Aboul Ella Hassanien (Abo)

Epilepsy is one of the most common a chronic neurological disorders of the brain that affect millions of the world's populations. It is characterized by recurrent seizures, which are physical reactions to sudden, usually brief, excessive electrical discharges in a group of brain cells. Hence, seizure identification has great importance in clinical therapy of epileptic patients. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is most commonly used in epilepsy detection since it includes precious physiological information of the brain. However, it could be a challenge to detect the subtle but critical changes included in EEG signals. Feature extraction of EEG signals is core trouble on EEG-based brain mapping analysis. This paper will extract ten features from EEG signal based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for epilepsy detection. These numerous features will help the classifiers to achieve a good accuracy when utilize to classify EEG signal to detect epilepsy. Subsequently, the results have illustrated that DWT has been adopted to extract various features i.e., Entropy, Min, Max, Mean, Median, Standard deviation, Variance, Skewness, Energy and Relative Wave Energy (RWE).

Despite the great efforts to assure quality in higher education institutions, the ambiguity of its related concepts and requirements constitute a big challenge when trying to implement it as an automated information system. The present work introduces a framework for an automated information system that manages the quality assurance in higher educations institutions. The aim of designing such a system is to provide an automation tool that avoids unnecessary and redundant tasks associated to quality in higher education institutions. In addition, the proposed system helps all higher education stockholders to handle and monitor their tasks. Moreover, it aims to help the quality assurance center in a higher education institution to apply its qualitys standards, and to make sure that they are being maintained and enhanced. This information system contains a core module and 17 sub-modules, which are described in this paper.

For many decades, artificial neural network (ANN) proves successful results in thousands of problems in many disciplines. Back-propagation (BP) is one of the candidate algorithms to train ANN. Due to the way of BP to find the solution for the underlying problem, there is an important drawback of it, namely the stuck in local minima rather than the global one. Recent studies introduce meta-heuristic techniques to train ANN. The current work proposes a framework in which grey wolf optimizer (GWO) provides the initial solution to a BP ANN. Five datasets are used to benchmark GWO BP performance with other competitors. The first competitor is an optimized BP ANN based on genetic algorithm. The second is a BP ANN powered by particle swarm optimizer. The third is the BP algorithm itself and lastly a feedforward ANN enhanced by GWO. The carried experiments show that GWOBP outperforms the compared algorithms.

This paper presents a hybrid approach to an Automated Essay Grading System (AEGS) that provides automated grading and evaluation of student essays. The proposed system has two complementary components: Writing Features Analysis tools, which rely on natural language processing (NLP) techniques and neural network grading engine, which rely on a set of pre-graded essays to judge the student answer and assign a grade. By this way, students essays could be evaluated with a feedback that would improve their writing skills. The proposed system is evaluated using datasets from computer and information sciences college students' essays in Mansoura University. These datasets was written as part of mid-term exams in introduction to information systems course and Systems analysis and design course. The obtained results shows an agreement with teachers' grades in between 70% and nearly 90% with teachers' grades. This indicates that the proposed might be useful as a tool for automatic assessment of students' essays, thus leading to a considerable reduction in essay grading costs.

Optimal search is a major challenge for wrapper-based attribute reduction. Rough sets have been used with much success, but current hill-climbing rough set approaches to attribute reduction are insufficient for finding optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose an innovative use of an intelligent optimisation method, namely the flower search algorithm (FSA), with rough sets for attribute reduction. FSA is a relatively recent computational intelligence algorithm, which is inspired by the pollination process of flowers. For many applications, the attribute space, besides being very large, is also rough with many different local minima which makes it difficult to converge towards an optimal solution. FSA can adaptively search the attribute space for optimal attribute combinations that maximise a given fitness function, with the fitness function used in our work being rough set-based classification. Experimental results on various benchmark datasets from the UCI repository confirm our technique to perform well in comparison with competing methods.

