A Hybrid Multitask Learning Framework with a Fire Hawk Optimizer for Arabic Fake News Detection

The exponential spread of news and posts related to the COVID-19 pandemic on social media platforms led to the emergence of the disinformation phenomenon. The phenomenon of spreading fake information and news creates significant concern for the public health and safety of the population. In this paper, we propose a disinformation detection framework based on multi-task learning (MTL) and meta-heuristic algorithms in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The developed framework uses an MTL and a pre-trained transformer-based model to learn and extract contextual feature representations from Arabic social media posts. The extracted contextual representations are fed to an alternative feature selection technique which depends on modified version of the Fire Hawk Optimizer. The proposed framework, which aims to improve the disinformation detection rate, was evaluated on several datasets of Arabic social media posts. The experimental results show that the proposed framework can achieve accuracy of 59%. It obtained, at best, precision, recall, and F-measure of 53%, 71%, and 53%, respectively, on all datasets;and it outperformed the other algorithms in all measures.

Boosting COVID-19 Image Classification Using MobileNetV3 and Aquila Optimizer Algorithm.

Currently, the world is still facing a COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) classified as a highly infectious disease due to its rapid spreading. The shortage of X-ray machines may lead to critical situations and delay the diagnosis results, increasing the number of deaths. Therefore, the exploitation of deep learning (DL) and optimization algorithms can be advantageous in early diagnosis and COVID-19 detection. In this paper, we propose a framework for COVID-19 images classification using hybridization of DL and swarm-based algorithms. The MobileNetV3 is used as a backbone feature extraction to learn and extract relevant image representations as a DL model. As a swarm-based algorithm, the Aquila Optimizer (Aqu) is used as a feature selector to reduce the dimensionality of the image representations and improve the classification accuracy using only the most essential selected features. To validate the proposed framework, two datasets with X-ray and CT COVID-19 images are used. The obtained results from the experiments show a good performance of the proposed framework in terms of classification accuracy and dimensionality reduction during the feature extraction and selection phases. The Aqu feature selection algorithm achieves accuracy better than other methods in terms of performance metrics.

A biological sub-sequences detection using integrated BA-PSO based on infection propagation mechanism: Case study COVID-19.

The longest common consecutive subsequences (LCCS) play a vital role in revealing the biological relationships between DNA/RNA sequences especially the newly discovered ones such as COVID-19. FLAT is a Fragmented local aligner technique which is an accelerated version of the local pairwise sequence alignment algorithm based on meta-heuristic algorithms. The performance of FLAT needs to be enhanced since the huge length of biological sequences leads to trapping in local optima. This paper introduces a modified version of FLAT based on improving the performance of the BA algorithm by integration with particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm based on a novel infection mechanism. The proposed algorithm, named BPINF, depends on finding the best-explored solution using BA operators which can infect the agents during the exploitation phase using PSO operators to move toward it instead of moving toward the best-exploited solution. Hence, moving the solutions toward the two best solutions increase the diversity of generated solutions and avoids trapping in local optima. The infection can be propagated through the agents where each infected agent can transfer the infection to other non-infected agents which enhances the diversification of generated solutions. FLAT using the proposed technique (BPINF) was validated to detect LCCS between a set of real biological sequences with huge lengths besides COVID-19 and other well-known viruses. The performance of BPINF was compared to the enhanced versions of BA in the literature and the relevant studies of FLAT. It has a preponderance to find the LCCS with the highest percentage (88%) which is better than other state-of-the-art methods.

Automatic clustering method to segment COVID-19 CT images.

Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has infected more than ten million persons worldwide. Therefore, researchers are trying to address various aspects that may help in diagnosis this pneumonia. Image segmentation is a necessary pr-processing step that implemented in image analysis and classification applications. Therefore, in this study, our goal is to present an efficient image segmentation method for COVID-19 Computed Tomography (CT) images. The proposed image segmentation method depends on improving the density peaks clustering (DPC) using generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution. The DPC is faster than other clustering methods, and it provides more stable results. However, it is difficult to determine the optimal number of clustering centers automatically without visualization. So, GEV is used to determine the suitable threshold value to find the optimal number of clustering centers that lead to improving the segmentation process. The proposed model is applied for a set of twelve COVID-19 CT images. Also, it was compared with traditional k-means and DPC algorithms, and it has better performance using several measures, such as PSNR, SSIM, and Entropy.

