Improved Barnacle Mating Optimizer-Based Least Square Support Vector Machine to Predict COVID-19 Confirmed Cases with Total Vaccination

Every country must have an accurate and efficient forecasting model to avoid and manage the epidemic. This paper suggests an upgrade to one of the evolutionary algorithms inspired by nature, the Barnacle Mating Optimizer (BMO). First, the exploration phase of the original BMO is enhanced by enforcing and replacing the sperm cast equation through Levy flight. Then, the Least Square Support Vector Machine (LSSVM) is partnered with the improved BMO (IBMO). This hybrid approach, IBMO-LSSVM, has been deployed effectively for time-series forecasting to enhance the RBF kernel-based LSSVM model since vaccination started against COVID-19 in Malaysia. In comparison to other well-known algorithms, our outcomes are superior. In addition, the IBMO is assessed on 19 conventional benchmarks and the IEEE Congress of Evolutionary Computation Benchmark Test Functions (CECC06, 2019 Competition). In most cases, IBMO outputs are better than comparison algorithms. However, in other circumstances, the outcomes are comparable.

A multimodal AI-based non-invasive COVID-19 grading framework powered by deep learning, manta ray, and fuzzy inference system from multimedia vital signs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges to healthcare systems worldwide. One of the key challenges in controlling and managing the pandemic is accurate and rapid diagnosis of COVID-19 cases. Traditional diagnostic methods such as RT-PCR tests are time-consuming and require specialized equipment and trained personnel. Computer-aided diagnosis systems and artificial intelligence (AI) have emerged as promising tools for developing cost-effective and accurate diagnostic approaches. Most studies in this area have focused on diagnosing COVID-19 based on a single modality, such as chest X-rays or cough sounds. However, relying on a single modality may not accurately detect the virus, especially in its early stages. In this research, we propose a non-invasive diagnostic framework consisting of four cascaded layers that work together to accurately detect COVID-19 in patients. The first layer of the framework performs basic diagnostics such as patient temperature, blood oxygen level, and breathing profile, providing initial insights into the patient's condition. The second layer analyzes the coughing profile, while the third layer evaluates chest imaging data such as X-ray and CT scans. Finally, the fourth layer utilizes a fuzzy logic inference system based on the previous three layers to generate a reliable and accurate diagnosis. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we used two datasets: the Cough Dataset and the COVID-19 Radiography Database. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective and trustworthy in terms of accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, and balanced accuracy. The audio-based classification achieved an accuracy of 96.55%, while the CXR-based classification achieved an accuracy of 98.55%. The proposed framework has the potential to significantly improve the accuracy and speed of COVID-19 diagnosis, allowing for more effective control and management of the pandemic. Furthermore, the framework's non-invasive nature makes it a more attractive option for patients, reducing the risk of infection and discomfort associated with traditional diagnostic methods.

A novel hybrid multi-thread metaheuristic approach for fake news detection in social media.

In fake news detection, intelligent optimization seems to be a more effective and explainable solution methodology than the black-box methods that have been extensively used in the literature. This study takes the optimization-based method one step further and proposes a novel, multi-thread hybrid metaheuristic approach for fake news detection in social media. The most innovative feature of the proposed method is that it uses a supervisor thread mechanism, which simultaneously monitors and improves the performance and search patterns of metaheuristic algorithms running parallel. With the supervisor thread mechanism, it is possible to analyse different key attribute combinations in the search space. In addition, this study develops a software framework that allows this model to be implemented easily. It tests the performance of the proposed model on three different data sets, respectively containing news about Covid-19, the Syrian War, and daily politics. The proposed method is evaluated in comparison to the results of fifteen different well-known deep models and classification algorithms. Experimental results prove the success of the proposed model and that it can produce competitive results.

Optimal evaluation of re-opening policies for COVID-19 through the use of metaheuristic schemes.

