more transfer and storage of data. In this context, this paper addresses the problem of lossy image compression. Indeed, this new proposed method is based on the block singular value decomposition (SVD) power method that overcomes the disadvantages of MATLAB’s SVD function in order to make a lossy image compression. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has better compression performance compared with the existing compression algorithms that use MATLAB’s SVD function. In addition, the proposed approach is simple in terms of implementation and can provide different degrees of error resilience, which gives, in a short execution time, a better image compression.

Speech signals are usually affected by noises during the communication process. For suppressing the noise signal that is combined with the speech signal, a Wiener filter is adapted in digital hearing aids. Weiner filter plays an important role in noise suppression and enhancement by estimating the relation between the power spectra of the noise-affected speech signal and the noise signal. Power consumption and the hardware requirement are the important problems in adapting Weiner filter for major communication systems. In this work, we implemented an efficient Wiener filter and applied it for noise suppression along with a real-valued fast Fourier transform (FFT)/real-valued inverse FFT processor in digital hearing aids. The pipelined process was adopted for increasing the performance of the system. The proposed Wiener filter was designed to remove the iteration problems in the conventional Wiener filter. The division operation was replaced by an efficient inverse and multiplication operation in the proposed design. A modified architecture for matrix inversion with low computation complexity was implemented. The complete design computation was based on IEEE-754 standard single-precision floating-point numbers. The Wiener filter and the whole system architecture was implemented and designed on a Field Programmable Gate Array platform and simulated to validate the results in Xilinx ISE tools. An efficient reduction in power and area was obtained by adapting the proposed method for speech signal noise degradation. The performance of the proposed design was found to be 50.01% more efficient than that of existing designs.

Nowadays, there has been an increase in security concerns regarding fingerprint biometrics. This problem arises due to technological advancements in bypassing and hacking methodologies. This has sparked the need for a more secure platform for identification. In this paper, we have used a deep Convolutional Neural Network as a pre-verification filter to filter out bad or malicious fingerprints. As deep learning allows the system to be more accurate at detecting and reducing false identification by training itself again and again with test samples, the proposed method improves the security and accuracy by multiple folds. The implementation of a novel secure fingerprint verification platform that takes the optical image of a fingerprint as input is explained in this paper. The given input is pre-verified using Google’s pre-trained inception model for deep learning applications, and then passed through a minutia-based algorithm for user authentication. Then, the results are compared with existing models.

Although current computer-aided software engineering tools support developers in composing a program, there is no doubt that more flexible supportive tools are needed to address the increases in the complexity of programs. This need can be met by automating the intellectual activities that are carried out by humans when composing a program. This paper aims to automate the composition of a programming language code from pseudocode, which is viewed here as a translation process for a natural language text, as pseudocode is a formatted text in natural English language. Based on this view, a new automatic code generator is developed that can convert pseudocode to C# programming language code. This new automatic code generator (ACG), which is called CodeComposer, uses natural language processing (NLP) techniques such as verb classification, thematic roles, and semantic role labeling (SRL) to analyze the pseudocode. The resulting analysis of linguistic information from these techniques is used by a semantic rule-based mapping machine to perform the composition process. CodeComposer can be viewed as an intelligent computer-aided software engineering (I_CASE) tool. An evaluation of the accuracy of CodeComposer using a binomial technique shows that it has a precision of 88%, a recall of 91%, and an F-measure of 89%.

Literature scripts can be compared to paintings, in an artistic way as well as in the perspective of financial value, whereas the value of these scripts rise and fall depending on their author’s popularity. Authors’ scripts represent a specific style of writing that can be measured and compared using a text mining field called Stylometric. Stylometric analysis depends on some features called authorship attributes, and these attributes or features can be used in special algorithms and methods to reach that aim. Generally, each method selected in the Stylometric field uses a variety of attributes to reach higher prediction accuracy. The aim of this research is to improve the accuracy of authorship prediction in literary works based on the artistic writing style of the authors. To achieve that, a new set of attributes will be used with the Stylometric Authorship Balanced Attribution method, which was chosen in this research among several other machine language methods because of its delicateness in authorship prediction projects. The attributes that have been used by most of the researchers were word frequencies (single word, pair of words, or trio of words), which led to some prediction mistakes. In this research, a new set of attributes is used to decrease these mistakes. These proposed non-word attributes are named sentence length, special characters, and punctuation symbols. The results obtained by using these proposed attributes were excellent.

