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Class imbalance problems have attracted the research community, but a few works have focused on feature selection with imbalanced datasets. To handle class imbalance problems, we developed a novel fitness function for feature selection using the chaotic salp swarm optimization algorithm, an efficient meta-heuristic optimization algorithm that has been successfully used in a wide range of optimization problems. This paper proposes an AdaBoost algorithm with chaotic salp swarm optimization. The most discriminating features are selected using salp swarm optimization, and AdaBoost classifiers are thereafter trained on the features selected. Experiments show the ability of the proposed technique to find the optimal features with performance maximization of AdaBoost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unequal area facility layout problems deal with the placement of departments in a particular area. In these problems, unsettled rectangular-shaped blocks with an aspect ratio limitation are arranged in a given space. This has been widely studied for facility planning design and operating efficiency. Therefore, many metaheuristic approaches have been suggested to determine optimal solutions. In this study, monarch butterfly optimization, a recently developed algorithm, is presented to solve an unequal area facility layout problem. A slicing tree representation is used to form a layout structure as well as greedy acceptance, which accelerates the monarch butterfly optimization's search performance. A set of well-known instances from existing studies is tested to evaluate the algorithm's effectiveness. Meaningful results are obtained from various categories. The proposed algorithm generates solutions that match the best results from previous research, and it provides such solutions within a comparable amount of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since real-world problems are quite complex, developing more effective methods to optimize them is taken into consideration at the present age. One of the most popular strategies to solve such problems is nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms which have presented promising solutions in different fields. The JAYA algorithm is an innovative and promising technique for solving a wide range of optimization problems. Hence, this investigation provides a new hybrid algorithm based on JAYA and crow search algorithm (CSA), known as HJCSA, to enhance its performance. In other words, the mechanism of updating position in CSA is integrated with JAYA algorithm to reinforce the convergence and search capabilities of JAYA algorithm. The proposed hybrid algorithm is evaluated through solving 20 well-known benchmark functions, and obtained results are compared with various up-to-date algorithms, including CSA, JAYA, particle swarm optimization (PSO), dragonfly algorithm (DA), grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA), moth-flame optimization (MFO), and sine–cosine algorithm (SCA). In addition, a real-world engineering problem is optimized by the proposed optimization approach and compared with other published works. The results showed that the suggested optimization algorithm is much more vigorous in escaping from local minima, possessing better convergence, and discovering more accurate solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fitness-dependent optimizer (FDO) is a recent metaheuristic algorithm that mimics the reproduction behavior of the bee swarm in finding better hives. This algorithm is similar to particle swarm optimization, but it works differently. The algorithm is very powerful and has better results compared to other common metaheuristic algorithms. This paper aims at improving the performance of FDO; thus, the chaotic theory is used inside FDO to propose chaotic FDO (CFDO). Ten chaotic maps are used in the CFDO to consider which of them are performing well to avoid local optima and finding global optima. New technic is used to conduct population in specific limitation since FDO technic has a problem to amend population. The proposed CFDO is evaluated by using 10 benchmark functions from CEC2019. Finally, the results show that the ability of CFDO is improved. Singer map has a great impact on improving CFDO, while the Tent map is the worst. Results show that CFDO is superior to GA, FDO, and CSO. Both CEC2013 and CEC2005 are used to evaluate CFDO. Finally, the proposed CFDO is applied to classical engineering problems, such as pressure vessel design and the result shows that CFDO can handle the problem better than WOA, GWO, FDO, and CGWO. Besides, CFDO is applied to solve the task assignment problem and then compared to the original FDO. The results prove that CFDO has better capability to solve the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To solve global optimization problems, nature-inspired metaheuristics have emerged as the best option in many cases. The researchers have mimicked or mapped the optimal behaviors of living organisms, natural phenomena and human behaviors to solve optimization problems. Whenever a new algorithm is proposed, its exploration, exploitation and convergence capabilities are tested; however, in this study, it is highlighted that a metaheuristic should also exhibit invariance to function translation/shifting. Whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is a well-reputed and highly referred algorithm in the literature; however, we find that its performance is strongly affected under certain circumstances involving function shifting. Our analysis reveals that WOA performs really well when the global optimum is situated at the origin ( 0 , 0 , ... , 0 ); on the contrary, the performance amazingly degrades whenever the global optimum is situated away from the origin. Moreover, in most cases, our findings reveal that the performance degradation is directly proportional to the distance of the global optimum from the origin. Furthermore, the root cause of the problem is discovered and discussed. Finally, it is suggested how WOA can be made shift-invariant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hierarchical linear models are widely used in many research disciplines and estimation issues for such models are generally well addressed. Design issues are relatively much less discussed for hierarchical linear models but there is an increasing interest as these models grow in popularity. This paper discusses the G-optimality for predicting individual parameters in such models and establishes an equivalence theorem for confirming the G-optimality of an approximate design. Because the criterion is non-differentiable and requires solving multiple nested optimization problems, it is much harder to find and study G-optimal designs analytically. We propose a nature-inspired meta-heuristic algorithm called competitive swarm optimizer (CSO) to generate G-optimal designs for linear mixed models with different means and covariance structures. We further demonstrate that CSO is flexible and generally effective for finding the widely used locally D-optimal designs for nonlinear models with multiple interacting factors and some of the random effects are correlated. Our numerical results for a few examples suggest that G and D-optimal designs may be equivalent and we establish that D and G-optimal designs for hierarchical linear models are equivalent when the models have only a random intercept only. The challenging mathematical question of whether their equivalence applies more generally to other hierarchical models remains elusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past present future (PPF) is a new stochastic optimization algorithm inspired by the phenomena of the way an individual learns from a successful person in society. PPF is based on the concept of "future improvement of a person's life depending on his/her past experience and present work." The influence of successful persons also affects the improvement of the future life of an individual. This work develops a mathematical model for PPF following the above facts. In this new algorithm, the population is divided into subpopulations and a switching mechanism is followed among the subpopulations to track the change in optimal positions of an individual thereby accelerating the convergence rate. In addition, this switching mechanism also prevents pre-mature convergence. PPF was found to possess low computational complexity with fast convergence characteristics. The proposed PPF is compared with 41 up-to-date meta-heuristic algorithms taking an extensive set of benchmark functions to verify the efficiency. In addition, five classical engineering design problems are simulated to estimate the efficacy of the PPF algorithm in optimizing engineering problems. The results confirm the superior performance of the proposed algorithm to get the optimal solution with less iteration and have shown the best competitive performance compared to all other algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pavement rutting refers to surface depression in the wheel-path along an asphalt road which causes loss of steering control and consequently leads to serious traffic accidents. Hence, it is necessary to develop powerful methods to accurately recognize pavement rutting during road condition survey. This study presents a novel computer vision-based model