Symbiotic Organisms Search Algorithm: theory, recent advances and applications

The symbiotic organisms search algorithm is a very promising recent metaheuristic algorithm. It has received a plethora of attention from all areas of numerical optimization research, as well as engineering design practices. it has since undergone several modifications, either in the form of hybridization or as some other improved variants of the original algorithm. However, despite all the remarkable achievements and rapidly expanding body of literature regarding the symbiotic organisms search algorithm within its short appearance in the field of swarm intelligence optimization techniques, there has been no collective and comprehensive study on the success of the various implementations of this algorithm. As a way forward, this paper provides an overview of the research conducted on symbiotic organisms search algorithms from inception to the time of writing, in the form of details of various application scenarios with variants and hybrid implementations, and suggestions for future research directions

A Comprehensive Study of Groundbreaking Machine Learning Research: Analyzing Highly Cited and Impactful Publications across Six Decades

Machine learning (ML) has emerged as a prominent field of research in computer science and other related fields, thereby driving advancements in other domains of interest. As the field continues to evolve, it is crucial to understand the landscape of highly cited publications to identify key trends, influential authors, and significant contributions made thus far. In this paper, we present a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of highly cited ML publications. We collected a dataset consisting of the top-cited papers from reputable ML conferences and journals, covering a period of several years from 1959 to 2022. We employed various bibliometric techniques to analyze the data, including citation analysis, co-authorship analysis, keyword analysis, and publication trends. Our findings reveal the most influential papers, highly cited authors, and collaborative networks within the machine learning community. We identify popular research themes and uncover emerging topics that have recently gained significant attention. Furthermore, we examine the geographical distribution of highly cited publications, highlighting the dominance of certain countries in ML research. By shedding light on the landscape of highly cited ML publications, our study provides valuable insights for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to understand the key developments and trends in this rapidly evolving field

Use of Java RMI on Mobile Devices for Peer to Peer Computing

In this paper, the use of Java RMI on mobile devices for peer-to-peer computing is presented. An overview of the commonly used distributed middleware systems are described by looking into remote procedure call (RPC) and object oriented middleware java remote method invocation (Java RMI). The differences between this middleware are equally detailed in this work. A review of some related literature was carried out and some of the features required for the proposed prototype were also extracted accordingly. This paper also provides an overview of peer-to-peer networking and some of the application areas linked to the platform implementation. Detailed design and implementation of the artifact for peer-to-peer network using Java 2 platform programming language were carried out. Finally, on the process of this research, three applications were developed and peered together to show that java RMI is a tool for peer-to-peer computing. Keywords: - Remote method invocation, Remote procedure call, Stub, Skeleton, Peer-to-Pee

Machine Learning Research Trends in Africa: A 30 Years Overview with Bibliometric Analysis Review

In this paper, a critical bibliometric analysis study is conducted, coupled with an extensive literature survey on recent developments and associated applications in machine learning research with a perspective on Africa. The presented bibliometric analysis study consists of 2761 machine learning-related documents, of which 98% were articles with at least 482 citations published in 903 journals during the past 30 years. Furthermore, the collated documents were retrieved from the Science Citation Index EXPANDED, comprising research publications from 54 African countries between 1993 and 2021. The bibliometric study shows the visualization of the current landscape and future trends in machine learning research and its application to facilitate future collaborative research and knowledge exchange among authors from different research institutions scattered across the African continent

Machine learning approaches to medication adherence amongst NCD patients: A systematic literature review

Non-adherence to prescribed medication is a major public health concern that escalates the risk of morbidity and death as well as incurring extra expenses associated with hospitalisation. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), only 50% of people suffering from chronic diseases follow the treatment recommendations despite the counsel provided to patients on the importance of medication adherence (MA). Early detection of non-communicable disease (NCD) patients poorly adhering to recommended medications using analytics based on machine learning (ML) may improve the outcomes of NCD patients positively. This paper presents a systematic review of literature involving the application of ML in evaluating MA amongst NCD patients. The articles considered in this study were extracted from Web of Science, Google Scholar, PubMed, and IEEE Explore. Twenty-five articles in total met the criteria for inclusion. These were articles that utilised ML techniques to analyse MA in NCDs, with patients suffering from diabetes (n = 8), hypertension (n = 3), cardiovascular disease (CVD) and statin adherence (n = 6), cancer (n = 3), respiratory diseases (n = 2), and other NCD conditions (n = 3). The proportion of days covered (PDC) was typically used to evaluate MA. It emerged from the study that for MA to be considered high, the adherence threshold should be at least 75% of the PDC, a universally accepted threshold. In MA analytics research and practice, a PDC ≥80% threshold is typically regarded as a high level of adherence to prescription medication. Logistic regression (LR) (n = 12), random forest (RF) (n = 11), support vector machine (SVM) (n = 7), neural net (n = 6), ensemble learning (n = 6), MLPs (n = 4), XGBoost (n = 3), Bayesian network (BN) (n = 3), and gradient boosting (n = 3) were the most frequently applied ML techniques in the analytics of MA amongst NCD patients. It should be underscored that leveraging standard ML, deep learning (DL), and ensemble learning has enormous potential for measuring MA amongst NCD patients based on various analytics such as prediction, regression, classification, and clustering. Moreover, a further study could be conducted to comprehend how the application of alternative ML-based techniques can be used to measure MA among patients with chronic infectious diseases

