A novel population-based local search for nurse rostering problem

Population-based approaches regularly are better than single based (local search) approaches in exploring the search space. However, the drawback of population-based approaches is in exploiting the search space. Several hybrid approaches have proven their efficiency through different domains of optimization problems by incorporating and integrating the strength of population and local search approaches. Meanwhile, hybrid methods have a drawback of increasing the parameter tuning. Recently, population-based local search was proposed for a university course-timetabling problem with fewer parameters than existing approaches, the proposed approach proves its effectiveness. The proposed approach employs two operators to intensify and diversify the search space. The first operator is applied to a single solution, while the second is applied for all solutions. This paper aims to investigate the performance of population-based local search for the nurse rostering problem. The INRC2010 database with a dataset composed of 69 instances is used to test the performance of PB-LS. A comparison was made between the performance of PB-LS and other existing approaches in the literature. Results show good performances of proposed approach compared to other approaches, where population-based local search provided best results in 55 cases over 69 instances used in experiments

The adoption of bitcoins technology: The difference between perceived future expectation and intention to use bitcoins: Does social influence matter?

Bitcoin is a decentralized system that tries to become a solution to the shortcomings of fiat and gold-based currencies. Considering its newness, the adoption level of bitcoin is yet understood. Hence, several variables are proposed in this work in examining user perceptions regarding performance expectancy, effort expectancy, trust, adoption risk, decentralization and social influence interplay, with the context of user’s future expectation and behavioral intentions to use bitcoins. Data were gathered from 293 completed questionnaire and analised using AMOS 18. The outcomes prove the sound predictability of the proposed model regarding user’s future expectations and intentions toward bitcoins. All hypotheses were supported, they were significantly affecting the dependent variables. Social influence was found as the highest predictor of behavioral intention to negatively utilize bitcoins. The significant impact of social influence, adoption risk and effort expectancy which affect behavioral intention to use bitcoins the most, are demonstrated in this study. Bitcoins should thus, present an effective, feasible and personalized program which will assist efficient usage among users. Additionally, the impacts of social influence, adoption risk and perceived trust on behavioral intention to utilize new technology were compared, and their direct path was tested together, for the first time in this context

Robust features extraction for general fish classification

Image recognition process could be plagued by many problems including noise, overlap, distortion, errors in the outcomes of segmentation, and impediment of objects within the image. Based on feature selection and combination theory between major extracted features, this study attempts to establish a system that could recognize fish object within the image utilizing texture, anchor points, and statistical measurements. Then, a generic fish classification is executed with the application of an innovative classification evaluation through a meta-heuristic algorithm known as Memetic Algorithm (Genetic Algorithm with Simulated Annealing) with back-propagation algorithm (MA-B Classifier). Here, images of dangerous and non-dangerous fish are recognized. Images of dangerous fish are further recognized as Predatory or Poison fish family, whereas families of non-dangerous fish are classified into garden and food family.  A total of 24 fish families were used in testing the proposed prototype, whereby each family encompasses different number of species. The process of classification was successfully undertaken by the proposed prototype, whereby 400 distinct fish images were used in the experimental tests. Of these fish images, 250 were used for training phase while 150 were used for testing phase. The back-propagation algorithm and the proposed MA-B Classifier produced a general accuracy recognition rate of 82.25 and 90% respectively

Cyberbullying detection framework for short and imbalanced Arabic datasets

Cyberbullying detection has attracted many researchers to detect negative comments deployed on communication platforms as cyberbullying can take many forms: verbal, implicit, explicit, or even nonverbal. The successful growth of social media in recent years has opened new perspectives on the detection of cyberbullying, although related research still encounters several challenges, such as data imbalance and expression implicitness. In this paper, we propose an automated cyberbullying detection framework designed to produce satisfactory results, especially when imbalanced short text and different dialects exist in the Arabic text data. In the proposed framework a new method to solve the imbalance problem is suggested, where the modified simulated annealing optimization algorithm is used to find the optimal set of samples from the majority class to balance the training set. This method has been evaluated using traditional machine learning algorithms including support vector machine, and deep learning algorithms including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM). To generate a framework that can detect Arabic written cyberbullying on communication platforms, the accuracy, recall, specificity, sensitivity and mean squared error are used as the main performance indicators. The results indicate that the proposed framework can improve the performance of the tested algorithms, and Bi-LSTM outperforms other methods for cyberbullying classification

Memory based cuckoo search algorithm for feature selection of gene expression dataset

Cancer prediction has been shown to be important in the cancer research area. This importance has prompted many researchers to review machine learning-approaches to predict cancer outcome using gene expression dataset. This dataset consists of many genes (features) which can mislead the prediction ability of the machine learning methods, as some features may lead to confusion or inaccurate classification. Since finding the most informative genes for cancer prediction is challenging, feature selection techniques are recommended to pick important and relevant features out of large and complex datasets. In this research, we propose the Cuckoo search method as a feature selection algorithm, guided by the memory-based mechanism to save the most informative features that are identified by the best solutions. The purpose of the memory is to keep track of the selected features at every iteration and find the features that enhance classification accuracy. The suggested algorithm has been contrasted with the original algorithm using microarray datasets and the proposed algorithm has been shown to produce good results as compared to original and contemporary algorithms

Comparison of specific segmentation methods used for copy move detection

In this digital age, the widespread use of digital images and the availability of image editors have made the credibility of images controversial. To confirm the credibility of digital images many image forgery detection types are arises, copy-move forgery is consisting of transforming any image by duplicating a part of the image, to add or hide existing objects. Several methods have been proposed in the literature to detect copy-move forgery, these methods use the key point-based and block-based to find the duplicated areas. However, the key point-based and block-based have a drawback of the ability to handle the smooth region. In addition, image segmentation plays a vital role in changing the representation of the image in a meaningful form for analysis. Hence, we execute a comparison study for segmentation based on two clustering algorithms (i.e., k-means and super pixel segmentation with density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN)), the paper compares methods in term of the accuracy of detecting the forgery regions of digital images. K-means shows better performance compared with DBSCAN and with other techniques in the literature