Binarization of Metaheuristics: Is the Transfer Function Really Important?

In this work, an approach is proposed to solve binary combinatorial problems using continuous metaheuristics. It focuses on the importance of binarization in the optimization process, as it can have a significant impact on the performance of the algorithm. Different binarization schemes are presented and a set of actions, which combine different transfer functions and binarization rules, under a selector based on reinforcement learning is proposed. The experimental results show that the binarization rules have a greater impact than transfer functions on the performance of the algorithms and that some sets of actions are statistically better than others. In particular, it was found that sets that incorporate the elite or elite roulette binarization rule are the best. Furthermore, exploration and exploitation were analyzed through percentage graphs and a statistical test was performed to determine the best set of actions. Overall, this work provides a practical approach for the selection of binarization schemes in binary combinatorial problems and offers guidance for future research in this field.

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.

A Novel Deep Learning-based Whale Optimization Algorithm for Prediction of Breast Cancer

HIGHLIGHTS Novel whale optimization algorithm is proposed for prediction of breast cancer. Deep learning-based WOA adjusts the CNN structure as per maximum detection accuracy. Proposed method achieves 92.4% accuracy in comparison to 90.3%. Validity of method is evaluated with magnifying factors like 40x, 100 x, 200x, 400x.

Abstract Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers among women that cause billions of deaths worldwide. Identification of breast cancer often depends on the examination of digital biomedical photography such as the histopathological images of various health professionals, and clinicians. Analyzing histopathological images is a unique task and always requires special knowledge to conclude investigating these types of images. In this paper, a novel efficient technique has been proposed for the detection and prediction of breast cancer at its early stage. Initially, the dataset of images is used to carry out the pre-processing phase, which helps to transform a human pictorial image into a computer photographic image and adjust the parameters appropriate to the Convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier. Afterward, all the transformed images are assigned to the CNN classifier for the training process. CNN classifies incoming breast cancer clinical images as malignant and benign without prior information about the occurrence of cancer. For parameter optimization of CNN, a deep learning-based whale optimization algorithm (WOA) has been proposed which proficiently and automatically adjusts the CNN network structure by maximizing the detection accuracy. We have also compared the obtained accuracy of the proposed algorithm with a standard CNN and other existing classifiers and it is found that the proposed algorithm supersedes the other existing algorithms.