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The rapid growth of data generated by several applications like engineering, biotechnology, energy, and others has become a crucial challenge in the high dimensional data mining. The large amounts of data, especially those with high dimensions, may contain many irrelevant, redundant, or noisy features, which may negatively affect the accuracy and efficiency of the industrial data mining process. Recently, several meta-heuristic optimization algorithms have been utilized to evolve feature selection techniques for dealing with the vast dimensionality problem. Despite optimization algorithms' ability to find the near-optimal feature subset of the search space, they still face some global optimization challenges. This paper proposes an improved version of the sooty tern optimization (ST) algorithm, namely the ST-AL method, to improve the search performance for high-dimensional industrial optimization problems. ST-AL method is developed by boosting the performance of STOA by applying four strategies. The first strategy is the use of a control randomization parameters that ensure the balance between the exploration–exploitation stages during the search process; moreover, it avoids falling into local optimums. The second strategy entails the creation of a new exploration phase based on the Ant lion (AL) algorithm. The third strategy is improving the STOA exploitation phase by modifying the main equation of position updating. Finally, the greedy selection is used to ignore the poor generated population and keeps it from diverging from the existing promising regions. To evaluate the performance of the proposed ST-AL algorithm, it has been employed as a global optimization method to discover the optimal value of ten CEC2020 benchmark functions. Also, it has been applied as a feature selection approach on 16 benchmark datasets in the UCI repository and compared with seven well-known optimization feature selection methods. The experimental results reveal the superiority of the proposed algorithm in avoiding local minima and increasing the convergence rate. The experimental result are compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, i.e., ALO, STOA, PSO, GWO, HHO, MFO, and MPA and found that the mean accuracy achieved is in range 0.94–1.00. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As corona virus disease (COVID-19) is still an ongoing global outbreak, countries around the world continue to take precautions and measures to control the spread of the pandemic. Because of the excessive number of infected patients and the resulting deficiency of testing kits in hospitals, a rapid, reliable, and automatic detection of COVID-19 is in extreme need to curb the number of infections. By analyzing the COVID-19 chest X-ray images, a novel metaheuristic approach is proposed based on hybrid dipper throated and particle swarm optimizers. The lung region was segmented from the original chest X-ray images and augmented using various transformation operations. Furthermore, the augmented images were fed into the VGG19 deep network for feature extraction. On the other hand, a feature selection method is proposed to select the most significant features that can boost the classification results. Finally, the selected features were input into an optimized neural network for detection. The neural network is optimized using the proposed hybrid optimizer. The experimental results showed that the proposed method achieved 99.88% accuracy, outperforming the existing COVID-19 detection models. In addition, a deep statistical analysis is performed to study the performance and stability of the proposed optimizer. The results confirm the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of Covid-19 has taken the lives of many patients so far. The symptoms of COVID-19 include muscle pains, loss of taste and smell, coughs, fever, and sore throat, which can lead to severe cases of breathing difficulties, organ failure, and death. Thus, the early detection of the virus is very crucial. COVID-19 can be detected using clinical tests, making us need to know the most important symptoms/features that can enhance the decision process. In this work, we propose a modified multilayer perceptron (MLP) with feature selection (MLPFS) to predict the positive COVID-19 cases based on symptoms and features from patients' electronic medical records (EMR). MLPFS model includes a layer that identifies the most informative symptoms to minimize the number of symptoms base on their relative importance. Training the model with only the highest informative symptoms can fasten the learning process and increase accuracy. Experiments were conducted using three different COVID-19 datasets and eight different models, including the proposed MLPFS. Results show that MLPFS achieves the best feature reduction across all datasets compared to all other experimented models. Additionally, it outperforms the other models in classification results as well as time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]