Improved method for COVID-19 Classification of Complex-Architecture CNN from Chest CT volumes using Orthogonal Ensemble Networks

This paper introduces the improved method for the COVID-19 classification based on computed tomography (CT) volumes using a combination of a complex-architecture convolutional neural network (CNN) and orthogonal ensemble networks (OEN). The novel coronavirus disease reported in 2019 (COVID-19) is still spreading worldwide. Early and accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 is required in such a situation, and the CT scan is an essential examination. Various computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) methods have been developed to assist and accelerate doctors' diagnoses. Although one of the effective methods is ensemble learning, existing methods combine some major models which do not specialize in COVID-19. In this study, we attempted to improve the performance of a CNN for the COVID-19 classification based on chest CT volumes. The CNN model specializes in feature extraction from anisotropic chest CT volumes. We adopt the OEN, an ensemble learning method considering inter-model diversity, to boost its feature extraction ability. For the experiment, We used chest CT volumes of 1283 cases acquired in multiple medical institutions in Japan. The classification result on 257 test cases indicated that the combination could improve the classification performance. © 2023 SPIE.

Fake News Detection Using Transformer and Ensemble Learning Models

On social media, misinformation can spread quickly, posing serious problems. Understanding the content and sensitive nature of fake news and misinformation is critical to prevent the damage caused by them. To this end, the characteristics of information must first be discerned. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based hybrid ensemble model to detect misinformation on the Internet. First, false and true news on Covid-19 were analyzed, and various text classification tasks were performed to understand their content. The results were utilized in the proposed hybrid ensemble learning model. Our analysis revealed promising results, establishing the capability of the proposed system to detect misinformation on social media. The final model exhibited an excellent F1 score (0.98) and accuracy (0.97). The AUC (Area Under The Curve) score was also high at 0.98, and the ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristics) curve revealed that the true-positive rate of the data was close to one in this model. Thus, the proposed hybrid model was demonstrated to be successful in recognizing false information online. © 2022 IEEE.

CovidXNet: An Ensemble of Deep Neural Networks for Non-invasive Binary Identification of COVID-19 through Chest Radiographs

This study compared five different image classification algorithms, namely VGG16, VGG19, AlexNet, DenseNet, and ConVNext, based on their ability to detect and classify COVID-19-related cases given chest X-ray images. Using performance metrics like accuracy, F1 score, precision, recall, and MCC compared these intelligent classification algorithms. Upon testing these algorithms, the accuracy for each model was quite unsatisfactory, ranging from 80.00% to 92.50%, provided it is for medical application. As such, an ensemble learning-based image classification model, made up of AlexNet and VGG19 called CovidXNet, was proposed to detect COVID-19 through chest X-ray images discriminating between health and pneumonic lung images. CovidXNet achieved an accuracy of 97.00%, which was significantly better considering past results. Further studies may be conducted to increase the accuracy, particularly for identifying and classifying chest radiographs for COVID-19-related cases, since the current model may still provide false negatives, which may be detrimental to the prevention of the spread of the virus. © 2022 IEEE.

Ensemble Deep Learning Framework for Situational Aspects-Based Annotation and Classification of International Student's Tweets during COVID-19

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, social media plat-forms became an essential source of information and communication for many. International students, particularly, turned to Twitter to express their struggles and hardships during this difficult time. To better understand the sentiments and experiences of these international students, we developed the Situational Aspect-Based Annotation and Classification (SABAC) text mining framework. This framework uses a three-layer approach, combining baseline Deep Learning (DL) models with Machine Learning (ML) models as meta-classifiers to accurately predict the sentiments and aspects expressed in tweets from our collected Student-COVID-19 dataset. Using the pro-posed aspect2class annotation algorithm, we labeled bulk unlabeled tweets according to their contained aspect terms. However, we also recognized the challenges of reducing data's high dimensionality and sparsity to improve performance and annotation on unlabeled datasets. To address this issue, we proposed the Volatile Stopwords Filtering (VSF) technique to reduce sparsity and enhance classifier performance. The resulting Student-COVID Twitter dataset achieved a sophisticated accuracy of 93.21% when using the random forest as a meta-classifier. Through testing on three benchmark datasets, we found that the SABAC ensemble framework performed exceptionally well. Our findings showed that international students during the pandemic faced various issues, including stress, uncertainty, health concerns, financial stress, and difficulties with online classes and returning to school. By analyzing and summarizing these annotated tweets, decision-makers can better understand and address the real-time problems international students face during the ongoing pandemic.