With the increasing impact of capital regulation on banks financial decisions especially in competing environment with credit constraints, it comes the urge to set an optimal mechanism of bank lending decisions that will maximize the bank profit in a timely manner. In this context, we propose a self-organizing method for dynamically organizing bank lending decision using Genetic Algorithm (GA). Our proposed GA based model provides a framework to optimize bank objective when constructing the loan portfolio, which maximize the bank profit and minimize the probability of bank default in a search for an optimal, dynamic lending decision. Multiple factors related to loan characteristics, creditor ratings are integrated to GA chromosomes and validation is performed to ensure the optimal decision. GA uses random search to suggest the best appropriate design. We use this algorithm in order to obtain the most efficient lending decision. The reason for choosing GA is its convergence and its flexibility in solving multi-objective optimization problems such as credit assessment, portfolio optimization and bank lending decision.

Analytical prediction of oxidative stress biomarkers in ecosystem provides an expressive result for many stressors. These oxidative stress biomarkers including superoxide dismutase, glutathione peroxidase and catalase activity in fish liver tissue were analyzed within feeding different levels of selenium nanoparticles. Se-nanoparticles represent a salient defense mechanism in oxidative stress within certain limits; however, stress can be engendered from toxic levels of these nanoparticles. For instance, prediction of the level of pollution and/or stressors was elucidated to be improved with different levels of selenium nanoparticles using the bio-inspired Sine-Cosine algorithm (SCA). In this paper, we improved the prediction accuracy of liver enzymes of fish fed by nano-selenite by developing a neural network model based on SCA, that can train and update the weights and the biases of the network until reaching the optimum value. The performance of the proposed model is better and achieved more efficient than other models.

Nowadays, a dataset includes a huge number of features with irrelevant and redundant ones. Feature selection is required for a better machine-learning algorithms' performance. A system for feature selection is proposed in this work using a sine cosine algorithm (SCA). SCA is a new stochastic search algorithm for optimization problems. SCA optimization adaptively balances the exploration and exploitation to find the optimal solution quickly. The SCA can quickly explore the feature space for optimal or near-optimal feature subset minimizing a given fitness function. The proposed fitness function used incorporates both classification accuracy and feature size reduction. The proposed system was tested on 18 datasets and shows an advance over other search methods as particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) optimizers commonly used in this context using different evaluation indicators.

This paper presents an approach based on Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) to optimize the parameters of membership functions of Sugeno based Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS). The optimization is achieved by Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) for the sake of achieving minimum Root Mean Square Error of ANFIS structure. The proposed ANFIS-ABC model is used to build a system for predicting the wind speed. To ensure the accuracy of the model, a different number of membership functions has been used. The experimental results indicates that the best accuracy achieved is 98% with ten membership functions and least value of RMSE which is 0.39.

In this paper, two novel bio-inspired optimization algorithms; namely Dragonfly Algorithm (DA) and Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO), have been applied for fulfilling the goal of feature set dimensional reduction. The proposed classification system has been tested via solving the problem of Electromyography (EMG) signal classification with optimal features subset selection. The obtained experimental results showed that the GWO based Support Vector Machines (SVM) classification algorithm has achieved an accuracy of 93.22% using 31% of the total extracted features. It also outperformed both the typical SVM algorithm, with no feature set optimization, and the DA based optimized feature set SVM classification, for the tested EMG dataset.

Measuring toxicity is one of the main steps in drug development. Hence, there is a high demand for computational models to predict the toxicity effects of the potential drugs. In this study, we used a dataset, which consists of four toxicity effects:mutagenic, tumorigenic, irritant and reproductive effects. The proposed model consists of three phases. In the first phase, rough set-based methods are used to select the most discriminative features for reducing the classification time and improving the classification performance. Due to the imbalanced class distribution, in the second phase, different sampling methods such as Random Under-Sampling, Random Over-Sampling and Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique are used to solve the problem of imbalanced datasets. ITerative Sampling (ITS) method is proposed to avoid the limitations of those methods. ITS method has two steps. The first step (sampling step) iteratively modifies the prior distribution of the minority and majority classes. In the second step, a data cleaning method is used to remove the overlapping that is produced from the first step. In the third phase, Bagging classifier is used to classify an unknown drug into toxic or non-toxic. The experimental results proved that the proposed model performed well in classifying the unknown samples according to all toxic effects in the imbalanced datasets.

