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At present, the issue of air quality in populated urban areas is recognized as an environmental crisis. Air pollution affects the sustainability of the city. In controlling air pollution and protecting its hazards from humans, air quality data are very important. However, the costs of constructing and maintaining air quality registration infrastructure are very expensive and high, and air quality data recording at one point will not be generalizable to even a few kilometers. Some of the gains come from the integration of multiple data sources, which can never be achieved through independent single-source processing. Urban organizations in each city independently produce and record data relevant to the organization’s goals and objectives. These issues create separate data silos associated with an urban system. These data are varied in model and structure, and the integration of such data provides an appropriate opportunity to discover knowledge that can be useful in urban planning and decision making. This paper aims to show the generality of our previous research, which proposed a novel model to predict Particulate Matter (PM) as the main factor of air quality in the regions of the cities where air quality sensors are not available through urban big data resources integration, by extending the model and experiments with various configuration for different settings in smart cities. This work extends the evaluation scenarios of the model with the extended dataset of city of Aarhus, in Denmark, and compare the model performance against various specified baselines. Details of removing the heterogeneity of multiple data sources in the Multiple Data Set Aggregator & Heterogeneity Remover (MDA&HR) and improving the operation of Train Data Splitter (TDS) part of the model by focusing on the finding more similar pattern of air quality also are presented in this paper. The acceptable accuracy of the results shows the generality of the model.

In modern day Psychiatric analysis, Epileptic Seizures are considered as one of the most dreadful disorders of the human brain that drastically affects the neurological activity of the brain for a short duration of time. Thus, seizure detection before its actual occurrence is quintessential to ensure that the right kind of preventive treatment is given to the patient. The predictive analysis is carried out in the preictal state of the Epileptic Seizure that corresponds to the state that commences a couple of minutes before the onset of the seizure. In this paper, the average value of prediction time is restricted to 23.4 minutes for a total of 23 subjects. This paper intends to compare the accuracy of three different predictive models, namely – Logistic Regression, Decision Trees and XGBoost Classifier based on the study of Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals and determine which model has the highest rate of detection of Epileptic Seizure.

The doctrine of the “one size fits all” approach has been overcome in the field of disease diagnosis and patient management and has been replaced by a more per patient approach known as “personalized medicine”. Biomarkers are the key variables in the research and development of new methods of training prognostic models and neural networks in the scientific field of machine learning and artificial intelligence [1] [2]. Important biomarkers related to metabolism are the metabolites. Metabolomics refers to the systematic study of unique chemical fingerprints that are left behind by specific cellular processes. The metabolic profile can provide a snapshot of cell physiology and, by extension, metabolomics provide a direct “functional reading of the physiological state” of an organism. The goal of this paper is to employ current machine learning methodologies, specifically neural networks, to formulate a general evaluation chart of the nutritional biomarkers, to investigate how to best predict body mass index and to discover dietary patterns.

Harmful information identification is a critical research topic in natural language processing. Existing approaches have been focused either on rule-based methods or harmful text identification of normal documents. In this paper, we propose a BERT-based model to identify harmful information from social media, called Topic-BERT. Firstly, Topic-BERT utilizes BERT to take additional information as input to alleviate the sparseness of short texts. The GPU-DMM topic model is used to capture hidden topics of short texts for attention weight calculation. Secondly, the proposed model divides harmful short text identification into two stages, and different granularity labels are identified by two similar sub-models. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on a real-world social media dataset to evaluate our model. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can significantly improve the classification performance compared with baseline methods.

A curriculum sequence represents a match between learners’ preferences, needs, and surroundings from one side, and the learning content characteristics and the pedagogical requirements from the other side. The curriculum sequence adaptation problem (CSA) is considered as an important issue in adaptive and personalized learning field. It concerns the dynamic generation of a personal optimal learning path for a specific learner. This problem has gained an increased research interest in the last decade, and heuristics and meta-heuristics are usually used to solve it. In this direction, this paper summarizes existing works and presents a novel GA-based approach modeled as an objective optimization problem to deal with this problem. The experimental results from simulations showed that the proposed GA could outperform particle swarm optimization (PSO) and a random search approach in many simulated datasets. Moreover, from a pedagogical perspective, positive learners’ feedback and high acceptance towards the proposed approach is indicated.

Recommender Systems is a highly applicable subclass of information filtering systems, aiming to provide users with personalized item suggestions. These systems build on collaborative filtering and content-based methods to overcome the information overload issue. Hybrid recommender systems combine the abovementioned methods and are generally proved to be more efficient than the classical approaches. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the development of a hybrid recommender system that is able to make recommendations under the limitation of processing small amounts of data with strong intercorrelation. The proposed hybrid solution integrates Machine Learning and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis algorithms. The experimental evaluation of the proposed solution indicates that it performs better than widely used Machine Learning algorithms such as the k-Nearest Neighbors and Decision Trees.