to automatically identify rutting on asphalt pavement road. The model is established based on a hybridization of image processing techniques (ITPs), least squares support vector classification (LSSVC), dynamic feature selection (FS) method, and forensic-based investigation (FBI). The ITPs, including Gabor filter and discrete cosine transform were employed to implement texture computation for image data. These techniques are used to generate an initial set of extracted features describing rutting and non-rutting states. The extracted features were then refined by a wrapper-based feature selection (FS) method to determine set of highly relevant features. LSSVC models were used to learn the categorization of rutting and non-rutting based on the refined features and hyper-parameters optimized by the FBI metaheuristic. The final LSSVC prediction model with the most desired prediction accuracy can be obtained once the process of the FBI's optimization terminates. A dataset of 2000 image samples has been collected during field trip of pavement survey in Da Nang city (Vietnam) to construct and evaluate the newly developed model. The statistical results obtained from a k-fold cross-validation have demonstrated that the hybrid FBI-LSSVC-FS model can achieve the most desired rutting recognition performance with accuracy rate, precision, recall, and F1 score of 98.9%, 0.994, 0.984 and 0.989, respectively. Therefore, this paper contributes to the body of knowledge by proposing a novel AI-based prediction model to assist transportation agencies in the task of periodic asphalt pavement survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efficiency of tunnel boring machines (TBMs) in underground projects has great significance for the mining and tunneling industries, demanding a reliable estimation of the TBM's performance in different geotechnical conditions. The current research work attempted to suggest an optimal predictor model of TBM performance as a reliable alternative to experimental and numerical techniques. To achieve this target, three data-mining techniques, namely neural network (NN), gene expression programming (GEP), and multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), were employed for modelling the TBM performance, and then the most robust predictive model was optimized via a metaheuristic search method known as whale optimization algorithm (WOA). For the modelling purpose, an experimental database was compiled by performing a field assessment program in a tunneling project in Malaysia and then conducting laboratory testing on the derived rock specimens. Based on the measured experimental data, the six most influential parameters were identified and served as model inputs to predict penetration rate (PR). In order to indicate the capability of the developed GEP and NN models, a stepwise linear regression model, i.e., MARS, was designed for PR prediction as well. The predictive capacity of the constructed models was quantified using a series of statistical indices, i.e., root mean squared error (RMSE), determination coefficient (R2) and variance account for (VAF). Based on the computed indices for testing records, both the proposed GEP and NN models (with RMSE values of 0.1882 and 0.2120 and R2 values of 0.9058 and 0.8735, respectively) yielded more accurate predictive results than the MARS model with RMSE of 0.2553 and R2 of 0.8346. Hence, by achieving the most robust performance compared to the rest, GEP-based model can provide a new practical equation with a high level of accuracy. In other part of this study, the six input parameters of the GEP model and its equation were, respectively, defined as decision variables and objective function for the WOA technique to find the optimum values of PR. As a consequence of optimizing the GEP equation, the maximum value of PR rose from 3.75 m/h to 4.022 m/h, equivalent to an increase of 7.25% in PR value. The findings of this study verified the applicability of the proposed hybrid GEP and WOA approach in the site investigation phase of tunneling projects constructed by TBMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Localization is the fundamental problem for event detecting and monitoring due to the mobility of nodes UWSNs . In the literature, researchers have examined the localization problem through optimization schemes for evaluating the accurate location of unknown target nodes. However, the existing schemes have not considered the failure of anchor nodes during obstacles, natural disasters and environmental interferences. Due to this, the network leads to high localization error and energy depletion. Therefore, in this paper, we considered anchor node failure and bad distance computational between anchor-target pair for better localization. For this, fault-resilient localization using FL and NSGA I I -based metaheuristic scheme is proposed for UWSNs . In this scheme, first, we refined the correction value of an anchor node to improve the distance between anchor-target pair. Afterward, FL and NSGA II are applied to identify the set of optimal anchor nodes for the fault-resilient localization process. Furthermore, we have also incorporated fitness value with the three parameters such as residual energy, modified anchor-target distance and a number of the connected nodes as the input parameters, whereas probability is the output for the selection of optimal anchor nodes. Performance evaluation of the proposed scheme outperforms the existing scheme in terms of average localization error, better coverage positioning, localized and bad node proportion with a fast convergence rate under different network scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Segmentation of image is a key step in image analysis and pre-processing. It consists of separating the pixels into different segments based on their intensity level according to threshold values. The most challenging job in segmentation is to select the optimum threshold values. Standard multilevel thresholding (MT) techniques are effective for bi-level thresholds due to their simplicity, robustness, decreased convergence time and precision. As the level of thresholds increases, computational complexity also increases exponentially. To mitigate these issues various metaheuristic algorithm are applied to this problem. In this manuscript, a new hybrid version of the Dragonfly algorithm (DA) and Firefly Algorithm (FA) is proposed. DA is an optimization algorithm recently suggested based on the dragonfly's static and dynamic swarming behavior. DA's worldwide search capability is great with randomization and static swarm behavior, local search capability is restricted, resulting in local optima trapping alternatives. The firefly algorithm (FA) is influenced by fireflies' social behavior in which they generate flashlights to attract their mates. The suggested technique combines the ability to explore DA and firefly Algorithm's ability to exploit to obtain ideal global solutions. In this paper, HDAFA is applied on ten standard test images having a diverse histogram, which are taken from Berkeley Segmentation Data Set 500 (BSDS500) benchmark image set for segmentation. The search capability of the algorithm is employed with OTSU and Kapur's entropy MT as an objective functions for image segmentation. The proposed approach is compared with the existing state-of-art optimization algorithms like MTEMO, GA, PSO, and BF for both OTSU and Kapur's entropy methods. Qualitative experimental outcomes demonstrate that HDAFA is highly efficient in terms of performance metric such as PSNR, mean, threshold values, number of iterations taken to converge and image segmentation quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, researches on optimizing the parameter of the artificial neural network (ANN) model has attracted significant attention from researchers. Hybridization of superior algorithms helps improving optimization performance and capable of solving complex applications. As a traditional gradient-based learning algorithm, ANN suffers from a slow learning rate and is easily trapped in local minima when training techniques such as gradient descent (GD) and back-propagation (BP) algorithm are used. The characteristics of randomization and selection of the best or near-optimal solution of metaheuristic algorithm provide an effective and robust solution; therefore, it has always been used in training of ANN to improve and overcome the above problems. New metaheuristic algorithms are proposed every year. Therefore, the review of its latest developments is essential. This article attempts to summarize the metaheuristic algorithms which have been proposed from the year 1975 to 2020 from various journals, conferences, technical papers, and books. The comparison of the popularity of the metaheuristic algorithm is presented in two time frames, such as algorithms proposed in the recent 20 years and those proposed earlier. Then, some of the popular metaheuristic algorithms and their working principle are reviewed. This article further categorizes the latest metaheuristic search algorithm in the literature to indicate their efficiency in training ANN for various industry applications. More and more researchers tend to develop new hybrid optimization tools by combining two or more metaheuristic algorithms to optimize the training parameters of ANN. Generally, the algorithm's optimal performance must