A new contagious disease or unidentified COVID-19 variants could provoke a new collapse in the global economy. Under such conditions, companies, factories, and organizations must adopt reopening policies that allow their operations to reduce economic effects. Effective reopening policies should be designed using mathematical models that emulate infection chains through individual interactions. In contrast to other modeling approaches, agent-based schemes represent a computational paradigm used to characterize the person-to-person interactions of individuals inside a system, providing accurate simulation results. To evaluate the optimal conditions for a reopening policy, authorities and decision-makers need to conduct an extensive number of simulations manually, with a high possibility of losing information and important details. For this reason, the integration of optimization and simulation of reopening policies could automatically find the realistic scenario under which the lowest risk of infection was attained. In this paper, the metaheuristic technique of the Whale Optimization Algorithm is used to find the solution with the minimal transmission risk produced by an agent-based model that emulates a hypothetical re-opening context. Our scheme finds the optimal results of different generical activation scenarios. The experimental results indicate that our approach delivers practical knowledge and essential estimations for identifying optimal re-opening strategies with the lowest transmission risk.

Mathematical Modeling of COVID-19 Spread Using Genetic Programming Algorithm

This paper analyses the possibilities of using Machine learning to develop a forecasting model for COVID-19 with a publicly available dataset from the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Data Repository and with the addition of a percentage of each variant from the GISAID Variant database. Genetic programming (GP), a symbolic regressor algorithm, is used for the estimation of new confirmed infected cases, hospitalized cases, cases in intensive care units (ICUs), and deceased cases. This metaheuristics method algorithm was used on a dataset for Austria and neighboring countries Czechia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Slovakia. Machine learning was done to create individual models for each country. Variance-based sensitivity analysis was initiated using the obtained mathematical models. This analysis showed us which input variables the output of the obtained models is sensitive to, like in the case of how much each covid variant affects the spread of the virus or the number of deceased cases. Individual short-term models have achieved very high R2 scores, while long-term predictions have achieved lower R2 scores. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

A self-adaptive quantum equilibrium optimizer with artificial bee colony for feature selection.

Feature selection (FS) is a popular data pre-processing technique in machine learning to extract the optimal features to maintain or increase the classification accuracy of the dataset, which is a combinatorial optimization problem, requiring a powerful optimizer to obtain the optimum subset. The equilibrium optimizer (EO) is a recent physical-based metaheuristic algorithm with good performance for various optimization problems, but it may encounter premature or the local convergence in feature selection. This work presents a self-adaptive quantum EO with artificial bee colony for feature selection, named SQEOABC. In the proposed algorithm, the quantum theory and the self-adaptive mechanism are employed into the updating rule of EO to enhance convergence, and the updating mechanism from the artificial bee colony is also incorporated into EO to achieve appropriate FS solutions. In the experiments, 25 benchmark datasets from the UCI repository are investigated to verify SQEOABC, which is compared with several state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms and the variants of EO. The statistical results of fitness values and accuracy demonstrate that SQEOABC has better performance than the compared algorithms and the variants of EO. Finally, a real-world FS problem from COVID-19 illustrates the effectiveness and superiority of SQEOABC.

Assessment of effective reactive power reserve in power system networks under uncertainty applying coronavirus herd immunity optimizer (CHIO) for operation simulation

The Reactive Power Reserve (RPR) is a very important indicator for voltage stability and is sensitive to the operating conditions of power systems. Thorough understanding of RPR, specifically Effective Reactive Reserve (ERR) under intermittent Wind Power (WP) and uncertain demand is essential and key focus of this research. Hence, a stochastic multivariate ERR assessment and optimization problem is introduced here. The proposed problem is solved in three stages: modeling of multivariate uncertainty, studying the stochastic behavior of ERR and optimizing ERR. The volatilities associated with WP generation and consumer demand are modeled explicitly, and their probability distribution function is discretized to accommodate structural uncertainty. A combined load modeling approach is introduced and extended further to accommodate multi-variability. The impact of these uncertainties on ERR is assessed thoroughly on modified IEEE 30 and modified Indian 62 bus system. A non-linear dynamic stochastic optimization problem is formulated to maximize the expected value of ERR and is solved using ‘Coronavirus Herd Immunity Optimizer (CHIO)'. The impact of the proposed strategy on stability indices like the L-index, Proximity Indicator (PI) are analyzed through various case studies. Further, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is also compared with the existing mean value approach. Additionally, the performance of CHIO is confirmed through exhaustive case studies and comparisons. © 2023 Elsevier B.V.