Improved ANFIS model for forecasting Wuhan City Air Quality and analysis COVID-19 lockdown impacts on air quality.

In this study, we propose an improved version of the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) for forecasting the air quality index in Wuhan City, China. We propose a hybrid optimization method to improve ANFIS performance, called PSOSMA, using a new modified meta-heuristics (MH) algorithm, Slime mould algorithm (SMA), which is improved by using the particle swarm optimizer (PSO). The proposed PSOSMA-ANFIS has been trained with air quality index time series data of three years and has been applied to forecast the fine particulate matter (PM2.5), sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbon dioxide (CO2), and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) for one year. We also compared the proposed PSOSMA to other MH algorithms used to train ANFIS. We found that the modified ANFIS using PSOSMA achieved better performance than compared algorithms. Moreover, we analyzed the impacts of the lockdown of Wuhan City on the concentrations of PM2.5, NO2, CO2, and SO2. We compared the correspondence period with previous years, and we concluded that there are significant decreases in the concentrations of PM2.5, CO2, SO2, and NO2.

COVID-19 X-ray images classification based on enhanced fractional-order cuckoo search optimizer using heavy-tailed distributions.

Classification of COVID-19 X-ray images to determine the patient's health condition is a critical issue these days since X-ray images provide more information about the patient's lung status. To determine the COVID-19 case from other normal and abnormal cases, this work proposes an alternative method that extracted the informative features from X-ray images, leveraging on a new feature selection method to determine the relevant features. As such, an enhanced cuckoo search optimization algorithm (CS) is proposed using fractional-order calculus (FO) and four different heavy-tailed distributions in place of the Lévy flight to strengthen the algorithm performance during dealing with COVID-19 multi-class classification optimization task. The classification process includes three classes, called normal patients, COVID-19 infected patients, and pneumonia patients. The distributions used are Mittag-Leffler distribution, Cauchy distribution, Pareto distribution, and Weibull distribution. The proposed FO-CS variants have been validated with eighteen UCI data-sets as the first series of experiments. For the second series of experiments, two data-sets for COVID-19 X-ray images are considered. The proposed approach results have been compared with well-regarded optimization algorithms. The outcomes assess the superiority of the proposed approach for providing accurate results for UCI and COVID-19 data-sets with remarkable improvements in the convergence curves, especially with applying Weibull distribution instead of Lévy flight.

Marine Predators Algorithm for Forecasting Confirmed Cases of COVID-19 in Italy, USA, Iran and Korea.

The current pandemic of the new coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), or COVID-19, has received wide attention by scholars and researchers. The vast increase in infected people is a significant challenge for each country and the international community in general. The prediction and forecasting of the number of infected people (so-called confirmed cases) is a critical issue that helps in understanding the fast spread of COVID-19. Therefore, in this article, we present an improved version of the ANFIS (adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system) model to forecast the number of infected people in four countries, Italy, Iran, Korea, and the USA. The improved version of ANFIS is based on a new nature-inspired optimizer, called the marine predators algorithm (MPA). The MPA is utilized to optimize the ANFIS parameters, enhancing its forecasting performance. Official datasets of the four countries are used to evaluate the proposed MPA-ANFIS. Moreover, we compare MPA-ANFIS to several previous methods to evaluate its forecasting performance. Overall, the outcomes show that MPA-ANFIS outperforms all compared methods in almost all performance measures, such as Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Root Mean Squared Relative Error (RMSRE), and Coefficient of Determination( R 2 ). For instance, according to the results of the testing set, the R 2 of the proposed model is 96.48%, 98.59%, 98.74%, and 95.95% for Korea, Italy, Iran, and the USA, respectively. More so, the MAE is 60.31, 3951.94, 217.27, and 12,979, for Korea, Italy, Iran, and the USA, respectively.