Metaheuristic design of feedforward neural networks: a review of two decades of research

Over the past two decades, the feedforward neural network (FNN) optimization has been a key interest among the researchers and practitioners of multiple disciplines. The FNN optimization is often viewed from the various perspectives: the optimization of weights, network architecture, activation nodes, learning parameters, learning environment, etc. Researchers adopted such different viewpoints mainly to improve the FNN's generalization ability. The gradient-descent algorithm such as backpropagation has been widely applied to optimize the FNNs. Its success is evident from the FNN's application to numerous real-world problems. However, due to the limitations of the gradient-based optimization methods, the metaheuristic algorithms including the evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, etc., are still being widely explored by the researchers aiming to obtain generalized FNN for a given problem. This article attempts to summarize a broad spectrum of FNN optimization methodologies including conventional and metaheuristic approaches. This article also tries to connect various research directions emerged out of the FNN optimization practices, such as evolving neural network (NN), cooperative coevolution NN, complex-valued NN, deep learning, extreme learning machine, quantum NN, etc. Additionally, it provides interesting research challenges for future research to cope-up with the present information processing era

A Review on Energy Consumption Optimization Techniques in IoT Based Smart Building Environments

In recent years, due to the unnecessary wastage of electrical energy in residential buildings, the requirement of energy optimization and user comfort has gained vital importance. In the literature, various techniques have been proposed addressing the energy optimization problem. The goal of each technique was to maintain a balance between user comfort and energy requirements such that the user can achieve the desired comfort level with the minimum amount of energy consumption. Researchers have addressed the issue with the help of different optimization algorithms and variations in the parameters to reduce energy consumption. To the best of our knowledge, this problem is not solved yet due to its challenging nature. The gap in the literature is due to the advancements in the technology and drawbacks of the optimization algorithms and the introduction of different new optimization algorithms. Further, many newly proposed optimization algorithms which have produced better accuracy on the benchmark instances but have not been applied yet for the optimization of energy consumption in smart homes. In this paper, we have carried out a detailed literature review of the techniques used for the optimization of energy consumption and scheduling in smart homes. The detailed discussion has been carried out on different factors contributing towards thermal comfort, visual comfort, and air quality comfort. We have also reviewed the fog and edge computing techniques used in smart homes

Spatial information of fuzzy clustering based mean best artificial bee colony algorithm for phantom brain image segmentation

Fuzzy c-means algorithm (FCM) is among the most commonly used in the medical image segmentation process. Nevertheless, the traditional FCM clustering approach has been several weaknesses such as noise sensitivity and stuck in local optimum, due to FCM hasn’t able to consider the information of contextual. To solve FCM problems, this paper presented spatial information of fuzzy clustering-based mean best artificial bee colony algorithm, which is called SFCM-MeanABC. This proposed approach is used contextual information in the spatial fuzzy clustering algorithm to reduce sensitivity to noise and its used MeanABC capability of balancing between exploration and exploitation that is explore the positive and negative directions in search space to find the best solutions, which leads to avoiding stuck in a local optimum. The experiments are carried out on two kinds of brain images the Phantom MRI brain image with a different level of noise and simulated image. The performance of the SFCM-MeanABC approach shows promising results compared with SFCM-ABC and other stats of the arts