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Psoriasis is a chronic and complex immune-mediated papulosquamous disease affecting almost 2% of the world population. The interaction between a genetically predisposed individual and environmental triggers leads to a vicious cycle involving autoreactive T cells, dendritic cells, keratinocytes and dermal cells. Up to 40% of the psoriasis cases develop disabling psoriatic arthritis and an equal number of patients also tend to develop metabolic syndrome as well as cardiovascular comorbidities; hence, this is no more considered to be a disease limited to skin only. Being a systemic disease, there is an urgent need to develop potential biomarkers for the assessment of disease severity, prediction of outcome of the therapeutic intervention and association with various systemic comorbidities. Diverse genetic markers not only function as predictors of diseases pathogenesis, but also help to predict development of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. Personalised medicine is customising the therapeutic needs of a psoriasis patient and improving the outcome as per the hints we receive from the various biomarkers. This review deals with the list of potential biomarkers proposed to be useful in psoriasis, though there is limited data validating their routine use in clinical practice and the progress so far made in the field of precision medicine for psoriasis.

Abstract Feature selection and hyper-parameters optimization (tuning) are two of the most important and challenging tasks in machine learning. To achieve satisfying performance, every machine learning model has to be adjusted for a specific problem, as the efficient universal approach does not exist. In addition, most of the data sets contain irrelevant and redundant features that can even have a negative influence on the model’s performance. Machine learning can be applied almost everywhere; however, due to the high risks involved with the growing number of malicious, phishing websites on the world wide web, feature selection and tuning are in this research addressed for this particular problem. Notwithstanding that many metaheuristics have been devised for both feature selection and machine learning tuning challenges, there is still much space for improvements. Therefore, the research exhibited in this manuscript tries to improve phishing website detection by tuning extreme learning model that utilizes the most relevant subset of phishing websites data sets features. To accomplish this goal, a novel diversity-oriented social network search algorithm has been developed and incorporated into a two-level cooperative framework. The proposed algorithm has been compared to six other cutting-edge metaheuristics algorithms, that were also implemented in the framework and tested under the same experimental conditions. All metaheuristics have been employed in level 1 of the devised framework to perform the feature selection task. The best-obtained subset of features has then been used as the input to the framework level 2, where all algorithms perform tuning of extreme learning machine. Tuning is referring to the number of neurons in the hidden layers and weights and biases initialization. For evaluation purposes, three phishing websites data sets of different sizes and the number of classes, retrieved from UCI and Kaggle repositories, were employed and all methods are compared in terms of classification error, separately for layers 1 and 2 over several independent runs, and detailed metrics of the final outcomes (output of layer 2), including precision, recall, f1 score, receiver operating characteristics and precision–recall area under the curves. Furthermore, an additional experiment is also conducted, where only layer 2 of the proposed framework is used, to establish metaheuristics performance for extreme machine learning tuning with all features, which represents a large-scale NP-hard global optimization challenge. Finally, according to the results of statistical tests, final research findings suggest that the proposed diversity-oriented social network search metaheuristics on average obtains better achievements than competitors for both challenges and all data sets. Finally, the SHapley Additive exPlanations analysis of the best-performing model was applied to determine the most influential features.

Abstract Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)-based systems have become an important part of industry consortium systems because of their rapid growth and wide-ranging application. Various physical objects that are interconnected in the IIoT network communicate with each other and simplify the process of decision-making by observing and analyzing the surrounding environment. While making such intelligent decisions, devices need to transfer and communicate data with each other. However, as devices involved in IIoT networks grow and the methods of connections diversify, the traditional security frameworks face many shortcomings, including vulnerabilities to attack, lags in data, sharing data, and lack of proper authentication. Blockchain technology has the potential to empower safe data distribution of big data generated by the IIoT. Prevailing data-sharing methods in blockchain only concentrate on the data interchanging among parties, not on the efficiency in sharing, and storing. Hence an element-based K-harmonic means clustering algorithm (CA) is proposed for the effective sharing of data among the entities along with an algorithm named underweight data block (UDB) for overcoming the obstacle of storage space. The performance metrics considered for the evaluation of the proposed framework are the sum of squared error (SSE), time complexity with respect to different m values, and storage complexity with CPU utilization. The results have experimented with MATLAB 2018a simulation environment. The proposed model has better sharing, and storing based on blockchain technology, which is appropriate IIoT.