Prediction of Dropout Students in Massive Open Online Courses Using Ensemble Learning: A Pilot Study in Post-COVID Academic Session

High dropout rate is a critical problem in MOOCs. The prime objective of this study is to identify possible dropout students at the early stage of the course and reducing the number of dropouts providing proper feedback to address the relevant factor. A prediction model based on stacking ensemble machine learning is proposed to identify whether a learner is at risk of dropping a course. The proposed stacked ensemble model outperformed with an accuracy of 93.4% compared to other popular machine learning classifiers. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Diagnosis of COVID-19 Using Chest X-ray Images and Disease Symptoms Based on Stacking Ensemble Deep Learning.

The COVID-19 virus is one of the most devastating illnesses humanity has ever faced. COVID-19 is an infection that is hard to diagnose until it has caused lung damage or blood clots. As a result, it is one of the most insidious diseases due to the lack of knowledge of its symptoms. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are being investigated for the early detection of COVID-19 using symptoms and chest X-ray images. Therefore, this work proposes stacking ensemble models using two types of COVID-19 datasets, symptoms and chest X-ray scans, to identify COVID-19. The first proposed model is a stacking ensemble model that is merged from the outputs of pre-trained models in the stacking: multi-layer perceptron (MLP), recurrent neural network (RNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent unit (GRU). Stacking trains and evaluates the meta-learner as a support vector machine (SVM) to predict the final decision. Two datasets of COVID-19 symptoms are used to compare the first proposed model with MLP, RNN, LSTM, and GRU models. The second proposed model is a stacking ensemble model that is merged from the outputs of pre-trained DL models in the stacking: VGG16, InceptionV3, Resnet50, and DenseNet121; it uses stacking to train and evaluate the meta-learner (SVM) to identify the final prediction. Two datasets of COVID-19 chest X-ray images are used to compare the second proposed model with other DL models. The result has shown that the proposed models achieve the highest performance compared to other models for each dataset.

Accelerating automatic hate speech detection using parallelized ensemble learning models

With increasing number of social media users and online engagement, it is essential to study hate speech propagation on social media platforms (SMPs). Automatic hate speech detection on social media is of utmost importance as hate speech can create discomfort among users and potentially generate a strong reaction in society. Ensemble learning algorithms are helpful in addressing sentiment-based classification due to their fault tolerance and efficiency. However, a simple, scalable, and robust framework is required to deal with large-scale data efficiently and accurately. Therefore, we propose parallelization to the standard ensemble learning algorithms to speed up the automatic hate speech detection on SMPs. In this study, we parallelize bagging, A-stacking, and random sub-space algorithms and test their serial and parallel versions on the standard high-dimensional datasets for hate speech detection. The experiments are performed using six datasets that address hate speech propagation during events like the COVID-19 pandemic, the US presidential election (2020), and the farmers' protest in India (2021). Our parallel models observe a significant speedup with high efficiency, claiming that the proposed models are suitable for the considered application. Also, one of the main motivations of this study is to highlight the importance of generalization by testing the models under the cross-dataset environment. We observed that the accuracy is not affected while parallelizing the algorithms compared with serial algorithms executing on a single machine.

FCMCPS-COVID: AI propelled fog-cloud inspired scalable medical cyber-physical system, specific to coronavirus disease.

Medical cyber-physical systems (MCPS) firmly integrate a network of medical objects. These systems are highly efficacious and have been progressively used in the Healthcare 4.0 to achieve continuous high-quality services. Healthcare 4.0 encompasses numerous emerging technologies and their applications have been realized in the monitoring of a variety of virus outbreaks. As a growing healthcare trend, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) can be cured and its spread can be prevented using MCPS. This virus spreads from human to human and can have devastating consequences. Moreover, with the alarmingly rising death rate and new cases across the world, there is an urgent need for continuous identification and screening of infected patients to mitigate their spread. Motivated by the facts, we propose a framework for early detection, prevention, and control of the COVID-19 outbreak by using novel Industry 5.0 technologies. The proposed framework uses a dimensionality reduction technique in the fog layer, allowing high-quality data to be used for classification purposes. The fog layer also uses the ensemble learning-based data classification technique for the detection of COVID-19 patients based on the symptomatic dataset. In addition, in the cloud layer, social network analysis (SNA) has been performed to control the spread of COVID-19. The experimental results reveal that compared with state-of-the-art methods, the proposed framework achieves better results in terms of accuracy (82.28 %), specificity (91.42 %), sensitivity (90 %) and stability with effective response time. Furthermore, the utilization of CVI-based alert generation at the fog layer improves the novelty aspects of the proposed system.

