Implications of war on the food, beverage, and tobacco industry in South Korea.

The Food, Beverage & Tobacco (F&B) industry is an essential sector in the competitive economy. Procurement of production factors mainly depends on sales forecasting and the supply chain of raw materials. However, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has jeopardized the global supply chain. As the conflict worsened, the world faced a food crisis, which was already a significant challenge due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Understanding how conflict-related disruptions in global food markets might affect the stock return of the F&B industry of South Korea, this study forecasts the stock returns on the KOSDAQ F&B sector. This paper highlights that the conflict resulted in immediate and far-reaching consequences on the global food supply chain and future crop harvesting in South Korea. As numerous algorithms have been widely used in predicting stock market returns, we use Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model for the prediction. Using daily returns from the KOSDAQ F&B industry from January 1999 to October 2022, the study proposes an ARIMA (2,2,3) model to forecast future movements of the stock returns. With an RMSE of 0.012, the prediction performance holds good using the ARIMA model. The results show a negative trend observed in the F&B sector returns for a few months, implying that sector stock returns decline as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine becomes more pronounced. This study also suggests that South Korea has massive scope to stabilize the demand for healthy, safe food, give more attention to domestic agribusiness, and make itself a self-sufficient agri-economy.

Predicting death risk analysis in fully vaccinated people using novel extreme regression-voting classifier.

Vaccination for the COVID-19 pandemic has raised serious concerns among the public and various rumours are spread regarding the resulting illness, adverse reactions, and death. Such rumours can damage the campaign against the COVID-19 and should be dealt with accordingly. One prospective solution is to use machine learning-based models to predict the death risk for vaccinated people by utilizing the available data. This study focuses on the prognosis of three significant events including 'not survived', 'recovered', and 'not recovered' based on the adverse events followed by the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Extensive experiments are performed to analyse the efficacy of the proposed Extreme Regression- Voting Classifier model in comparison with machine learning models with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency, Bag of Words, and Global Vectors, and deep learning models like Convolutional Neural Network, Long Short Term Memory, and Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory. Experiments are carried out on the original, as well as, a balanced dataset using Synthetic Minority Oversampling Approach. Results reveal that the proposed voting classifier in combination with TF-IDF outperforms with a 0.85 accuracy score on the SMOTE-balanced dataset. In line with this, the validation of the proposed voting classifier on binary classification shows state-of-the-art results with a 0.98 accuracy.

Novel extreme regression-voting classifier to predict death risk in vaccinated people using VAERS data.

COVID-19 vaccination raised serious concerns among the public and people are mind stuck by various rumors regarding the resulting illness, adverse reactions, and death. Such rumors are dangerous to the campaign against the COVID-19 and should be dealt with accordingly and timely. One prospective solution is to use machine learning-based models to predict the death risk for vaccinated people and clarify people's perceptions regarding death risk. This study focuses on the prediction of the death risks associated with vaccinated people followed by a second dose for two reasons; first to build consensus among people to get the vaccines; second, to reduce the fear regarding vaccines. Given that, this study utilizes the COVID-19 VAERS dataset that records adverse events after COVID-19 vaccination as 'recovered', 'not recovered', and 'survived'. To obtain better prediction results, a novel voting classifier extreme regression-voting classifier (ER-VC) is introduced. ER-VC ensembles extra tree classifier and logistic regression using soft voting criterion. To avoid model overfitting and get better results, two data balancing techniques synthetic minority oversampling (SMOTE) and adaptive synthetic sampling (ADASYN) have been applied. Moreover, three feature extraction techniques term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), bag of words (BoW), and global vectors (GloVe) have been used for comparison. Both machine learning and deep learning models are deployed for experiments. Results obtained from extensive experiments reveal that the proposed model in combination with TF-TDF has shown robust results with a 0.85 accuracy when trained on the SMOTE-balanced dataset. In line with this, validation of the proposed voting classifier on binary classification shows state-of-the-art results with a 0.98 accuracy. Results show that machine learning models can predict the death risk with high accuracy and can assist the authors in taking timely measures.

COVINet: a convolutional neural network approach for predicting COVID-19 from chest X-ray images.

COVID-19 pandemic is widely spreading over the entire world and has established significant community spread. Fostering a prediction system can help prepare the officials to respond properly and quickly. Medical imaging like X-ray and computed tomography (CT) can play an important role in the early prediction of COVID-19 patients that will help the timely treatment of the patients. The x-ray images from COVID-19 patients reveal the pneumonia infections that can be used to identify the patients of COVID-19. This study presents the use of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that extracts the features from chest x-ray images for the prediction. Three filters are applied to get the edges from the images that help to get the desired segmented target with the infected area of the x-ray. To cope with the smaller size of the training dataset, Keras' ImageDataGenerator class is used to generate ten thousand augmented images. Classification is performed with two, three, and four classes where the four-class problem has X-ray images from COVID-19, normal people, virus pneumonia, and bacterial pneumonia. Results demonstrate that the proposed CNN model can predict COVID-19 patients with high accuracy. It can help automate screening of the patients for COVID-19 with minimal contact, especially areas where the influx of patients can not be treated by the available medical staff. The performance comparison of the proposed approach with VGG16 and AlexNet shows that classification results for two and four classes are competitive and identical for three-class classification.

COVID-19 Future Forecasting Using Supervised Machine Learning Models

Machine learning (ML) based forecasting mechanisms have proved their significance to anticipate in perioperative outcomes to improve the decision making on the future course of actions. The ML models have long been used in many application domains which needed the identification and prioritization of adverse factors for a threat. Several prediction methods are being popularly used to handle forecasting problems. This study demonstrates the capability of ML models to forecast the number of upcoming patients affected by COVID-19 which is presently considered as a potential threat to mankind. In particular, four standard forecasting models, such as linear regression (LR), least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), support vector machine (SVM), and exponential smoothing (ES) have been used in this study to forecast the threatening factors of COVID-19. Three types of predictions are made by each of the models, such as the number of newly infected cases, the number of deaths, and the number of recoveries in the next 10 days. The results produced by the study proves it a promising mechanism to use these methods for the current scenario of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results prove that the ES performs best among all the used models followed by LR and LASSO which performs well in forecasting the new confirmed cases, death rate as well as recovery rate, while SVM performs poorly in all the prediction scenarios given the available dataset.