Late acceptance hill climbing aided chaotic harmony search for feature selection: An empirical analysis on medical data

In today's era of data-driven digital society, there is a huge demand for optimized solutions that essentially reduce the cost of operation, thereby aiming to increase productivity. Processing a huge amount of data, like the Microarray based gene expression data, using machine learning and data mining algorithms has certain limitations in terms of memory and time requirements. This would be more concerning, when a dataset comes with redundant and non-important information. For example, many report-based medical datasets have several non-informative attributes which mislead the classification algorithms. To this end, researchers have been developing several feature selection algorithms that try to discard the redundant information from the raw datasets before feeding them to machine learning algorithms. Metaheuristic based optimization algorithms provide an excellent option to solve feature selection problems. In this paper, we propose a music-inspired harmony search (HS) algorithm based wrapper feature selection method. At the beginning, we use a chaotic mapping to initialize the population of the HS algorithm in order to better coverage of the search space. Further to complement the inferior exploitation of the HS algorithm, we integrate it with the Late Acceptance Hill Climbing (LAHC) method. Thus the combination of these two algorithms provides a good balance between the exploration and exploitation of the HS algorithm. We evaluate the proposed feature selection method on 15 UCI datasets and the obtained results are found to be better than many state-of-the-art methods both in terms of the classification accuracy and the number of features selected. To evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithm, we utilize a combination of precision, recall, F1 score, fitness value, and execution time as performance indicators. These metrics enable us to obtain a comprehensive assessment of the algorithm's abilities and limitations. We also apply our method on 3 microarray based gene expression datasets used for prediction of cancer to ensure the scalability and robustness as a feature selection method in real-life scenarios. In addition to this, we test our approach using the COVID-19 dataset, and it performs better than several metaheuristic based optimization techniques. © 2023

Impact of Metaheuristic Techniques in Pandemic of COVID-19

The early detection and diagnosis of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are required to cure the disease. Metaheuristic techniques can be used to develop an automated tool for detecting the symptoms of an infected person and provide appropriate precautionary measures. The metaheuristic-based software can be designed to analyze the radiographic patterns of infected individuals and determine the severity of COVID-19 infection. The genome structure of coronavirus can be easily understood through metaheuristic techniques. Based on the genome structure, an ef-fective drug combination can be explored by using metaheuristics for the treatment of COVID-19.Copyright © 2021 Bentham Science Publishers.

An automatic COVID-19 diagnosis from chest X-ray images using a deep trigonometric convolutional neural network

With growing demands for diagnosing COVID-19 definite cases, employing radiological images, i.e., the chest X-ray, is becoming challenging. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) propose effective automated models to detect COVID_19 positive cases. In order to improve the total accuracy, this paper proposes using the novel Trigonometric Function (TF) instead of the existing gradient descendent-based training method for training fully connected layers to have a COVID-19 detector with parallel implementation ability. The designed model gets then benchmarked on a verified dataset denominated COVID-Xray-5k. The results get investigated by qualified research with classic DCNN, BWC, and MSAD. The results confirm that the produced detector can present competitive results compared to the benchmark detection models. The paper also examines the class activation map theory to detect the areas probably infected by the Covid-19 virus. As experts confirm, the obtained results get correlated with the clinical recognitions. © 2023 The Royal Photographic Society.