be able to achieve a fine balance of their exploration and exploitation characteristics. Hence, this article tries to compare and summarize the properties of various metaheuristic algorithms in terms of their convergence rate and the ability to avoid the local minima. This information is useful for researchers working on algorithm hybridization by providing a good understanding of the convergence rate and the ability to find a global optimum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, use of various types of hybrid metaheuristic algorithms attracts the researchers to optimize the average profit or cost of an inventory system to avoid the local optimality due to high nonlinearity of the corresponding optimization problem. This paper deals with an application of binary tournament-based quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization algorithms on an imperfect production inventory problem with shortages. In order to reduce the production of defective items, modern/improvement technology has been incorporated in the production system. Also, the demand of the product is assumed to be dependent on its warranty period and selling price. The main objective of this study is to optimize the production rate, production period, selling price of the product, manufacturer's improvement technology level and maximum shortage level as well as maximize the average profit of the production system. For this purpose, three hybrid metaheuristic algorithms based on binary tournamenting and different variants of quantum-behaved PSO techniques have been developed. Then to examine the validity of the proposed model, three numerical examples have been solved. Considering each example, nonparametric statistical tests have been performed by using four different methods to analyze the performance of the used algorithms. Finally, sensitivity analyses have been performed to investigate the effects of different parameters on optimal policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial neural network (ANN) is modeled to predict and classify problems. However, in the training phase of ANNs discovering faultless values of the weights of a network is extremely troublesome. Traditional weight updating methods often get stuck into local optima and converge to optimal solutions very slowly. Therefore, to overcome these drawbacks a modified version of a nature-based algorithm which merges meta-heuristics with weight-updating technique of ANN has been used in this paper. Whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is a well-established, efficient and competitive algorithm inspired by the hunting mechanism of the whales including their behavior in finding and attacking their prey with their bubble-net feeding technique. In WOA, the next location of the search individuals or whales is modified depending on some probability. Due to the high exploration rate of WOA, there is a disproportion between exploration and exploitation in the WOA and it also converges to the solution slowly. Thus, to establish an equilibrium between exploration and exploitation a new variant of WOA called modified whale optimization algorithm (MWOA) is proposed to overcome the problem of delayed convergence. In MWOA, roulette wheel selection is combined with WOA to enhance the convergence speed of WOA. MWOA is tested on 11 benchmark functions, and the outcomes are compared with WOA. The results prove that MWOA has gained success in overcoming the problem of the slow convergence of WOA. Also, the results show that the proposed MWOA technique, when applied to ANN, can overcome the problems of traditional techniques and has improved the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subspace clustering is one of the efficient techniques for determining the clusters in different subsets of dimensions. Ideally, these techniques should find all possible non-redundant clusters in which the data point participates. Unfortunately, existing hard subspace clustering algorithms fail to satisfy this property. Additionally, with the increase in dimensions of data, classical subspace algorithms become inefficient. This work presents a new density-based subspace clustering algorithm (S_FAD) to overcome the drawbacks of classical algorithms. S_FAD is based on a bottom-up approach and finds subspace clusters of varied density using different parameters of the DBSCAN algorithm. The algorithm optimizes parameters of the DBCAN algorithm through a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm and uses hashing concepts to discover all non-redundant subspace clusters. The efficacy of S_FAD is evaluated against various existing subspace clustering algorithms on artificial and real datasets in terms of F_Score and rand_index. Performance is assessed based on three parameters: average ranking, SRR ranking, and scalability on varied dimensions. Statistical analysis is performed through the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Results reveal that S_FAD performs considerably better on the majority of the datasets and scales well up to 6400 dimensions on the actual dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gaining sharing knowledge based optimization algorithm (GSK) is recently developed metaheuristic algorithm, which is based on how humans acquire and share knowledge during their life-time. This paper investigates a modified version of the GSK algorithm to find the best feature subsets. Firstly, it represents a binary variant of GSK algorithm by employing a probability estimation operator (Bi-GSK) on the two main pillars of GSK algorithm. And then, the chaotic maps are used to enhance the performance of the proposed algorithm. Ten different types of chaotic maps are considered to adapt the parameters of the GSK algorithm that make a proper balance between exploration and exploitation and save the algorithm from premature convergence. To check the performance of proposed approaches of GSK algorithm, twenty-one benchmark datasets are taken from the UCI repository for feature selection. The performance is measured by calculating different type of measures, and several metaheuristic algorithms are adopted to compare the obtained results. The results indicate that Chebyshev chaotic map shows the best result among all chaotic maps which improve the performance accuracy and convergence rate of the original algorithm. Moreover, it outperforms the other metaheuristic algorithms in terms of efficiency, fitness value and the minimum number of selected features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel metaheuristic-based optimization technique called search space reduction (SSR) optimization algorithm. This algorithm attempts to solve the common pitfalls in the existing algorithms in the literature by randomly generating the search agents in every iteration instead of following the best solution. This new algorithm is simple, computationally efficient, which is based on the concept of reducing the search space. The performance of this algorithm is tested over classical test functions and CEC'17 benchmark test functions. The results are compared with well-established algorithms in the literature. The test results show that the proposed algorithm exhibits good exploration and exploitation capabilities. Further, this algorithm also outperforms other algorithms in solving multimodal optimization problems. In addition to this, the computational complexity of this algorithm is also presented according to CEC'17 guidelines. The proposed algorithm is also employed to solve three engineering design problems and a more complex re-entry trajectory optimization problem to show its effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Meta-heuristic algorithms have shown promising results in solving various optimization problems. The crow search algorithm (CSA) is a new and effective meta-heuristic algorithm that emulates crows' intelligent group behavior in nature. However, it suffers from several problems, such as trapping into local optimum and premature convergence. This paper proposes an improved crow search algorithm (ICSA), which has been tested and evaluated by a set of well-known benchmark functions. A new update mechanism that uses the merits of the global best position to move toward the best position is proposed. This mechanism increases the convergence of the algorithm and improves its local search-ability. Twenty benchmark functions are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed ICSA. Moreover, the ICSA algorithm is compared with the conventional CSA and other meta-heuristic algorithms such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), dragonfly algorithm (DA), grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA), gray wolf optimizer (GWO), moth-flame optimization (MFO), and sine-cosine algorithm (SCA). The experimental result shows that the proposed ICSA algorithm has produced promising results and outperformed conventional CSA and other meta-heuristic algorithms. Also, the proposed ICSA has a more robust convergence for optimizing objective functions in terms of solution accuracy and efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a cooperative bat searching algorithm (CBA) is proposed by using a communication topology to share information among all the bats in bat algorithm (BA). Inspired by the cooperation mechanism in the distributed control theory, a cooperative term is added