Social media contain abundant information about the events or news occurring all over the world. Social media growth has a greater impact on various domains like marketing, e-commerce, health care, e-governance, and politics, etc. Currently, Twitter was developed as one of the social media platforms, and now, it is one of the most popular social media platforms. There are 1 billion user’s profiles and millions of active users, who post tweets daily. In this research, buzz detection in social media was carried out by the semantic approach using the condensed nearest neighbor (SACNN). The Twitter and Tom’s Hardware data are stored in the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository, and this dataset is used in this research for outlier detection. The min–max normalization technique is applied to the social media dataset, and additionally, missing values were replaced by the normalized value. The condensed nearest neighbor (CNN) is used for semantic analysis of the database, and based on the optimized value provided by the proposed method, the threshold is calculated. The threshold value is used to classify buzz and non-buzz discussions in the social media database. The result showed that the SACNN achieved 99% of accuracy, and relative error is less than the existing methods.

Currently, there is a necessity for the expansion of precise, rapid, and intentional quality assurance with respect to the character of food and horticultural food items, because it is difficult to maintain and organize food products in an elevated quality and secure manner for the increasing population. In this article, we propose a procedure to resolve difficulties and to categorize food as either a broken or quality product. Therefore, the proposed process encompasses four segments, such as preprocessing, segmentation of broken division, feature extraction, and classification. At the first stage, the preprocessing method is used to remove all unnecessary noises. After that, modified region expansion-related segmentation is undertaken to segment the broken division of the food product. Then, feature extraction is used to remove the distinctive attributes of each food product to categorize their evaluation. Finally, the neural network classification procedure is used to examine the food quality. The proposed method is executed in the operational platform of MATLAB, and the consequences are examined by using obtainable methods.

Privacy-preserving data mining (PPDM) is a novel approach that has emerged in the market to take care of privacy issues. The intention of PPDM is to build up data-mining techniques without raising the risk of mishandling of the data exploited to generate those schemes. The conventional works include numerous techniques, most of which employ some form of transformation on the original data to guarantee privacy preservation. However, these schemes are quite multifaceted and memory intensive, thus leading to restricted exploitation of these methods. Hence, this paper intends to develop a novel PPDM technique, which involves two phases, namely, data sanitization and data restoration. Initially, the association rules are extracted from the database before proceeding with the two phases. In both the sanitization and restoration processes, key extraction plays a major role, which is selected optimally using Opposition Intensity-based Cuckoo Search Algorithm, which is the modified format of Cuckoo Search Algorithm. Here, four research issues, such as hiding failure rate, information preservation rate, and false rule generation, and degree of modification are minimized using the adopted sanitization and restoration processes.

The feature selection process is very important in the field of pattern recognition, which selects the informative features so as to reduce the curse of dimensionality, thus improving the overall classification accuracy. In this paper, a new feature selection approach named Memory-Based Histogram-Oriented Multi-objective Genetic Algorithm (M-HMOGA) is introduced to identify the informative feature subset to be used for a pattern classification problem. The proposed M-HMOGA approach is applied to two recently used feature sets, namely Mojette transform and Regional Weighted Run Length features. The experimentations are carried out on Bangla , Devanagari , and Roman numeral datasets, which are the three most popular scripts used in the Indian subcontinent. In-house Bangla and Devanagari script datasets and Competition on Handwritten Digit Recognition (HDRC) 2013 Roman numeral dataset are used for evaluating our model. Moreover, as proof of robustness, we have applied an innovative approach of using different datasets for training and testing. We have used in-house Bangla and Devanagari script datasets for training the model, and the trained model is then tested on Indian Statistical Institute numeral datasets. For Roman numerals, we have used the HDRC 2013 dataset for training and the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology dataset for testing. Comparison of the results obtained by the proposed model with existing HMOGA and MOGA techniques clearly indicates the superiority of M-HMOGA over both of its ancestors. Moreover, use of K-nearest neighbor as well as multi-layer perceptron as classifiers speaks for the classifier-independent nature of M-HMOGA. The proposed M-HMOGA model uses only about 45–50% of the total feature set in order to achieve around 1% increase when the same datasets are partitioned for training-testing and a 2–3% increase in the classification ability while using only 35–45% features when different datasets are used for training-testing with respect to the situation when all the features are used for classification.