PI control based on parameter space approach supported metaheuristic optimization algorithms and ANFIS in a natural gas combined cycle power plant

In this article, proportional‐integral (PI) control to ensure stable operation of a steam turbine in a natural gas combined cycle power plant is investigated, since active power control is very important due to the constantly changing power flow differences between supply and demand in power systems. For this purpose, an approach combining stability and optimization in PI control of a steam turbine in a natural gas combined cycle power plant is proposed. First, the regions of the PI controller, which will stabilize this power plant system in closed loop, are obtained by parameter space approach method. In the next step of this article, it is aimed to find the best parameter values of the PI controller, which stabilizes the system in the parameter space, with artificial intelligence‐based control and metaheuristic optimization. Through parameter space approach, the proposed optimization algorithms limit the search space to a stable region. The controller parameters are examined with Particle Swarm Optimization based PI, artificial bee colony based PI, genetic algorithm based PI, gray wolf optimization based PI, equilibrium optimization based PI, atom search optimization based PI, coronavirus herd immunity optimization based PI, and adaptive neuro‐fuzzy inference system based PI (ANFIS‐PI) algorithms. The optimized PI controller parameters are applied to the system model, and the transient responses performances of the system output signals are compared. Comparison results of all these methods based on parameter space approach that guarantee stability for this power plant system are presented. According to the results, ANFIS‐ PI controller is better than other methods.

Firefly Optimization with Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit for COVID-19 Diagnosis on Chest Radiographs

The epidemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused an ever-growing demand for treatment, testing, and diagnosis. Chest x-rays are a fast and low-cost test that can detect COVID19 but chest imaging is not a first-line test for COVID19 because of lower diagnosis performance and confounding with other viral pneumonia. Current studies using deep learning (DL) might assist in overcoming these issues as convolution neural networks (CNN) have illustrated higher performance of COVID19 diagnoses at the earlier phase. This study develops a new Firefly Optimization with Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (FFO-BGRU) for COVID19 diagnoses on Chest Radiographs. The main intention of the FFO-BGRU technique lies in the recognition and classification of COVID-19 on Chest X-ray images. At the initial stage, the presented FFO-BGRU technique applies Wiener filtering (WF) technique for noise removal process. Followed, the hyperparameter tuning process takes place by using FFO algorithm and SqueezeNet architecture is applied for feature extraction. Lastly, the BGRU model is applied for COVID19 recognition and classification. A wide range of simulations were performed to demonstrate the betterment of the FFO-BGRU model. The comprehensive comparison study highlighted the improved outcomes of the FFO-BGRU algorithm over other recent approaches. © 2022 IEEE.

Hybrid harmony search algorithm for social network contact tracing of COVID-19.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was first reported in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and then moved to almost every country showing an unprecedented outbreak. The world health organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Since then, millions of people were infected, and millions have lost their lives all around the globe. By the end of 2020, effective vaccines that could prevent the fast spread of the disease started to loom on the horizon. Nevertheless, isolation, social distancing, face masks, and quarantine are the best-known measures, in the time being, to fight the pandemic. On the other hand, contact tracing is an effective procedure in tracking infections and saving others' lives. In this paper, we devise a new approach using a hybrid harmony search (HHS) algorithm that casts the problem of finding strongly connected components (SCCs) to contact tracing. This new approach is named as hybrid harmony search contact tracing (HHS-CT) algorithm. The hybridization is achieved by integrating the stochastic hill climbing into the operators' design of the harmony search algorithm. The HHS-CT algorithm is compared to other existing algorithms of finding SCCs in directed graphs, where it showed its superiority over these algorithms. The devised approach provides a 77.18% enhancement in terms of run time and an exceptional average error rate of 1.7% compared to the other existing algorithms of finding SCCs.