to the original BA to accelerate the searching process. The convergence issue is rigorously studied for CBA by using the Jury's test. Moreover, numerical evaluation is conducted to compare CBA with other variants of BA by solving fifteen benchmark functions from IEEE congress on evolutionary computation. The results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CBA. As an application, CBA and binary CBA are equipped as the real-time optimizers in a networked model predictive control strategy to solve a balanced coordination problem. The proposed CBA showed competitive performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major purpose of this article is to enhance the performance of GOA algorithm by integrating a new mutation operator to the standard GOA algorithm. A series of six different variants of enhanced GOA is proposed by integrating GOA with six different variants of the mutation operator. The new enhanced metaheuristic optimization method is called EGOAs. EGOA aims to address the problems of slow convergence and trapping into local optima, by achieving a good balance between exploration and exploitation, using a special mutation operator that enhances the diversity of the standard GOA, to find the best solution for global optimization problems. The implementation process for enhancing the GOA algorithm is presented and the effectiveness of the enhanced algorithm is evaluated against 60 of the optimization benchmark functions, and compared to that of the standard GOA, as well as to other metaheuristic optimization algorithms. The performance of EGOAs was compared with the other improved methods based on GOA. Experimental results show that EGOAs is clearly superior to the standard GOA algorithm, as well as to other well-known algorithms, in terms of achieving the best optimal value, convergence speed, and avoiding local minima, which makes EGOAs a promising addition to the arsenal of metaheuristic algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Novel metaheuristic algorithms are now considered an appealing collection of methods for solving complex optimization problems, in which the challenging objective is to find a better solution in a shorter computation time. Focusing on the same objective, this paper proposes a novel metaheuristic optimization algorithm inspired by heat transfer relationships based on the second law of thermodynamics. Imitating the heat transfer behavior of solid objects, the proposed method is called the heat transfer relation-based optimization algorithm (HTOA). This behavior was modeled on a heat transfer function used to measure temperature differences between the selected solutions and the best solution. This function was employed to determine and add the heat capacity transferred between those solutions. Finally, all the solutions were heat-exchanged with the best solution to select the fittest solution and exclude the rest. This procedure continued until the best solution or solutions were found. The proposed method is challenged by many famous benchmark problems in two categories as well as two real-world problems (PID controller and linear regression). The HTOA was then compared with a number of well-known and state-of-the-art optimization algorithms. Selecting better solutions and requiring shorter computation time, the proposed HTOA outperformed the other algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identification of informative genes is essential for the disease and cancer studies. Metaheuristic algorithms have been widely used for this purpose. However, their performance on various high-dimensional datasets of genomic studies has not been fully addressed. This work was intended to perform a comprehensive comparative analysis on three well-known nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms, namely binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO), genetic algorithm (GA) and cuckoo search algorithm (CS) when they are used in gene selection and classification in twelve high-dimensional cancer datasets. The methodology was carried out through the utilization of a three-phase hybrid approach, considering a pre-processing filtration using Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (PPMCC) followed by the metaheuristic and classification algorithms. Comparably, five different classification algorithms were used in each phase of analysis. It was seen that the application of PCCMA filter has acted upon reducing the computational complexity of overall analysis. The comparative study showed that BPSO outperformed GA and CS in terms of accuracy. However, CS was able to select fewer attributed genes and was less computationally complex compared to that of GA and BPSO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Handwritten signature verification is one of the most fast, intuitive and cost-effective tools for user authentication. However, the analysis of the handwritten signature may become complicated due to the large dimensionality. Feature selection is treated as one of the most commonly applied preprocessing techniques in data mining to deal with the dimensionality. Since the feature selection can be considered as an optimization problem, we propose a wrapper metaheuristic framework for the handwritten signature verification, which uses the k-nearest neighbor classification algorithm to guide a metaheuristic optimization algorithm in order to find the best subset of features. The following metaheuristics are used in the work: swallow swarm optimization (SSO), binary dragonfly swarm optimization (BBA), population algorithm with memory (PAO), genetic algorithm (GA), binary bat algorithm (BBA), binary whale optimization algorithm (WOA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The experiments are carried on the SVC2004 dataset by comparing the employed metaheuristics with each other from different perspectives, including the classification performance, the relatives frequencies of selected features and the feature subset size. According to results, the proposed wrapper framework obtains extremely promising results for handwritten signature verification. In particular, the proposed framework can increase the classification accuracy at least or more than 8%, even though selecting between 2 and 6 features among 100 features in most cases. It is also observed that the proposed framework with PSO can achieve slightly better results than with the other metaheuristics in most cases. It can therefore be suggested that the traditional metaheuristics like PSO and GA maintain their position and entrench their popularity in a wide range of fields despite a variety of the recently introduced metaheuristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at the shortcomings of quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization algorithm (QPSO), an improved quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization algorithm (IQPSO) is put forward, and the improved algorithm is applied in solving a kind of fuzzy portfolio selection problems. Firstly, a kind of portfolio models with fuzzy return rates and background risk is established followed by some necessary preparations of fuzzy theory. Then, in the improved algorithm, hybrid probability distribution strategy and contraction–expansion coefficient with nonlinear structure are chosen to enhance particle's exploration ability, and premature prevention mechanism is used to maintain population diversity. Furthermore, the experimental results on 16 benchmark functions show that IQPSO has better convergence and robustness than PSO with inertia weight, QPSO and QPSO with a hybrid probability distribution in most cases. Finally, when solving a fuzzy portfolio model, IQPSO provides comparable and superior results compared with the other metaheuristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, there are a lot of useful algorithms for covering array (CA) generation, one of the branches of combinatorial testing. The major CA challenge is the generation of an array with the minimum number of test cases (efficiency) in an appropriate run-time (performance), for large systems. CA generation strategies are classified into several categories: computational and meta-heuristic, to name the most important ones. Generally, computational strategies have high performance and yield poor results in terms of efficiency, in contrast, meta-heuristic strategies have good efficiency and lower performance. Among the strategies available, some are efficient strategies but suffer from low performance; conversely, some others have good performance, but is not such efficient. In general, there is not a strategy that enjoys both above-mentioned metrics. In this paper, it is tried to combine the genetic algorithm and the Augmented Lagrangian Particle Swarm Optimization with Fractional Order Velocity to produce the appropriate test suite in terms of efficiency and performance. Also, a simple and effective minimizing function is employed to increase efficiency. The evaluation results show that the proposed strategy outperforms the existing approaches in terms of both efficiency and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Big data (BD) approach has significantly impacted on the development and expansion of supply chain network management and design. The available problems in the supply chain network (SCN) include production, distribution, transportation, ordering, and