In the discipline of software development, effort estimation renders a pivotal role. For the successful development of the project, an unambiguous estimation is necessitated. But there is the inadequacy of standard methods for estimating an effort which is applicable to all projects. Hence, to procure the best way of estimating the effort becomes an indispensable need of the project manager. Mathematical models are only mediocre in performing accurate estimation. On that account, we opt for analogy-based effort estimation by means of some soft computing techniques which rely on historical effort estimation data of the successfully completed projects to estimate the effort. So in a thorough study to improve the accuracy, models are generated for the clusters of the datasets with the confidence that data within the cluster have similar properties. This paper aims mainly on the analysis of some of the techniques to improve the effort prediction accuracy. Here the research starts with analyzing the correlation coefficient of the selected datasets. Then the process moves through the analysis of classification accuracy, clustering accuracy, mean magnitude of relative error and prediction accuracy based on some machine learning methods. Finally, a bio-inspired firefly algorithm with fuzzy analogy is applied on the datasets to produce good estimation accuracy.

The image restoration (IR) technique is a part of image processing to improve the quality of an image that is affected by noise and blur. Thus, IR is required to attain a better quality of image. In this paper, IR is performed using linear regression-based support vector machine (LR-SVM). This LR-SVM has two steps: training and testing. The training and testing stages have a distinct windowing process for extracting blocks from the images. The LR-SVM is trained through a block-by-block training sequence. The extracted block-by-block values of images are used to enhance the classification process of IR. In training, the imperfections on the image are easily identified by setting the target vectors as the original images. Then, the noisy image is given at LR-SVM testing, based on the original image restored from the dictionary. Finally, the image block from the testing stage is enhanced using the hybrid Laplacian of Gaussian (HLOG) filter. The denoising of the HLOG filter provides enhanced results by using block-by-block values. This proposed approach is named as LR-SVM-HLOG. A dataset used in this LR-SVM-HLOG method is the Berkeley Segmentation Database. The performance of LR-SVM-HLOG was analyzed as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index. The PSNR values of the house and pepper image (color image) are 40.82 and 36.56 dB, respectively, which are higher compared to the inter- and intra-block sparse estimation method and block matching and three-dimensional filtering for color images at 20% noise.

The recent advancements in information technology and the web tend to increase the volume of data used in day-to-day life. The result is a big data era, which has become a key issue in research due to the complexity in the analysis of big data. This paper presents a technique called FPWhale-MRF for big data clustering using the MapReduce framework (MRF), by proposing two clustering algorithms. In FPWhale-MRF, the mapper function estimates the cluster centroids using the Fractional Tangential-Spherical Kernel clustering algorithm, which is developed by integrating the fractional theory into a Tangential-Spherical Kernel clustering approach. The reducer combines the mapper outputs to find the optimal centroids using the proposed Particle-Whale (P-Whale) algorithm, for the clustering. The P-Whale algorithm is proposed by combining Whale Optimization Algorithm with Particle Swarm Optimization, for effective clustering such that its performance is improved. Two datasets, namely localization and skin segmentation datasets, are used for the experimentation and the performance is evaluated regarding two performance evaluation metrics: clustering accuracy and DB-index. The maximum accuracy attained by the proposed FPWhale-MRF technique is 87.91% and 90% for the localization and skin segmentation datasets, respectively, thus proving its effectiveness in big data clustering.

The application of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for ship and iceberg monitoring is important to carry out marine activities safely. The task of differentiating the two target classes, i.e. ship and iceberg, presents a challenge for operational scenarios. The dataset comprising SAR images of ship and iceberg poses a major challenge, as we are provided with a small number of labeled samples in the training set compared to a large number of unlabeled test samples. This paper proposes a semisupervised learning approach known as pseudolabeling to deal with the insufficient amount of training data. By adopting this approach, we make use of both labeled data (supervised learning) and unlabeled data (unsupervised learning) to build a robust convolutional neural network model that results in a superior binary classification performance of the proposed method.

This paper proposes a new face recognition system based on combining two feature extraction techniques: the Vander Lugt correlator (VLC) and Gabor ordinal measures (GOM). The proposed system relies on the execution speed of VLC and the robustness of GOM. In this system, we applied the Tan and Triggs and retina modeling enhancement techniques, which are well suited for VLC and GOM, respectively. We evaluated our system on the standard FERET probe data sets and on extended YaleB database. The obtained results exhibited better face recognition rates in a shorter execution time compared to the GOM technique.