The recommendation system is affected with attacks when the users are given liberty to rate the items based on their impression about the product or service. Some malicious user or other competitors’ try to inject fake rating to degrade the item’s graces that are mostly adored by several users. Attacks in the rating matrix are not executed just by a single profile. A group of users profile is injected into rating matrix to decrease the performance. It is highly complex to extract the fake ratings from the mixture of genuine profile as it resides the same pattern. Identifying the attacked profile and the target item of the fake rating is a challenging task in the big data environment. This paper proposes a unique method to identify the attacks in collaborating filtering method. The process of extracting fake rating is carried out in two phases. During the initial phase, doubtful user profile is identified from the rating matrix. In the following phase, the target item is analysed using push attack count to reduce the false positive rates from the doubtful user profile. The proposed model is evaluated with detection rate and false positive rates by considering the filler size and attacks size. The experiment was conducted with 6%, 8% and 10% filler sizes and with different attack sizes that ranges from 0%–100%. Various classification techniques such as decision tree, logistic regression, SVM and random forest methods are used to classify the fake ratings. From the results, it is witnessed that SVM model works better with random and bandwagon attack models at an average of 4% higher accuracy. Similarly the decision tree method performance better at an average of 3% on average attack model.

Pests are major threat to economic growth of a country. Application of pesticide is the easiest way to control the pest infection. However, excessive utilization of pesticide is hazardous to environment. The recent advances in deep learning have paved the way for early detection and improved classification of pest in tomato plants which will benefit the farmers. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of 11 state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural network (CNN) models with three configurations: transfers learning, fine-tuning and scratch learning. The training in transfer learning and fine tuning initiates from pre-trained weights whereas random weights are used in case of scratch learning. In addition, the concept of data augmentation has been explored to improve the performance. Our dataset consists of 859 tomato pest images from 10 categories. The results demonstrate that the highest classification accuracy of 94.87% has been achieved in the transfer learning approach by DenseNet201 model with data augmentation.

Today, with the development of internet technology, a new kind of social relations and interactions have been formed in the newly emerged social networks. Through social networks, the users can share different types of content, including personal information, text, image, video, music, poem, and other related information, which express their mental states, emotions, feelings, and thoughts. Thus, a new and essential aspect of human life is being formed in a virtual space in social networks, which must be explored from several viewpoints, such as mental disorders. Analyzing mental disorders according to the social network data can guide us to gain new approaches to improve the public health of the whole society. To this aim, developing mental health feature extraction (MHFE) methods in a social network is essential and is now becoming an active research area. Therefore, in this paper, a review of existing techniques and methods in MHFE is presented, and a comprehensive framework is provided to classify these approaches. Furthermore, to analyze and evaluate each approach in extraction methods, an appropriate set of functional criteria is proposed, which leads to a more accurate understanding and correct use of them.

Online social networks are considered to be one of the most disruptive platforms where people communicate with each other on any topic ranging from funny cat videos to cancer support. The widespread diffusion of mobile platforms such as smart-phones causes the number of messages shared in such platforms to grow heavily, thus more intelligent and scalable algorithms are needed for efficient extraction of useful information. This paper proposes a method for retrieving relevant information from social network messages using a distributional semantics-based framework powered by topic modeling. The proposed framework combines the Latent Dirichlet Allocation and distributional representation of phrases (Phrase2Vec) for effective information retrieval from online social networks. Extensive and systematic experiments on messages collected from Twitter (tweets) show this approach outperforms some state-of-the-art approaches in terms of precision and accuracy and better information retrieval is possible using the proposed method.

In this paper, based on the fusion of Lidar and Radar measurement data, a real-time road-Object Detection and Tracking (LR_ODT) method for autonomous driving is proposed. The lidar and radar devices are installed on the ego car, and a customized Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) is used for their data fusion. Lidars are accurate in determining objects’ positions but significantly less accurate on measuring their velocities. However, Radars are more accurate on measuring objects velocities but less accurate on determining their positions as they have a lower spatial resolution. Therefore, the merits of both sensors are combined using the proposed fusion approach to provide both pose and velocity data for objects moving in roads precisely. The Grid-Based Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (GB-DBSCAN) clustering algorithm is used to detect objects and estimate their centroids from the lidar and radar raw data. Then, the estimation of the object’s velocity as well as determining its corresponding geometrical shape is performed by the RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm. The proposed technique is implemented using the high-performance language C+⁣+ and utilizes highly optimized math and optimization libraries for best real-time performance. The performance of the UKF fusion is compared to that of the Extended Kalman Filter fusion (EKF) showing its superiority. Simulation studies have been carried out to evaluate the performance of the LR_ODT for tracking bicycles, cars, and pedestrians.

In this paper, we have proposed a novel overlapping community detection algorithm based on an ensemble approach with a distributed neighbourhood threshold method (EnDNTM). EnDNTM uses pre-partitioned disjoint communities generated by the ensemble mechanism and then analyzes the neighbourhood distribution of boundary nodes in disjoint communities to detect overlapping communities. It is a form of seed-based global method since boundary nodes are considered as seeds and become the starting point for detecting overlapping communities. A threshold value for each boundary node is used as the minimum influence by the neighbours of a node in order to determine its belongingness to any community. The effectiveness of the EnDNTM algorithm has been demonstrated by testing with five synthetic benchmark datasets and fifteen real-world datasets. The performance of the EnDNTM algorithm was compared with seven overlapping community detection algorithms. The F1-score, normalized mutual information ONMI and extended modularity Qo⁢v metrics were used to measure the quality of the detected communities. EnDNTM outperforms comparable algorithms on 4 out of 5 synthetic benchmarks datasets, 11 out of 15 real world datasets and gives comparable results with the remaining datasets. Experiments on various synthetic and real world datasets reveal that for a majority of datasets, the proposed ensemble-based distributed neighbourhood threshold method is able to select the best disjoint clusters produced by a disjoint method from a collection of methods for detecting overlapping communities.