inventory holding problems. These problems under the BD environment are challenging and considerably affect the efficiency of the SCN. The drastic environmental and regulatory changes around the world and the rising concerns about carbon emissions have increased the awareness of customers regarding the carbon footprint of the products they are consuming. This has enforced supply chain managers to change strategies to reframe carbon emissions.. The decisions such as an optimization of the suitable network of the proper lot sizes can play a crucial role in minimizing the whole carbon emissions in the SCN. In this paper, a new integrated production–transportation–ordering–inventory holding problem for SCN is developed. In this regard, a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model in the multi-product, multi-level, and multi-period SCN is formulated based on the minimization of the total costs and the related cost of carbon emissions. The research also uses a chance-constrained programming approach. The proposed model needs a range of real-time parameters from capacities, carbon caps, and costs. These parameters along with the various sizes of BD, namely velocity, variety, and volume, have been illustrated. A lot-sizing policy along with carbon emissions is also provided in the proposed model. One of the important contributions of this paper is the three various carbon regulation policies that include carbon capacity-and-trade, the strict capacity on emission, and the carbon tax on emissions in order to assess the carbon emissions. As there is no benchmark available in the literature, this study contributes toward this aspect by proposing two hybrid novel meta-heuristics (H-1) and (H-2) to optimize the large-scale problems with the complex structure containing BD. Hence, a generated random dataset possessing the necessary parameters of BD, namely velocity, variety, and volume, is provided to validate and solve the suggested model. The parameters of the proposed algorithms are calibrated and controlled using the Taguchi approach. In order to evaluate hybrid algorithms and find optimal solutions, the study uses 15 randomly generated data examples having necessary features of BD and T test significance. Finally, the effectiveness and performance of the presented model are analyzed by a set of sensitivity analyses. The outcome of our study shows that H-2 is of higher efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A smart city (SC) is a sustainable and efficient urban center that provides a high quality of life to its inhabitants through optimal management of its resources that nowadays have been wider and wider. In modern societies, municipal solid waste management (MSWM) is an important part of SCs, the main problem of MSWM is the cost that it generates and must be reduced. To solve this situation in this paper are considered two sub-models. The first sub-model uses vehicle routing problem (VRP) for routing fleet among generation waste to separation facilities. The second sub-model is designed to allocate resources from separation facilities to set of recovery plants or landfill centers. From the best of our knowledge, most of the past studies related to this topic have focused only on deterministic implementations. Also, recent studies usually focus on uncertain parameters in the area of waste generation. In addition, a few related studies have developed the uncertain parameter which has focused on facilitating separation. This study considers the uncertain parameters in the output rate of separation facilities as well as the importance of value recovery from each bin; the aim is to enhance the efficiency of operations. The purpose of this study is to minimize the total transportation cost and to maximize recycled revenue. Chance-constrained programming has been used to deal with stochastic optimization model. Four metaheuristic algorithms are employed to identify the best solution. Besides, the performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated. Finally, sensitivity analyses along with number of scenarios have developed to measure the tightness of the proposed problem. The results of the study illustrate the optimized number of vehicles that can help the managers and decision-makers in various tightness conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current national and international regulations, along with growing environmental concerns, have deeply influenced the design of supply chain networks. These decisions stem from the fact that decision-makers try to design the supply chain network to align with their economic and environmental objectives. In this paper, a new closed-loop supply chain network with sales agency and customers is formulated. The proposed model has four echelons in the forward direction and five echelons in the backwards direction. The model not only considers several constraints from previous studies, but also addresses new constraints in order to better explore real-life problems that employ different transportation modes and that rely on sale agency centers. The objective function is to maximize the total profit. In addition, this study firstly considers distinct cluster of customers based on the product life cycle. These customers are utilized in different levels of the proposed network in order to purchase the final products, returned products, and recycled products. The structure of the model is based on linear mixed-integer programming, and the proposed model has been investigated through a case study regarding the manufacturing industry. To verify the model efficiency, a set of metaheuristics and hybrid algorithm are applied in various test problems along with a data from a real-world case study in a building construction industry. The findings of the proposed network illustrated that using the attributes of sale agency centers and clusters of customers both increase the problem total revenue and the number of the collected returned products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The very large scale integration (VLSI) chip design includes a crucial phase called floorplanning. Several nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms were developed depending on swarm intelligence for VLSI floorplanning. But, the energy consumption and heat generation of floorplanning in VLSI design were not improved using existing metaheuristic algorithms. In order to improve the performance of floorplanning with minimum energy consumption and heat generation, multi-objective firefly optimization-based floorplanning (MOFO-FP) technique is introduced. The main aim of MOFO-FP technique is to reduce the heat generation, space occupied and wire length with the fixed outline constraints for VLSI floorplanning. After constructing the floorplan design, optimization is performed using energy and heat-aware firefly optimization (EHAFO) algorithm. In EHAFO algorithm, the multi-objective function such as heat generation, space occupied and wire length is calculated for efficient floorplanning in VLSI design. Based on the objective functions, the light intensity of each firefly is calculated. From that, the lower brightness fireflies are moved towards higher brightness firefly to identify the optimized position. Lastly, the ranking process carried out to rank the fireflies depends on the intensity to find the optimal tree structure for VLSI floorplanning. This, in turns, proposed MOFO-FP technique which reduces the energy consumption, wire length and heat generation. Experimental evaluation of MOFO-FP technique is carried out with the performance metrics such as wirelength, heat generation, and space consumption compared to the state-of-the-art works. The results are observed that the MOFO-FP technique reduces the space occupied by the circuits with minimum heat generation as well as wire length than the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multicore processors that support multithreading techniques have many advantages, including processors' utilization, responsiveness, resource sharing, and economical usage of threads. Thus, to have these advantages, programming languages must support multithreading programming. Unfortunately, this technique is not compatible with old programs since most of the old program codes have been prepared sequentially. Inevitably, this posed a challenge when attempts were made to convert old sequential codes into multithreading codes. Despite the existence of several approaches of multithreading, differences do exist in their overhead, efficiency, and speedup, thereby underpinning the need for further optimization. Thus, a chemical reaction optimizer demonstrates the efficacy of its optimization in several problems. Against this backdrop, this paper presents a chemical reaction optimizer for the multithreading scheduling (CROTS) technique that generates multithreaded code while considering a sequential one. CROTS technique has been evaluated using several performance metrics, such as the number of steps, execution time, speedup, efficiency, cost, and percentage of error. Experimental results show that the maximum speedup achieved by CROTS is 11.98 upon the usage of 32 threads, with an average percentage of error being 14.56% in regard to the comparison between experimental and analytical cost results. Furthermore, after comparing CROTS with intermediate representation based on diKernel (KIR), it has been established that it can accommodate more threads and attain greater speedup. For example, the experiments show that when applying both approaches CROTS and KIR using 32 threads on dataset M7000, CROTS attains a speedup of 11.71, that is, about tripled the speedup achieved by KIR, which is 3.77. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a Joint set-up procedure for tuning metaheuristic algorithms' parameters is proposed. The approach is applied to a genetic algorithm (GA) and tested further on the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm. The joint influence of parameters (the crossover and mutation probabilities for GA and the number of population and limit for ABC) on the performance of the algorithms is investigated. As a case study, a model parameter identification of an E. coli fed-batch cultivation process is considered. E. coli is one of the most commonly used bacteria for producing medical substances in the pharmaceutical industry. The development of an effective model of a fed-batch cultivation process is very important. The processes in a bioreactor are usually described by a system of parametric nonlinear differential equations. The model parameter identification is a difficult optimization problem, which cannot be solved by applying traditional numerical methods. Feasibilities of GA and ABC for a model parameter identification of a nonlinear fed-batch cultivation process based on real experimental data are presented. The application of the proposed Joint set-up approach leads to a significant improvement in the performance of GA and ABC. As a result, a reasonable enhancement of the E. coli cultivation model accuracy is achieved. The main advantage of the tuning procedure, which searches an optimal set of values of GA and ABC control parameters, focusing on promising intervals of variation of the parameter values and refining their ranges, is that the computational efforts are reduced by more than 60% for the ABC algorithm and more than 90% for GA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hazardous wastes' volume produced by human activities has increased in recent years. Consequently, associated risks involved in the treatment, recycling, disposing, and transportation of these hazardous materials have become more attractive for the researchers. In this study, we propose a new model for hazardous waste location routing problem. Appending the service time window and workload balance to the previous mathematical models can be taken into account as the major contributions of this study. Three objective functions including two systematic goals (cost and risk) and one social goal (workload balancing) have been considered for the model. Compatibility between wastes and a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles, which are rarely investigated in the literature, is discussed in this paper. Since the proposed model is classified as a multi-objective model, three multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, namely Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II), Pareto Envelope-based Selection Algorithm II (PESA-II), and Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm II (SPEA-II) are employed. As two other innovations, an adaptive penalty function is developed and the PESA-II is modified by removing replicated solutions from its archive and their obtained results are discussed. Finally, by experimenting a number of test problems in different sizes, it is demonstrated that proposed modified PESA-II and SPEA-II perform better than NSGA-II in most of comparison metrics including feasible answers exploration, CPU time, spacing metric, inverted generational distance, quality metric, etc., whereas, NSGA-II creates more spread Pareto frontiers which are suitable for decision-maker to choose, from among a range of different options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimisers for multi- or many-objective optimisation problems can be categorised as scalarisation and meta-heuristic approaches. Many of the approaches from both groups require to use a set of weighting vectors, which are expected to be as evenly distributed as possible. The current practice employs the normal-boundary intersection (NBI) method which has one disadvantage in that the number of sampling points must be the number of k-combination. This work proposes a numerical scheme called clustering-based hyperplane sampling (CBHS) to deal with such a weak point. The method is based on random sampling on a hyperplane and clustering. The classical NBI method and some of its extended versions are used to examine the performance of the proposed algorithm. The comparative results reveal that CBHS is the best performer with using longer computing time. Moreover, its real advantage is the capability of generating a set of weighting vectors with any sample size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evolutionary computations algorithms effectively deal with high-dimensional big data by performing dimensionality reduction and can be effectively used during image pre-processing in medical imaging, remote sensing, and other domains for parameter optimizations during segmentation, clustering, etc. This special issue is aimed at exploring soft computing techniques specially metaheuristic algorithms for high-dimensional data analytics, optimization and development of intelligent systems for prediction and decision making. Moreover, high-dimensional datasets tend to be in unstructured form and contain noise and uncertainties which further adds up to the challenges of big data analysis. [Extracted from the article]

Research that focuses on the performance improvement of metaheuristics is important to gain understanding on the characteristic of specific algorithm. Better understanding of metaheuristics method will bring benefit when it comes to implement the methods to solve real problems. This paper studies the effect of local information sharing on the performance of soccer game optimization with suitable control parameter settings. A novel method, called soccer game optimization with local information sharing (SGOLS), has been proposed in this paper. The method implements local information derived from several nearby players to conduct move forward. Therefore, the move forward will consider the position of the ball dribbler, the previous best player position as well as the position of players nearby. The proposed method is evaluated based on 20 unconstraint continuous problems, consisting of unimodal function and multimodal functions, and compared to SGO, PSO and DE. The experiment result reveals that the local information sharing could enhance intensification search in SGOLS. The proposed methods perform better in high-dimensionality problems than SGO, PSO and DE. However, the use of local information consumes more computational times than the SGO and PSO, but it is still faster than DE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the methods for solving optimization problems is applying metaheuristic algorithms that find near to optimal solutions. Dragonfly algorithm is one of the metaheuristic algorithms which search problem space by the inspiration of hunting and emigration behavior of dragonflies in nature. However, it suffers from the premature convergence of the population to an undesirable point in the detection ability (global search). In this research, an improved dragonfly algorithm called BMDA (applying Biogeography-based algorithm, Mexican hat wavelet, and Dragonfly algorithm) is presented to resolve the premature convergence in high workloads by creating a mutation phase based on the combination of the biogeography-based optimization (BBO) migration process and the Mexican hat wavelet transform in dragonfly algorithm (DA). The algorithm was evaluated for the mean error in comparison with standard dragonfly algorithm (DA), Memory-based Hybrid Dragonfly Algorithm (MHDA), chaotic dragonfly algorithm version 9 (CDA9), Adaptive_DA algorithm, bat algorithm (BAT), particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO), raven roosting optimization (RRO) and whale optimization algorithm (WOA) using the CEC2017 benchmark functions. The implementation results of the proposed BMDA algorithm applying different benchmark functions outweighed the DA-based algorithm, MHDA algorithm, CDA9 algorithm, Adaptive_DA algorithm, BAT algorithm, PSO algorithm, RRO, and WOA algorithms in terms of mean error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing delivers practical solutions for long-term image archiving systems. Cloud data centers consume enormous amounts of electrical energy that increases their operational costs. This shows the importance of investing on energy consumption techniques. Dynamic placement of virtual machines to appropriate physical nodes using metaheuristic algorithms is among the methods of reducing energy consumption. In metaheuristic algorithms, there should be a balance between both exploration and exploitation aspects so that they can find better solutions in a search space. Exploration means looking for a solution in a wider area, while exploitation is producing new solutions from existence ones. Artificial bee colony optimization, which is a biological metaheuristic algorithm, is a sign-oriented approach. It has a strong exploration ability, but a relatively weaker exploitation power. On the other hand, tabu search is a popular algorithm that shows better exploitation in comparison with ABC. In this study, cloud computing environments are detailed with an allocation protocol for efficient energy and resource management. The technique of energy-aware allocation splits data centers (DCs) resources among client applications end routes to enhance energy efficacy of DCs and also achieves anticipated quality of service (QoS) for everyone. Heuristic protocols are exercised for optimizing the distribution of resources to upgrade the efficiency of DC. In the current paper, energy-aware resources allotment technique is employed and optimized in clouds via a new approach called Tabu Job Master (JM). Tabu JM claims the benefits of some variables and also rapid convergence speeds. Results are duly achieved for energy consumption—the count of virtual machines (VMs) migration and also makespan. The results shown by Tabu JM are benchmarked by using genetic algorithm (GA), artificial bee colony (ABC), ABC with crossover and technique of mutation, the basic tabu search techniques, and Tabu Job Master. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new hybrid method for training high-order Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy systems using sparse regressions and metaheuristic optimization. The fuzzy system is considered with Gaussian fuzzy sets in the antecedents and high-order polynomials in the consequents of fuzzy rules. The fuzzy sets can be chosen manually or determined by a metaheuristic optimization method (particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithm or simulated annealing), while the polynomials are obtained using ordinary least squares, ridge regression or sparse regressions (forward selection, least angle regression, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, and elastic net regression). A quality criterion is proposed that expresses a compromise between the prediction ability of the fuzzy model and its sparsity. The conducted experiments showed that: (a) the use of sparse regressions and/or metaheuristic optimization can reduce the validation error compared with the reference method, and (b) the use of sparse regressions may simplify the fuzzy model by zeroing some of the coefficients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive radio networks have been gaining widespread attraction among researchers especially with the increasing demand for radio frequency spectrum whose availability is quite scarce. Cognitive radio networks provide an ideal solution to allocate spectrum to users on an intelligent basis through a series of spectrum sensing and decision making. A metaheuristic soft computing framework is proposed and implemented in this research work by using powerful optimization concepts of evolutionary algorithm, namely ant colony algorithm, coupled with graph-cut modeling of given wireless network to provide the expected precision of detection. Channel characteristics have been taken as the feature vectors which are modeled as n-tuple graph to decide upon the maximization of channel allocation probability based on availability in an opportunistic basis. Exhaustive experimentations have been conducted and optimal performance justified against other benchmark algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classification accuracy of a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) depends on the selection of relevant features from the data set, its architecture, connection weights and the transfer functions. Generating an optimal value of all these parameters together is a complex task. Metaheuristic algorithms are popular choice among researchers to solve complex optimization problems. This paper presents a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm simple matching-grasshopper new cat swarm optimization algorithm (SM-GNCSOA) that optimizes all the four components simultaneously. SM-GNCSOA uses grasshopper optimization algorithm, a new variant of binary grasshopper optimization algorithm called simple matching-binary grasshopper optimization algorithm and a new variant of cat swarm optimization algorithm called new cat swarm optimization algorithm to generate an optimal MLP. Features play a vital role in determining the classification accuracy of a classifier. Here, we propose a new feature penalty function and use it in SM-GNCSOA to prevent underfitting or overfitting due to the selected number of features. To evaluate the performance of SM-GNCSOA, different variants of SM-GNCSOA are proposed and their classification accuracies are compared with SM-GNCSOA on ten classification data sets. The results show that SM-GNCSOA gives better results on most of the data sets due to its capability to balance exploration and exploitation and to avoid local minima. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) is a new type of metaheuristic and has shown superiority over other well-known algorithms such as Particle Swarm Optimization and Grey Wolf Optimizer in solving challenging optimization problems. Despite its superior performance, SSA still has problems such as insufficient convergence speed. Moreover, its local optima avoidance ability is not as good as those evolutionary algorithms using crossover operators. In this paper, we propose a modified Salp Swarm Algorithm (m-SSA) which improves the exploitation and exploration of SSA by integrating random walk strategy and especially enhances exploration by adding a new controlling parameter. In addition, a simulated annealing-type acceptance criterion is adopted to accept the fittest follower position as the new best leader position. The performance of the proposed algorithm is benchmarked on a set of classical functions and CEC2014 test suite. The proposed algorithm (m-SSA) outperforms SSA significantly on most test functions. When compared with other state-of-the-art metaheuristics, it also presents very competitive results. Besides, we apply the proposed algorithm on training feedforward neural networks (FNNs) and the results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of m-SSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nature has been considered as an inspiration of several recent meta-heuristic algorithms. This paper firstly studies and mimics the behavior of Scottish red deer in order to develop a new nature-inspired algorithm. The main inspiration of this meta-heuristic algorithm is to originate from an unusual mating behavior of Scottish red deer in a breading season. Similar to other population-based meta-heuristics, the red deer algorithm (RDA) starts with an initial population called red deers (RDs). They are divided into two types: hinds and male RDs. Besides, a harem is a group of female RDs. The general steps of this evolutionary algorithm are considered by the competition of male RDs to get the harem with more hinds via roaring and fighting behaviors. By solving 12 benchmark functions and important engineering as well as multi-objective optimization problems, the superiority of the proposed RDA shows in comparison with other well-known and recent meta-heuristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differential evolution (DE) is a population-based metaheuristic algorithm that has been proved powerful in solving a wide range of real-parameter optimization tasks. However, the selection of the mutation strategy and control parameters in DE is problem dependent, and inappropriate specification of them will lead to poor performance of the algorithm such as slow convergence and early stagnation in a local optimum. This paper proposes a new method termed as Joint Adaptation of Parameters in DE (JAPDE). The key idea lies in dynamically updating the selection probabilities for a complete set of pairs of parameter generating functions based on feedback information acquired during the search by DE. Further, for mutation strategy adaptation, the Rank-Based Adaptation (RAM) method is utilized to facilitate the learning of multiple probability distributions, each of which corresponds to an interval of fitness ranks of individuals in the population. The coupling of RAM with JAPDE results in the new RAM-JAPDE algorithm that enables simultaneous adaptation of the selection probabilities for pairs of control parameters and mutation strategies in DE. The merit of RAM-JAPDE has been evaluated on the benchmark test suit proposed in CEC2014 in comparison to many well-known DE algorithms. The results of experiments demonstrate that the proposed RAM-JAPDE algorithm outperforms or is competitive to the other related DE variants that perform mutation strategy and control parameter adaptation, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imaging modalities play a major role in early detection and diagnosis of various medical conditions related to the patient. Retinal image segmentation has been taken up for investigation in this research paper to efficiently detect the presence of eye disorder which could be indicators of major onset of conditions like hypertension, cataracts, diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular disorders, etc. A machine learning method for classification of given pixels in the search space into regions containing blood vessels and those that do not contain blood vessels is implemented using a three-stage neural classifier in this paper. Prior to classification, an optimization algorithm namely ant colony