The extended Mobile Ad-hoc Network architecture is a paramount research domain due to a wide enhancement of smart phone and open source Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology. The novelty of the current work is to design a disaster aware mobility modeling for a Flying Ad-hoc network infrastructure, where the UAV group is considered as nodes of such ecosystem. This can perform a collaborative task of a message relay, where the mobility modeling under a “Post Disaster” is the main subject of interest, which is proposed with a multi-UAV prototype test bed. The impact of various parameters like UAV node attitude, geometric dilution precision of satellite, Global Positioning System visibility, and real life atmospheric upon the mobility model is analyzed. The results are mapped with the realistic disaster situation. A cluster based mobility model using the map oriented navigation of nodes is emulated with the prototype test bed.

In this paper, we propose a novel optimal singular value decomposition (SVD)-based image watermarking approach that uses a new combination of weighted quantum particle swarm optimization (WQPSO) algorithm and a human visual system (HVS) model for both the hybrid discrete wavelet transform and discrete cosine transform (DCT). The proposed SVD-based watermarking approach initially decomposes the host image into sub-bands; afterwards, singular values of the DCT of the lower sub-band of the host image are quantized using a set of optimal quantization steps deduced from a combination of the WQPSO algorithm and the HVS model. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, we present tests on different images. The experimental results show that the proposed approach yields a watermarked image with good visual definition; at the same time, the embedded watermark was robust against a wide variety of common attacks, including JPEG compression, Gaussian noise, salt and pepper noises, Gaussian filters, median filters, image cropping, and image scaling. Moreover, the results of various experimental analyses demonstrated the superiority of the WQPSO approach over other optimization techniques, including classical PSO and QPSO in terms of local convergence speed, resulting in a better balance between global and local searches of the watermarking algorithm.

In this paper, we present a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for abdominal Computed Tomography liver images that comprises four main phases: liver segmentation, lesion candidate segmentation, feature extraction from each candidate lesion, and liver disease classification. A hybrid approach based on fuzzy clustering and grey wolf optimisation is employed for automatic liver segmentation. Fast fuzzy c-means clustering is used for lesion candidates extraction, and a variety of features are extracted from each candidate. Finally, these features are used in a classification stage using a support vector machine. Experimental results confirm the efficacy of the proposed CAD system, which is shown to yield an overall accuracy of almost 96% in terms of healthy liver extraction and 97% for liver disease classification.

In this paper, binary variants of the ant lion optimizer (ALO) are proposed and used to select the optimal feature subset for classification purposes in wrapper-mode. ALO is one of the recently bio-inspired optimization techniques that imitates the hunting process of ant lions. Moreover, ALO balances exploration and exploitation using a single operator that can adaptively searches the domain of solutions for the optimal solution. Binary variants introduced here are performed using two different approaches. The first approach takes only the inspiration of ALO operators and makes the corresponding binary operators. In the second approach, the native ALO is applied while its continuous steps are threshold using suitable threshold function after squashing them. The proposed approaches for binary ant lion optimizer (BALO) are utilized in the feature selection domain for finding feature subset that maximizing the classification performance while minimizing the number of selected features. The proposed binary algorithms were compared to three common optimization algorithms hired in this domain namely particle swarm optimizer (PSO), genetic algorithms (GAs), binary bat algorithm (BBA), as well as the native ALO. A set of assessment indicators is used to evaluate and compare the different methods over 21 data sets from the UCI repository. Results prove the capability of the proposed binary algorithms to search the feature space for optimal feature combinations regardless of the initialization and the used stochastic operators.