Towards Automated COVID-19 Presence and Severity Classification.

COVID-19 presence classification and severity prediction via (3D) thorax computed tomography scans have become important tasks in recent times. Especially for capacity planning of intensive care units, predicting the future severity of a COVID-19 patient is crucial. The presented approach follows state-of-theart techniques to aid medical professionals in these situations. It comprises an ensemble learning strategy via 5-fold cross-validation that includes transfer learning and combines pre-trained 3D-versions of ResNet34 and DenseNet121 for COVID19 classification and severity prediction respectively. Further, domain-specific preprocessing was applied to optimize model performance. In addition, medical information like the infection-lung-ratio, patient age, and sex were included. The presented model achieves an AUC of 79.0% to predict COVID-19 severity, and 83.7% AUC to classify the presence of an infection, which is comparable with other currently popular methods. This approach is implemented using the AUCMEDI framework and relies on well-known network architectures to ensure robustness and reproducibility.

An empirical analysis of deep ensemble approach on COVID-19 and tuberculosis X-ray images

COVID-19 is a pandemic and a highly contagious disease that can severely damage the respiratory organs. Tuberculosis is also one of the leading respiratory diseases that affect public health. While COVID-19 has pushed the world into chaos and tuberculosis is still a persistent problem in many countries. A chest X-ray can provide plethora of information regarding the type of disease and the extent of damage to the lungs. Since X-rays are widely accessible and can be used in the diagnosis of COVID-19 or tuberculosis, this study aims to leverage those property to classify them in the category of COVID-19 infected lungs, tuberculosis infected lungs or normal lungs. In this paper, an ensemble deep learning model consisting of pre-trained models for feature extraction is used along with machine learning classifiers to classify the X-ray images. Various ensemble models were implemented and highest achieved accuracy among them was observed as 93%.

VMCTE: Visualization-Based Malware Classification Using Transfer and Ensemble Learning

The Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) effect has made telecommuting and remote learning the norm. The growing number of Internet-connected devices provides cyber attackers with more attack vectors. The development of malware by criminals also incorporates a number of sophisticated obfuscation techniques, making it difficult to classify and detect malware using conventional approaches. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel visualization-based malware classification system using transfer and ensemble learning (VMCTE). VMCTE has a strong anti-interference ability. Even if malware uses obfuscation, fuzzing, encryption, and other techniques to evade detection, it can be accurately classified into its corresponding malware family. Unlike traditional dynamic and static analysis techniques, VMCTE does not require either reverse engineering or the aid of domain expert knowledge. The proposed classification system combines three strong deep convolutional neural networks (ResNet50, MobilenetV1, and MobilenetV2) as feature extractors, lessens the dimension of the extracted features using principal component analysis, and employs a support vector machine to establish the classification model. The semantic representations of malware images can be extracted using various convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, obtaining higher-quality features than traditional methods. Integrating fine-tuned and non-fine-tuned classification models based on transfer learning can greatly enhance the capacity to classify various families of malware. The experimental findings on the Malimg dataset demonstrate that VMCTE can attain 99.64%, 99.64%, 99.66%, and 99.64% accuracy, F1-score, precision, and recall, respectively. © 2023 Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.