Genetic Algorithm Enhanced by Levy Flight for Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Window in Home Healthcare

In the present modern Healthcare system, demands for Home Healthcare services have drastically increased, especially during pandemic outbreaks such as the covid-19 infections. Home Healthcare (HHC) system is meant to provide a flexible method of healthcare services at the patient's home. Since HHC has limited and multi-dimensional resources, its demand is extensively high. As a result, the allocation of resources is one of the most complex and critical tasks for the HHC operational team. The inclusion of dynamic resources in their scheduling and routing plans becomes even more challenging for the HHC team. Hence, we investigate the Dynamic Vehicle routing problem with time window (DVRPTW) using the constraints for adding new patients to the existing route plan based on their preferred timeslots. In order to solve this combinatorial problem, we used Genetic Algorithm (GA) enhanced by Levy Flight (LF) to minimize total travel and idle time and maximize new patient visits in every route plan. In this paper, we evaluated the efficiency of the proposed algorithm by comparing it to the well-known Nearest Neighborhood algorithm, and found that it outperforms well. Thus, by adopting GA along with LF in the HHC organizations can benefit from cost effective and time saving solutions. © 2023 American Institute of Physics Inc.. All rights reserved.

A Bi-Level Vaccination Points Location Problem That Aims at Social Distancing and Equity for the Inhabitants

Designing efficient vaccination programs that consider the needs of the population is very relevant to prevent reoccurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The government needs to provide vaccination points to give out vaccine doses to the population. In this paper, the authors analyze the location of vaccination points whilst addressing the inhabitants' preferences. Two objectives that prevent crowding of inhabitants are considered. The government aims for the minimum distance between located vaccination points is maximized, and for the number of inhabitants that attend the different vaccination points to be equitable. One of the key aspects of this problem is the assumption that inhabitants freely choose the located vaccination point to go. That decision affects the objectives of the government, since crowding at vaccination points may appear due to the inhabitants' decisions. This problem is modeled as a bi-objective, bi-level program, in which the upper level is associated to the government and the lower level to the inhabitants. To approximate the Pareto front of this problem, a cross-entropy metaheuristic is proposed. The algorithm incorporates criteria to handle two objective functions in a simultaneous manner, and optimally solve the lower-level problem for each government decision. The proposed algorithm is tested over an adapted set of benchmark instances and pertinent analysis of the results is included. An important managerial insight is that locating far vaccination points does not lead us to a more equitable allocation of inhabitants. © 2023 by the authors.

Coronavirus Mask Protection Algorithm: A New Bio-inspired Optimization Algorithm and Its Applications.

Nowadays, meta-heuristic algorithms are attracting widespread interest in solving high-dimensional nonlinear optimization problems. In this paper, a COVID-19 prevention-inspired bionic optimization algorithm, named Coronavirus Mask Protection Algorithm (CMPA), is proposed based on the virus transmission of COVID-19. The main inspiration for the CMPA originated from human self-protection behavior against COVID-19. In CMPA, the process of infection and immunity consists of three phases, including the infection stage, diffusion stage, and immune stage. Notably, wearing masks correctly and safe social distancing are two essential factors for humans to protect themselves, which are similar to the exploration and exploitation in optimization algorithms. This study simulates the self-protection behavior mathematically and offers an optimization algorithm. The performance of the proposed CMPA is evaluated and compared to other state-of-the-art metaheuristic optimizers using benchmark functions, CEC2020 suite problems, and three truss design problems. The statistical results demonstrate that the CMPA is more competitive among these state-of-the-art algorithms. Further, the CMPA is performed to identify the parameters of the main girder of a gantry crane. Results show that the mass and deflection of the main girder can be improved by 16.44% and 7.49%, respectively.

Optimal feature selection for COVID-19 detection with CT images enabled by metaheuristic optimization and artificial intelligence.

