An evolutionary ensemble learning for diagnosing COVID-19 via cough signals

© 2023 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Chinese Medical Association. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)Objective The spread of the COVID-19 disease has caused great concern around the world and detecting the positive cases is crucial in curbing the pandemic. One of the symptoms of the disease is the dry cough it causes. It has previously been shown that cough signals can be used to identify a variety of diseases including tuberculosis, asthma, etc. In this paper, we proposed an algorithm to diagnose the COVID-19 disease via cough signals. Methods The proposed algorithm was an ensemble scheme that consists of a number of base learners, where each base learner used a different feature extractor method, including statistical approaches and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for automatic feature extraction. Features were extracted from the raw signal and some transforms performed it, including Fourier, wavelet, Hilbert-Huang, and short-term Fourier transforms. The outputs of these base-learners were aggregated via a weighted voting scheme, with the weights optimised via an evolutionary paradigm. This paper also proposed a memetic algorithm for training the CNNs in the base-learners, which combined the speed of gradient descent (GD) algorithms and global search space coverage of the evolutionary algorithms. Results Experiments were performed on the proposed algorithm and different rival algorithms which included a number of CNN architectures in the literature and generic machine learning algorithms. The results suggested that the proposed algorithm achieves better performance compared to the existing algorithms in diagnosing COVID-19 via cough signals. Conclusion COVID-19 may be diagnosed via cough signals and CNNs may be employed to process these signals and it may be further improved by the optimization of CNN architecture.Peer reviewe

Anatomy of the fitness landscape for dense graph-colouring problem

Graph-colouring is one of the best-known combinatorial optimisation problems. This paper provides a systematic analysis of many properties of the fitness landscape for random instances as a function of both the problem size and the number of colours used. The properties studied include both statistical properties of the bulk of the states, such as the distribution of fitnesses and the auto-correlation, but also properties related to the local optima of the problem. These properties include the mean time to reach the local optima, the number of local optima and the probability of reaching local optima of a given cost, the average distance between global optima and between local optima of a given cost and the closest local optimum, the expected cost as a function of the distance from a configuration and the fitness–distance correlation. Finally, an analysis of how a successful algorithm exploits the fitness distance correlation is carried out