Extraction of relevant features is of significant importance for brain tumor segmentation systems. To improve brain tumor segmentation accuracy, the authors present an improved feature extraction component that takes advantage of the correlation between intracranial structure deformation and the compression resulting from brain tumor growth. Using 3D nonrigid registration and deformation modeling techniques, the component measures lateral ventricular (LaV) deformation in volumetric magnetic resonance images. By verifying the location of the extracted LaV deformation feature data and applying the features on brain tumor segmentation with widely used classification algorithms, the authors evaluate the proposed component qualitatively and quantitatively with promising results on 11 datasets comprising real and simulated patient images.

This research proposes cultivation-time recommender system for predicting the best sowing dates for winter cereal crops in the newly reclaimed lands in Farafra Oasis, The Egyptian Western Desert. The main goal of the proposed system is to support the best utilization of farm resources. In this research, predicting the best sowing dates for the aimed crops is based on weather conditions prediction along with calculating the seasonal accumulative growing degree days (GDD) fulfillment duration for each crop. Various Machine Learning (ML) regression algorithms have been used for predicting the daily minimum and maximum air temperature based on historical weather conditions data for twenty-five growing seasons (1990/91 to 2014/15). Experimental results showed that using the M5P and IBk ML regression algorithms have outperformed the other implemented regression algorithms for predicting the daily minimum and maximum air temperature based on historical weather conditions data. That has been measured based on the calculated mean absolute error (MAE). Also, obtained experimental results obviously indicated that the best cultivation-time prediction by the proposed recommender system has been achieved by the M5P algorithm, based on the seasonal accumulative GDD fulfillment duration, for the coming five growing seasons (2016/17 to 2019/20).

Abstract: This paper presents a Fuzzy C-Means based image segmentation approach that benefits from the Minkowski distance as the dissimilarity measure, denoted as FCM-M, instead of the traditional Euclidean distance, herein identified as FCM-E. The proposed approach was applied on Liver CT images, and a thorough comparison between both methods was carried out. FCM-M provided better accuracy when compared to the traditional FCM-E, with an area under the ROC curve of 85.44% and 47.96%, respectively. In terms of statistical significant analysis, a twofold benefit was obtained from using the proposed approach: the performance of the image segmentation procedure was maintained, or even slightly increased in some situations, while the CPU processing time was significantly decreased. The advantages inherent to the proposed FCM-M pave the way to a whole new chain of fully automatic segmentation methods.

Evolutionary harmony search algorithm is used for its capability in finding solution space both locally and globally. In contrast, Wavelet based feature selection, for its ability to provide localized frequency information about a function of a signal, makes it a promising one for efficient classification. Research in this direction states that wavelet based neural network may be trapped to fall in a local minima whereas fuzzy harmony search based algorithm effectively addresses that problem and able to get a near optimal solution. In this, a hybrid wavelet based radial basis function (RBF) neural network (WRBF) and feature subset harmony search based fuzzy discernibility classifier (HSFD) approaches are proposed as a data mining technique for image segmentation based classification. In this paper, the authors use Lena RGB image; Magnetic resonance image (MR) and Computed Tomography (CT) Image for analysis. It is observed from the obtained simulation results that Wavelet based RBF neural network outperforms the harmony search based fuzzy discernibility classifiers.

Water pollution by organic materials or metals is one of the problems that threaten humanity, both nowadays and over the next decades. Morphological changes in Nile Tilapia “Oreochromis niloticus” fish liver and gills can also represent the adaptation strategies to maintain some physiological functions or to assess acute and chronic exposure to chemicals found in water and sediments. This paper presents an automatic system for assessing water quality, in Sharkia Governorate – Egypt, based on microscopic images of fish gills and liver. The proposed system used fish gills and liver as hybrid-biomarker in order to detect water pollution. It utilized case-based reasoning (CBR) for indicating the degree of water quality based on the different histopathological changes in fish gills and liver microscopic images. Various performance evaluation metrics namely, retrieval accuracy, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, F-measure, and G-mean have been used in order to objectively indicate the true performance of the system considering the unbalanced data. Experimental results showed that the proposed hybrid-biomarker CBR based system achieved water quality prediction accuracy of 97.9% using cosine distance similarity measure. Also, it outperformed both SVMs and LDA classifiers for the tested microscopic images dataset.

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