optimization derived from nature-inspired phenomena is used to provide an optimal feature vector set to set high standards for the neural network based classification approach. The novelty and merits of the paper lie in back tracing of the segmentation process in which optimization is done first on the preprocessed features followed by classification for segmented output on the optimized features. This results in elimination of redundant feature vectors which tend to occupy much memory as well increase the computational overhead on the process. The entire implemented system is automated by the machine learning process and tested on 30 samples, 15 each on DRIVE and STARE databases. Classification rates of nearly 98% on an average scenario have been achieved for segmentation and 96.5% for abnormality detection. The performances have been compared against Bayesian set models and standalone ANN models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the outstanding effectiveness and efficiency performance in different fields such as image processing and energy dispatching, the virus optimization algorithm (VOA), a newly developed metaheuristic for general optimization purposes, has been further improved. Similar to other metaheuristic methods, VOA performance to some degree relies on proper parameter settings, which may require large numbers of experiments to determine. Therefore, this study proposes a self-adaptive version of VOA (SaVOA) to decrease the number of controllable parameters in the algorithm and thus reduce the time needed to determine proper parameter values by any sort of experimental design process. Having an SaVOA ensures the ease access of the algorithm for different types of continuous domain problems, whereas previous different optimization problems may have needed different parameter settings. To perform the comparison, SaVOA is tested by optimizing the same set of benchmark functions used when proposing the original VOA. Computational results indicate some major advances were achieved by the SaVOA in addition to competitive results obtained. Most importantly, SaVOA proved its superiority on functions where the original VOA was not powerful enough to perform well, such as Rosenbrock, Schwefel, Drop Wave, Levy, and Easom's functions. In terms of implementation, the number of controllable parameters in SaVOA was greatly reduced to only one—the stopping criterion. This promises a significant improvement in the utility of SaVOA for any type of continuous domain optimization problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the recent years, the optimization problems show that they are a big challenge for engineering regarding the fast growth of new nature-inspired optimization algorithms. Therefore, this paper presents a novel nature-inspired meta-heuristic algorithm for optimization which is called as bear smell search algorithm (BSSA) that takes into account the powerful global and local search operators. The proposed algorithm imitates both dynamic behaviors of bear based on sense of smell mechanism and the way bear moves in the search of food in thousand miles farther. Among all animals, bears have inconceivable sense of smell due to their huge olfactory bulbs that manage the sense of different odors. Since the olfactory bulb is a neural model of the vertebrate forebrain, it can make a strong exploration and exploitation for optimization. According to the odors value, bear moves the next location. Therefore, this paper mathematically models these structures. To demonstrate and evaluate the BSSA ability, numerous types of benchmark functions and four engineering problems are employed to compare the obtained results of BSSA with other available optimization methods with several analyzed indices such as pair-wise test, Wilcoxon rank and statistical analysis. The numerical results revealed that proposed BSSA presents competitive and greater results compared to other optimization algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The low-resolution imagery of satellite is used extensively for monitoring crops and forecasting of yield which has a major role to play in the operational systems. A combination of high levels of temporal frequency along with an extended coverage was connected with lower costs per each area unit making the images a choice that is convenient at the national level and the regional level scales. There are various quantitative and qualitative approaches for low-resolution satellite imagery to be used for the primary predictor of the final yield of crops. But, very little work is done on the yield prediction that is based on environmental and satellite data. To handle such satellite images may be very challenging owing to large data amounts. Big data analysis is efficient in handling a large amount of data generated for predicting agricultural yield. In this work, a neural network is used for prediction and to enhance its performance; a population-based incremental learning technique is proposed for optimizing the weights. The results of the experiment proved that the method proposed has better results compared to that of the other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligent video analytics for pedestrian detection plays a vital role for enhanced and effective surveillance system. Since smart city projects are gaining momentum in most of the countries nowadays, enhanced pedestrian detection plays a vital role in the field of security and surveillance. Various classification models were in existence for detecting the pedestrians which suffers from variety of challenges like illumination, pedestrian outfits, gestures, occlusion, lighting, etc., that affects the accuracy of detection. A strong feature vector describing the pedestrian is developed to enhance the accuracy of detection. In this paper, a novel hybrid metaheuristic pedestrian detection (HMPD) approach is proposed to enhance the accuracy of the classifier. HMPD extracts the working principles of support vector machine and genetic algorithm. The proposed model is trained using a set of human and non-human images. The accuracy of the proposed model is tested with benchmarking video data available at VISOR repository. The result clearly shows that HMPD approach produces the maximum accuracy than any traditional approaches. HMPD approach can further be applied in other domains for enhanced security and surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of this paper is to outline a new approach to represent the randomness that we can find in different metaheuristics as a stochastic process which helps in the performance of the analyzed metaheuristic. This new way of viewing randomness is based on the behavior of sine waves that we can find in many situations in nature or in physics laws. In this paper, we evaluate this proposed randomness with three metaheuristics: the grey wolf optimizer, firefly algorithm and flower pollination algorithm, with the goal of studying the performance of the proposed randomness method in different types of metaheuristics. A set of standard benchmark functions were used to test the proposed randomness method, which are classified as unimodal and multimodal benchmark functions. In addition, the benchmark functions of the CEC 2015 Competition are used. Finally, we present tests with functions that were presented in the CEC 2017 competition for constrained real-parameter optimization. We also present a comparative study of the analyzed metaheuristics, and this comparison is between their original randomness method and the proposed randomness method for each algorithm. Finally, we present the performance and results of the methods with different number of dimensions to complete the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last 3 decades, metaheuristic algorithms have received more popularity because of their superior performance to solve large and complex optimization problems. Most of these algorithms are inspired by biological phenomena, social behavior of animals, science and art. Among these four sources, the last one is utilized only by one algorithm. In this paper, we propose another novel art-inspired population-based metaheuristic, called color harmony algorithm (CHA), for solving the global optimization problems. The proposed method models its search behavior through combining harmonic colors based on their relative positions around the hue circle in the Munsell color system and harmonic templates. We utilize simultaneously four different fitness information to construct the hue groups, which improve search ability of the algorithm. CHA has two different phases including the concentration phase and the dispersion phase which are employed to explore and exploit the search space. The performance of the proposed method has been examined using several benchmark test functions commonly used in the literature. To show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, the results are compared with those obtained using ten well-known metaheuristic algorithms. Also, the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test is conducted to measure the pair-wise statistical performances of the algorithms. The results indicate that besides the simplicity of the proposed algorithm, CHA can outperform the other considered algorithms in terms of the convergence speed and the number of function evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]