Uncertainty management in electricity demand forecasting with machine learning and ensemble learning: Case studies of COVID-19 in the US metropolitans

Improving load forecasting is becoming increasingly crucial for power system management and operational research. Disruptive influences can seriously impact both the supply and demand sides of power. This work examines the impact of the coronavirus on power usage in two US states from January 2020 to December 2020. A wide range of machine learning (ML) algorithms and ensemble learning are employed to conduct the analysis. The findings showed a surprising increase in monthly power use changes in Florida and Texas during the COVID-19 pandemic, in contrast to New York, where usage decreased over the same period. In Texas, the quantity of power usage rises from 2% to 6% practically every month, except for September, when it decreased by around 1%. For Florida, except for May, which showed a fall of roughly 2.5%, the growth varied from 2.5% to 7.5%. This indicates the need for more extensive research into such systems and the applicability of adopting groups of algorithms in learning the trends of electric power demand during uncertain events. Such learning will be helpful in forecasting future power demand changes due to especially public health-related scenarios. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd

Ensemble Learning using Transformers and Convolutional Networks for Masked Face Recognition

Wearing a face mask is one of the adjustments we had to follow to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. Having our faces covered by masks constantly has driven the need to understand and investigate how this behavior affects the recognition capability of face recognition systems. Current face recognition systems have extremely high accuracy when dealing with unconstrained general face recognition cases but do not generalize well with occluded masked faces. In this work, we propose a system for masked face recognition. The proposed system comprises two Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models and two Transformer models. The CNN models have been fine-tuned on FaceNet pre-trained model. We ensemble the predictions of the four models using the majority voting technique to identify the person with the mask. The proposed system has been evaluated on a synthetically masked LFW dataset created in this work. The best accuracy is obtained using the ensembled models with an accuracy of 92%. This recognition rate outperformed the accuracy of other models and it shows the correctness and robustness of the proposed model for recognizing masked faces. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Hamzah-Luqman/MFR. © 2022 IEEE.

Machine Learning-Based Hybrid Ensemble Model Achieving Precision Education for Online Education Amid the Lockdown Period of COVID-19 Pandemic in Pakistan

Institutions of higher learning have made persistent efforts to provide students with a high-quality education. Educational data mining (EDM) enables academic institutions to gain insight into student data in order to extract information for making predictions. COVID-19 represents the most catastrophic pandemic in human history. As a result of the global pandemic, all educational systems were shifted to online learning (OL). Due to issues with accessing the internet, disinterest, and a lack of available tools, online education has proven challenging for many students. Acquiring accurate education has emerged as a major goal for the future of this popular medium of education. Therefore, the focus of this research was to identifying attributes that could help in students' performance prediction through a generalizable model achieving precision education in online education. The dataset used in this research was compiled from a survey taken primarily during the academic year of COVID-19, which was taken from the perspective of Pakistani university students. Five machine learning (ML) regressors were used in order to train the model, and its results were then analyzed. Comparatively, SVM has outperformed the other methods, yielding 87.5% accuracy, which was the highest of all the models tested. After that, an efficient hybrid ensemble model of machine learning was used to predict student performance using NB, KNN, SVM, decision tree, and logical regression during the COVID-19 period, yielding outclass results. Finally, the accuracy obtained through the hybrid ensemble model was obtained as 98.6%, which demonstrated that the hybrid ensemble learning model has performed better than any other model for predicting the performance of students.

Ensemble Learning for Interpretable Concept Drift and Its Application to Drug Recommendation

During the COVID-19 epidemic, the online prescription pattern of Internet healthcare pro-vides guarantee for the patients with chronic diseases and reduces the risk of cross-infection, but it also raises the burden of decision-making for doctors. Online drug recommendation system can effectively assist doctors by analysing the electronic medical records (EMR) of patients. Unlike commercial recommendations, the accuracy of drug recommendations should be very high due to their relevance to patient health. Besides, concept drift may occur in the drug treatment data streams, handling drift and location drift causes is critical to the accuracy and reliability of the rec-ommended results. This paper proposes a multi-model fusion online drug recommendation system based on the association of drug and pathological features with online-nearline-offline architecture.The system transforms drug recommendation into pattern classification and adopts interpretable concept drift detection and adaptive ensemble classification algorithms. We apply the system to the Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) treatment process. The experiment results show our system performs nearly as good as doctors, the accuracy is close to 100%.

Enhancing Marathi Handwritten Character Recognition Using Ensemble Learning

In the current era, the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model plays a vital role in converting images of handwritten characters or words into text editable script. During the COVID-19 pandemic, students' performance is assessed based on multiple-choice questions and handwritten answers so, in this situation, the need for handwritten recognition has become acute. Handwritten answers in any regional language need the OCR model to transform the readable machine-encoded text for automatic assessment which will reduce the burden of manual assessment. The single Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) algorithm recognizes the handwritten characters but its accuracy is suppressed when dataset volume is increased. In proposed work stacking and soft voting ensemble mechanisms that address multiple CNN models to recognize the handwritten characters. The performance of the ensemble mechanism is significantly better than the single CNN model. This proposed work ensemble VGG16, Alexnet and LeNet-5 as base classifiers using stacking and soft voting ensemble approaches. The overall accuracy of the proposed work is 98.66% when the soft voting ensemble has three CNN classifiers. © 2023 Lavoisier. All rights reserved.