Object detection is used to identify objects in real time using some deep learning algorithms. In this work, wheat plant data set around the world is collected to study the wheat heads. Using global data, a common solution for measuring the amount and size of wheat heads is formulated. YOLO V3 (You Look Only Once Version 3) and Faster RCNN is a real time object detection algorithm which is used to identify objects in videos and images. The global wheat detection dataset is used for the prediction which contains 3000+ training images and few test images with csv files which have information about the ground box labels of the images. To build a data pipeline for the model Tensorflow data API or Keras Data Generators is used.

With the whirlwind evolution of technology, the quantity of stored data within datasets is rapidly expanding. As a result, extracting crucial and relevant information from said datasets is a gruelling task. Feature selection is a critical preprocessing task for machine learning to reduce the excess data in a set. This research presents a novel quasi-reflection learning arithmetic optimization algorithm - firefly search, an enhanced version of the original arithmetic optimization algorithm. Quasi-reflection learning mechanism was implemented for enhancement of population diversity, while firefly algorithm metaheuristics were used to improve the exploitation abilities of the original arithmetic optimization algorithm. The aim of this wrapper-based method is to tackle a specific classification problem by selecting an optimal feature subset. The proposed algorithm is tested and compared with various well-known methods on ten unconstrained benchmark functions, then on twenty-one standard datasets gathered from the University of California, Irvine Repository and Arizona State University. Additionally, the proposed approach is applied to the Corona disease dataset. The experimental results verify the improvements of the presented method and their statistical significance.

Abstract Deep learning has recently been utilized with great success in a large number of diverse application domains, such as visual and face recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition, and handwriting identification. Convolutional neural networks, that belong to the deep learning models, are a subtype of artificial neural networks, which are inspired by the complex structure of the human brain and are often used for image classification tasks. One of the biggest challenges in all deep neural networks is the overfitting issue, which happens when the model performs well on the training data, but fails to make accurate predictions for the new data that is fed into the model. Several regularization methods have been introduced to prevent the overfitting problem. In the research presented in this manuscript, the overfitting challenge was tackled by selecting a proper value for the regularization parameter dropout by utilizing a swarm intelligence approach. Notwithstanding that the swarm algorithms have already been successfully applied to this domain, according to the available literature survey, their potential is still not fully investigated. Finding the optimal value of dropout is a challenging and time-consuming task if it is performed manually. Therefore, this research proposes an automated framework based on the hybridized sine cosine algorithm for tackling this major deep learning issue. The first experiment was conducted over four benchmark datasets: MNIST, CIFAR10, Semeion, and UPS, while the second experiment was performed on the brain tumor magnetic resonance imaging classification task. The obtained experimental results are compared to those generated by several similar approaches. The overall experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods included in the comparative analysis in terms of classification error and accuracy.

Several massive real-time services could be offered to the residents of smart cities by the incorporation of collaborative applications. All such applications require latency-aware network services for accomplishing various needs of the smart city environment. It requires technological enhancements to the existing mechanisms to serve better in smart environments. Such enhancements to the prevailing approaches also opened a wide range of chances to the intruders. Among such infringes, the identity-based attack is the most powerful attack, which may directly affect the credibility of legitimate network components. Such attackers aim to steal the identity of other legitimate entities. Thus, the prevailing trust-based approaches cannot withstand such attacks. The proposed Edge-based approach, EBAD has been designed for smart city environments, as a robust prevention mechanism for identity theft and misuse. EBAD is efficient enough to identify the Sybil attacker nodes and the early identification of such attacker nodes will nullify the probability of performing the Sybil attack over a Cooperative blackmailing attack (SA-CBA). EBAD uses an Edge-based accusation analysis approach to assess the malicious behavior of the network entities. The major part of the required computations has been placed at the edge node for reducing the computational overload of the end devices. Finally, the efficiency of EBAD has been examined under a malicious environment.