Initialisation Approaches for Population-Based Metaheuristic Algorithms: A Comprehensive Review

A situation where the set of initial solutions lies near the position of the true optimality (most favourable or desirable solution) by chance can increase the probability of finding the true optimality and significantly reduce the search efforts. In optimisation problems, the location of the global optimum solution is unknown a priori, and initialisation is a stochastic process. In addition, the population size is equally important; if there are problems with high dimensions, a small population size may lie sparsely in unpromising regions, and may return suboptimal solutions with bias. In addition, the different distributions used as position vectors for the initial population may have different sampling emphasis; hence, different degrees of diversity. The initialisation control parameters of population-based metaheuristic algorithms play a significant role in improving the performance of the algorithms. Researchers have identified this significance, and they have put much effort into finding various distribution schemes that will enhance the diversity of the initial populations of the algorithms, and obtain the correct balance of the population size and number of iterations which will guarantee optimal solutions for a given problem set. Despite the affirmation of the role initialisation plays, to our knowledge few studies or surveys have been conducted on this subject area. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of different initialisation schemes to improve the quality of solutions obtained by most metaheuristic optimisers for a given problem set. Popular schemes used to improve the diversity of the population can be categorised into random numbers, quasirandom sequences, chaos theory, probability distributions, hybrids of other heuristic or metaheuristic algorithms, Lévy, and others. We discuss the different levels of success of these schemes and identify their limitations. Similarly, we identify gaps and present useful insights for future research directions. Finally, we present a comparison of the effect of population size, the maximum number of iterations, and ten (10) different initialisation methods on the performance of three (3) population-based metaheuristic optimizers: bat algorithm (BA), Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO), and butterfly optimization algorithm (BOA)

Improved SOSK-Means Automatic Clustering Algorithm with a Three-Part Mutualism Phase and Random Weighted Reflection Coefficient for High-Dimensional Datasets

Automatic clustering problems require clustering algorithms to automatically estimate the number of clusters in a dataset. However, the classical K-means requires the specification of the required number of clusters a priori. To address this problem, metaheuristic algorithms are hybridized with K-means to extend the capacity of K-means in handling automatic clustering problems. In this study, we proposed an improved version of an existing hybridization of the classical symbiotic organisms search algorithm with the classical K-means algorithm to provide robust and optimum data clustering performance in automatic clustering problems. Moreover, the classical K-means algorithm is sensitive to noisy data and outliers; therefore, we proposed the exclusion of outliers from the centroid update’s procedure, using a global threshold of point-to-centroid distance distribution for automatic outlier detection, and subsequent exclusion, in the calculation of new centroids in the K-means phase. Furthermore, a self-adaptive benefit factor with a three-part mutualism phase is incorporated into the symbiotic organism search phase to enhance the performance of the hybrid algorithm. A population size of 40+2g was used for the symbiotic organism search (SOS) algorithm for a well distributed initial solution sample, based on the central limit theorem that the selection of the right sample size produces a sample mean that approximates the true centroid on Gaussian distribution. The effectiveness and robustness of the improved hybrid algorithm were evaluated on 42 datasets. The results were compared with the existing hybrid algorithm, the standard SOS and K-means algorithms, and other hybrid and non-hybrid metaheuristic algorithms. Finally, statistical and convergence analysis tests were conducted to measure the effectiveness of the improved algorithm. The results of the extensive computational experiments showed that the proposed improved hybrid algorithm outperformed the existing SOSK-means algorithm and demonstrated superior performance compared to some of the competing hybrid and non-hybrid metaheuristic algorithms