Multimodal negative sentiment recognition of online public opinion on public health emergencies based on graph convolutional networks and ensemble learning

To improve the effect of multimodal negative sentiment recognition of online public opinion on public health emergencies, we constructed a novel multimodal fine-grained negative sentiment recognition model based on graph convolutional networks (GCN) and ensemble learning. This model comprises BERT and ViT-based multimodal feature representation, GCN-based feature fusion, multiple classifiers, and ensemble learning-based decision fusion. Firstly, the image-text data about COVID-19 is collected from Sina Weibo, and the text and image features are extracted through BERT and ViT, respectively. Secondly, the image-text fused features are generated through GCN in the constructed microblog graph. Finally, AdaBoost is trained to decide the final sentiments recognized by the best classifiers in image, text, and image-text fused features. The results show that the F1-score of this model is 84.13% in sentiment polarity recognition and 82.06% in fine-grained negative sentiment recognition, improved by 4.13% and 7.55% compared to the optimal recognition effect of image-text feature fusion, respectively. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd

Fake News Detection System: An implementation of BERT and Boosting Algorithm

On social media, false information can proliferate quickly and cause big issues. To minimize the harm caused by false information, it is essential to comprehend its sensitive nature and content. To achieve this, it is necessary to first identify the characteristics of information. To identify false information on the internet, we suggest an ensemble model based on transformers in this paper. First, various text classification tasks were carried out to understand the content of false and true news on Covid-19. The proposed hybrid ensemble learning model used the results. The results of our analysis were encouraging, demonstrating that the suggested system can identify false information on social media. All the classification tasks were validated and shows outstanding results. The final model showed excellent accuracy (0.99) and F1 score (0.99). The Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve showed that the true-positive rate of the data in this model was close to one, and the AUC (Area Under The Curve) score was also very high at 0.99. Thus, it was shown that the suggested model was effective at identifying false information online. © 2023, EasyChair. All rights reserved.

An Optimized Ensemble Model for COVID Detection

The entire world has gone through a pandemic situation due to the spread of novel corona virus. In this paper, the authors have proposed an ensemble learning model for the classification of the subjects to be infected by coronavirus. For this purpose, five types of symptoms are considered. The dataset contains 2889 samples with six attributes and is collected from the Kaggle database. Three different types of classifiers such as Support vector machine (SVM), Gradient boosting, and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) are considered for classification purposes. For improving the learning strategy and performance of the proposed models subjected to accuracy, the learning rates are varied for each node of the tree-based ensemble classifiers. Also, the hyperparameters of the XGBoost model are optimized by applying the Bayesian optimization (BO) technique. The best accuracy in SVM classifier is found as 91.69%. 96.58% accuracy is obtained in the modified gradient boosting model. The optimized XGBoost model is providing 100% accuracy which is better than other. © 2022 IEEE.

Computer-Aided System for COVID-19 Using Semi-supervised-based Ensemble Learning and Reinforcement Learning

Coronavirus Disease 2019(COVID-19) has shocked the world with its rapid spread and enormous threat to life and has continued up to the present. In this paper, a computer-aided system is proposed to detect infections and predict the disease progression of COVID-19. A high-quality CT scan database labeled with time-stamps and clinicopathologic variables is constructed to provide data support. To our knowledge, it is the only database with time relevance in the community. An object detection model is then trained to annotate infected regions. Using those regions, we detect the infections using a model with semi-supervised-based ensemble learning and predict the disease progression depending on reinforcement learning. We achieve an mAP of 0.92 for object detection. The accuracy for detecting infections is 98.46%, with a sensitivity of 97.68%, a specificity of 99.24%, and an AUC of 0.987. Significantly, the accuracy of predicting disease progression is 90.32% according to the timeline. It is a state-of-the-art result and can be used for clinical usage. © 2022 IEEE.