There is a broad range of novel Coronaviruses (CoV) such as the common cold, cough, and severe lung infections. The mutation of this virus, which originally started as COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, has continued the rapid spread globally. As the mutated form of this virus spreads across the world, testing and screening procedures of patients have become tedious for healthcare departments in largely populated countries such as India. To diagnose COVID-19 pneumonia by radiological methods, high-resolution computed tomography (CT) of the chest has been considered the most precise method of examination. The use of modern artificial intelligence (AI) techniques on chest high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) images can help to detect the disease, especially in remote areas with a lack of specialized physicians. This article presents a novel metaheuristic algorithm for automatic COVID-19 detection using a least square support vector machine (LSSVM) classifier for three classes namely normal, COVID, and pneumonia. The proposed model results in a classification accuracy of 87.2% and an F1-score of 86.3% for multiclass classifications from simulations. The analysis of information transfer rate (ITR) revealed that the modified quantum-based marine predators algorithm (Mq-MPA) feature selection algorithm reduces the classification time of LSSVM by 23% when compared to the deep learning models.

An evolutionary optimization method for selecting features for speech emotion recognition

Human-computer interactions benefit greatly from emotion recognition from speech. To promote a contact-free environment in this coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID'19) pandemic situation, most digitally based systems used speech-based devices. Consequently, this emotion detection from speech has many beneficial applications for pathology. The vast majority of speech emotion recognition (SER) systems are designed based on machine learning or deep learning models. Therefore, need greater computing power and requirements. This issue was addressed by developing traditional algorithms for feature selection. Recent research has shown that nature-inspired or evolutionary algorithms such as equilibrium optimization (EO) and cuckoo search (CS) based meta-heuristic approaches are superior to the traditional feature selection (FS) models in terms of recognition performance. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of feature selection meta-heuristic approaches on emotion recognition from speech. To achieve this, we selected the rayerson audio-visual database of emotional speech and song (RAVDESS) database and obtained maximum recognition accuracy of 89.64% using the EO algorithm and 92.71% using the CS algorithm. For this final step, we plotted the associated precision and F1 score for each of the emotional classes. © This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA license.

Multi-verse Optimizer with Rosenbrock and Diffusion Mechanisms for Multilevel Threshold Image Segmentation from COVID-19 Chest X-Ray Images.

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the most severe epidemic that is prevalent all over the world. How quickly and accurately identifying COVID-19 is of great significance to controlling the spread speed of the epidemic. Moreover, it is essential to accurately and rapidly identify COVID-19 lesions by analyzing Chest X-ray images. As we all know, image segmentation is a critical stage in image processing and analysis. To achieve better image segmentation results, this paper proposes to improve the multi-verse optimizer algorithm using the Rosenbrock method and diffusion mechanism named RDMVO. Then utilizes RDMVO to calculate the maximum Kapur's entropy for multilevel threshold image segmentation. This image segmentation scheme is called RDMVO-MIS. We ran two sets of experiments to test the performance of RDMVO and RDMVO-MIS. First, RDMVO was compared with other excellent peers on IEEE CEC2017 to test the performance of RDMVO on benchmark functions. Second, the image segmentation experiment was carried out using RDMVO-MIS, and some meta-heuristic algorithms were selected as comparisons. The test image dataset includes Berkeley images and COVID-19 Chest X-ray images. The experimental results verify that RDMVO is highly competitive in benchmark functions and image segmentation experiments compared with other meta-heuristic algorithms.

Improved Reptile Search Algorithm by Salp Swarm Algorithm for Medical Image Segmentation.

This study proposes a novel nature-inspired meta-heuristic optimizer based on the Reptile Search Algorithm combed with Salp Swarm Algorithm for image segmentation using gray-scale multi-level thresholding, called RSA-SSA. The proposed method introduces a better search space to find the optimal solution at each iteration. However, we proposed RSA-SSA to avoid the searching problem in the same area and determine the optimal multi-level thresholds. The obtained solutions by the proposed method are represented using the image histogram. The proposed RSA-SSA employed Otsu's variance class function to get the best threshold values at each level. The performance measure for the proposed method is valid by detecting fitness function, structural similarity index, peak signal-to-noise ratio, and Friedman ranking test. Several benchmark images of COVID-19 validate the performance of the proposed RSA-SSA. The results showed that the proposed RSA-SSA outperformed other metaheuristics optimization algorithms published in the literature.