Nowadays, sentiment analysis is a method used to analyze the sentiment of the feedback given by a user in an online document, such as a blog, comment, and review, and classifies it as negative, positive, or neutral. The classification process relies upon the analysis of the polarity features of the natural language text given by users. Polarity analysis has been an important subtask in sentiment analysis; however, detecting correct polarity has been a major issue. Different researchers have utilized different polarity features, such as standard part-of-speech (POS) tags such as adjectives, adverbs, verbs, and nouns. However, there seems to be a lack of research focusing on the subcategories of these tags. The aim of this research was to propose a method that better recognizes the polarity of natural language text by utilizing different polarity features using the standard POS category and the subcategory combinations in order to explore the specific polarity of text. Several experiments were conducted to examine and compare the efficacies of the proposed method in terms of F-measure, recall, and precision using an Amazon dataset. The results showed that JJ + NN + VB + RB + VBP + RP, which is a POS subcategory combination, obtained better accuracy compared to the baseline approaches by 4.4% in terms of F-measure.

To solve the problem that traditional trajectory prediction methods cannot meet the requirements of high-precision, multi-dimensional and real-time prediction, a 4D trajectory prediction model based on the backpropagation (BP) neural network was studied. First, the hierarchical clustering algorithm and the k-means clustering algorithm were adopted to analyze the total flight time. Then, cubic spline interpolation was used to interpolate the flight position to extract the main trajectory feature. The 4D trajectory prediction model was based on the BP neural network. It was trained by Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast trajectory from Qingdao to Beijing and used to predict the flight trajectory at future moments. In this paper, the model is evaluated by the common measurement index such as maximum absolute error, mean absolute error and root mean square error. It also gives an analysis and comparison of the predicted over-point time, the predicted over-point altitude, the actual over-point time and the actual over-point altitude. The results indicate that the predicted 4D trajectory is close to the real flight data, and the time error at the crossing point is no more than 1 min and the altitude error at the crossing point is no more than 50 m, which is of high accuracy.

A reliable medical image management must provide proper security for patient information. Protecting the medical information of the patients is a major concern in all hospitals. Digital watermarking is a procedure prevalently used to secure the confidentiality of medical information and maintain them, which upgrades patient health awareness. To protect the medical information, the robust and lossless patient medical information sharing system using crypto-watermarking method is proposed. The proposed system consists of two phases: (i) embedding and (ii) extraction. In this paper, we securely share three types of patient information, medical image, electronic health record (EHR), and face image from one hospital to another hospital. Initially, all the three inputs are encrypted and the information is concordant. In order to enhance the robustness of the crypto-watermarking system, the obtained bit stream is compressed, and the compressed bit streams are embedded into the cover image. The same process is repeated for the extraction process. The experimentation result is carried out using different medical images with EHR, and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is analyzed with the help of peak signal to noise ratio.

Among agricultural plants, wheat, with valuable foodstuffs such as proteins, vitamins, and minerals, provides about 25% of the world’s food calories. Hence, providing its health conditions and quality is of great importance. One of the most important wheat diseases that causes a lot of damages to this product is Fusarium head blight (FHB). In most areas, the causal agent of disease is Fusarium graminearum . This disease not only decreases product quality and efficiency but also has harmful effects on humans and animals by mycotoxin production. FHB discrimination requires experimental work in special conditions and also experts, but these facilities may not be available at customs and other related grain health testing centers. In this study, discriminating healthy wheat grains and the grains infected with F. graminearum was performed with an image-processing technique, an accurate, rapid, and nondestructive method. First, healthy and infected wheat grains were selected, and then digital images of samples were prepared in randomized mass method using cameras and lightening chamber. Then using the image-processing technique, a total of 21 texture characteristics were obtained for each grain. Discrimination and classification of healthy and infected grains were done with 100% accuracy using extracted texture characteristics and two techniques mentioned above. The results of this research could be helpful in the development of automatic devices for rapid discrimination of healthy grains and grains infected with F. graminearum , one of the most destructive wheat diseases.

Multiple surveillance cameras provide huge video resources that need further mining to collect traffic stream data such as license plate recognition (LPR). However, these surveillance cameras have limited spatial resolution, which may not always suffice to precisely recognize license plates by existing LPR systems. This work is focused on the LPR method in low-quality images from surveillance video screenshots on urban road. The methodology we proposed is based on vehicle tracking and result integration, and we recognize the plate with an end-to-end method without character segmentation. First, we track each vehicle to get vehicle tracking sequence. Moreover, a plate detector based on an object detection framework is trained to detect license plates of each vehicle from the sequence and a license plate sequence is formed. In addition, an end-to-end convolutional neural network architecture is applied to recognize license plates from the sequence. Finally, we integrate the recognition result of continuous frames to get the final result. Evaluation results on multiple datasets show that our method significantly outperforms others without segmentation or integration in real traffic scene.