Brain tumors are a serious and death-defying disease for human life. Discovering an appropriate brain tumor image from a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) archive is a challenging job for the radiologist. Most search engines retrieve images on the basis of traditional text-based approaches. The main challenge in the MRI image analysis is that low-level visual information captured by the MRI machine and the high-level information identified by the assessor. This semantic gap is addressed in this study by designing a new feature extraction technique. In this paper, we introduce Content-Based Medical Image retrieval (CBMIR) system for retrieval of brain tumor images from the large data. Firstly, we remove noise from MRI images employing several filtering techniques. Afterward, we design a feature extraction scheme combining Gabor filtering technique (which is mainly focused on specific frequency content at the image region) and Walsh-Hadamard transform (WHT) (conquer technique for easy configuration of image) for discovering representative features from MRI images. After that, for retrieving the accurate and reliable image, we employ Fuzzy C-Means clustering Minkowski distance metric that can evaluate the similarity between the query image and database images. The proposed methodology design was tested on a publicly available brain tumor MRI image database. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms most of the existing techniques like Gabor, wavelet, and Hough transform in detecting brain tumors and also take less time. The proposed approach will be beneficial for radiologists and also for technologists to build an automatic decision support system that will produce reproducible and objective results with high accuracy.

Artificial neural networks are one of the most commonly used methods in machine learning. Performance of network highly depends on the learning method. Traditional learning algorithms are prone to be trapped in local optima and have slow convergence. At the other hand, nature-inspired optimization algorithms are proven to be very efficient in complex optimization problems solving due to derivative-free solutions. Addressing issues of traditional learning algorithms, in this study, an enhanced version of artificial bee colony nature-inspired metaheuristics is proposed to optimize connection weights and hidden units of artificial neural networks. Proposed improved method incorporates quasi-reflection-based learning and guided best solution bounded mechanisms in the original approach and manages to conquer its deficiencies. First, the method is tested on a recent challenging CEC 2017 benchmark function set, then applied for training artificial neural network on five well-known medical benchmark datasets. Further, devised algorithm is compared to other metaheuristics-based methods. The efficiency is measured by five metrics - accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, geometric mean, and area under the curve. Simulation results prove that the proposed algorithm outperforms other metaheuristics in terms of accuracy and convergence speed. The improvement of the accuracy over the other methods on different datasets are between 0.03% and 12.94%. The quasi-refection-based learning mechanism significantly improves the convergence speed of the original artificial bee colony algorithm and together with the guided best solution bounded, the exploitation capability is enhanced, which results in significantly better accuracy.

The research presented in this manuscript proposes a novel Harris Hawks optimization algorithm with practical application for evolving convolutional neural network architecture to classify various grades of brain tumor using magnetic resonance imaging. The proposed improved Harris Hawks optimization method, which belongs to the group of swarm intelligence metaheuristics, further improves the exploration and exploitation abilities of the basic algorithm by incorporating a chaotic population initialization and local search, along with a replacement strategy based on the quasi-reflection-based learning procedure. The proposed method was first evaluated on 10 recent CEC2019 benchmarks and the achieved results are compared with the ones generated by the basic algorithm, as well as with results of other state-of-the-art approaches that were tested under the same experimental conditions. In subsequent empirical research, the proposed method was adapted and applied for a practical challenge of convolutional neural network design. The evolved network structures were validated against two datasets that contain images of a healthy brain and brain with tumors. The first dataset comprises well-known IXI and cancer imagining archive images, while the second dataset consists of axial T1-weighted brain tumor images, as proposed in one recently published study in the Q1 journal. After performing data augmentation, the first dataset encompasses 8.000 healthy and 8.000 brain tumor images with grades I, II, III, and IV and the second dataset includes 4.908 images with Glioma, Meningioma, and Pituitary, with 1.636 images belonging to each tumor class. The swarm intelligence-driven convolutional neural network approach was evaluated and compared to other, similar methods and achieved a superior performance. The obtained accuracy was over 95% in all conducted experiments. Based on the established results, it is reasonable to conclude that the proposed approach could be used to develop networks that can assist doctors in diagnostics and help in the early detection of brain tumors.

The fast-growing Internet results in massive amounts of text data. Due to the large volume of the unstructured format of text data, extracting relevant information and its analysis becomes very challenging. Text document clustering is a text-mining process that partitions the set of text-based documents into mutually exclusive clusters in such a way that documents within the same group are similar to each other, while documents from different clusters differ based on the content. One of the biggest challenges in text clustering is partitioning the collection of text data by measuring the relevance of the content in the documents. Addressing this issue, in this work a hybrid swarm intelligence algorithm with a K-means algorithm is proposed for text clustering. First, the hybrid fruit-fly optimization algorithm is tested on ten unconstrained CEC2019 benchmark functions. Next, the proposed method is evaluated on six standard benchmark text datasets. The experimental evaluation on the unconstrained functions, as well as on text-based documents, indicated that the proposed approach is robust and superior to other state-of-the-art methods.