Feature selection (FS) is a technique which helps to find the most optimal feature subset to develop an efficient pattern recognition model under consideration. The use of genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) in the field of FS is profound. In this paper, we propose an insightful way to perform FS by amassing information from the candidate solutions produced by GA and PSO. Our aim is to combine the exploitation ability of GA with the exploration capacity of PSO. We name this new model as binary genetic swarm optimization (BGSO). The proposed method initially lets GA and PSO to run independently. To extract sufficient information from the feature subsets obtained by those, BGSO combines their results by an algorithm called average weighted combination method to produce an intermediate solution. Thereafter, a local search called sequential one-point flipping is applied to refine the intermediate solution further in order to generate the final solution. BGSO is applied on 20 popular UCI datasets. The results were obtained by two classifiers, namely, k nearest neighbors (KNN) and multi-layer perceptron (MLP). The overall results and comparisons show that the proposed method outperforms the constituent algorithms in 16 and 14 datasets using KNN and MLP, respectively, whereas among the constituent algorithms, GA is able to achieve the best classification accuracy for 2 and 7 datasets and PSO achieves best accuracy for 2 and 4 datasets, respectively, for the same set of classifiers. This proves the applicability and usefulness of the method in the domain of FS.

This paper addresses the problem of Twitter sentiment analysis through a hybrid approach in which SentiWordNet (SWN)-based feature vector acts as input to the classification model Support Vector Machine. Our main focus is to handle lexical modifier negation during SWN score calculation for the improvement of classification performance. Thus, we present naive and novel shift approach in which negation acts as both sentiment-bearing word and modifier, and then we shift the score of words from SWN based on their contextual semantic, inferred from neighbouring words. Additionally, we augment negation accounting procedure with a few heuristics for handling the cases in which negation presence does not necessarily mean negation. Experimental results show that the contextual-based SWN feature vector obtained through shift polarity approach alone led to an improved Twitter sentiment analysis system that outperforms the traditional reverse polarity approach by 2–6%. We validate the effectiveness of our hybrid approach considering negation on benchmark Twitter corpus from SemEval-2013 Task 2 competition.

In cloud security, intrusion detection system (IDS) is one of the challenging research areas. In a cloud environment, security incidents such as denial of service, scanning, malware code injection, virus, worm, and password cracking are getting usual. These attacks surely affect the company and may develop a financial loss if not distinguished in time. Therefore, securing the cloud from these types of attack is very much needed. To discover the problem, this paper suggests a novel IDS established on a combination of a leader-based k-means clustering (LKM), optimal fuzzy logic system. Here, at first, the input dataset is grouped into clusters with the use of LKM. Then, cluster data are afforded to the fuzzy logic system (FLS). Here, normal and abnormal data are inquired by the FLS, while FLS training is done by the grey wolf optimization algorithm through maximizing the rules. The clouds simulator and NSL-Knowledge Discovery and DataBase (KDD) Cup 99 dataset are applied to inquire about the suggested method. Precision, recall, and F-measure are conceived as evaluation criteria. The obtained results have denoted the superiority of the suggested method in comparison with other methods.

Trapezoidal cubic fuzzy numbers (TzCFNs) are an extraordinary cubic fuzzy set on a real number set. TzCFNs are useful for dealing with well-known quantities in decision data and decision making problems themselves. This paper is about multi-attribute group decision making problems in which the attribute values are stated with TzCFNs, which are solved by developing a new decision method based on power average operators of TzCFNs. The new operation laws for TzCFNs are given. Hereby, the power average operator of real numbers is extended to four kinds of power average operators of TzCFNs, involving the power average operator of TzCFNs, the weighted power average operator of TzCFNs, the power ordered weighted average operator of TzCFNs, and the power hybrid average operator of TzCFNs. In the proposed group decision method, the individual overall evaluation values of alternatives are generated by using the power average operator of TzCFNs. Applying the hybrid average operator of TzCFNs, the specific general evaluation standards of alternatives are then combined into the collective ones, which are used to rank the alternatives. The example analysis shows the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed method.