This is a survey of neural network applications in the real-world scenario. It provides a taxonomy of artificial neural networks (ANNs) and furnish the reader with knowledge of current and emerging trends in ANN applications research and area of focus for researchers. Additionally, the study presents ANN application challenges, contributions, compare performances and critiques methods. The study covers many applications of ANN techniques in various disciplines which include computing, science, engineering, medicine, environmental, agriculture, mining, technology, climate, business, arts, and nanotechnology, etc. The study assesses ANN contributions, compare performances and critiques methods. The study found that neural-network models such as feedforward and feedback propagation artificial neural networks are performing better in its application to human problems. Therefore, we proposed feedforward and feedback propagation ANN models for research focus based on data analysis factors like accuracy, processing speed, latency, fault tolerance, volume, scalability, convergence, and performance. Moreover, we recommend that instead of applying a single method, future research can focus on combining ANN models into one network-wide application.

The era of artificial neural network (ANN) began with a simplified application in many fields and remarkable success in pattern recognition (PR) even in manufacturing industries. Although significant progress achieved and surveyed in addressing ANN application to PR challenges, nevertheless, some problems are yet to be resolved like whimsical orientation (the unknown path that cannot be accurately calculated due to its directional position). Other problem includes; object classification, location, scaling, neurons behavior analysis in hidden layers, rule, and template matching. Also, the lack of extant literature on the issues associated with ANN application to PR seems to slow down research focus and progress in the field. Hence, there is a need for state-of-the-art in neural networks application to PR to urgently address the abovehighlights problems for more successes. The study furnishes readers with a clearer understanding of the current, and new trend in ANN models that effectively addresses PR challenges to enable research focus and topics. Similarly, the comprehensive review reveals the diverse areas of the success of ANN models and their application to PR. In evaluating the performance of ANN models, some statistical indicators for measuring the performance of the ANN model in many studies were adopted. Such as the use of mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE), and variance of absolute percentage error (VAPE). The result shows that the current ANN models such as GAN, SAE, DBN, RBM, RNN, RBFN, PNN, CNN, SLP, MLP, MLNN, Reservoir computing, and Transformer models are performing excellently in their application to PR tasks. Therefore, the study recommends the research focus on current models and the development of new models concurrently for more successes in the field.INDEX TERMS Artificial neural networks, application to pattern recognition, feedforward neural networks, feedback neural networks, hybrid models.

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Specialized data preparation techniques, ranging from data cleaning, outlier detection, missing value imputation, feature selection (FS), amongst others, are procedures required to get the most out of data and, consequently, get the optimal performance of predictive models for classification tasks. FS is a vital and indispensable technique that enables the model to perform faster, eliminate noisy data, remove redundancy, reduce overfitting, improve precision and increase generalization on testing data. While conventional FS techniques have been leveraged for classification tasks in the past few decades, they fail to optimally reduce the high dimensionality of the feature space of texts, thus breeding inefficient predictive models. Emerging technologies such as the metaheuristics and hyper-heuristics optimization methods provide a new paradigm for FS due to their efficiency in improving the accuracy of classification, computational demands, storage, as well as functioning seamlessly in solving complex optimization problems with less time. However, little details are known on best practices for case-to-case usage of emerging FS methods. The literature continues to be engulfed with clear and unclear findings in leveraging effective methods, which, if not performed accurately, alters precision, real-world-use feasibility, and the predictive model's overall performance. This paper reviews the present state of FS with respect to metaheuristics and hyper-heuristic methods. Through a systematic literature review of over 200 articles, we set out the most recent findings and trends to enlighten analysts, practitioners and researchers in the field of data analytics seeking clarity in understanding and implementing effective FS optimization methods for improved text classification tasks.

Communication security deals with attributes such as confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The current strategies used to achieve covertness of communication employs encryption. Encryption techniques minimize eavesdropping on the conversation between the conversing parties by transforming the message into an unreadable form. However, it does not prevent or discourage eavesdroppers from stealing and attempting to decrypt the encrypted messages using a brute-force attack or by randomly guessing the key. The probability of the eavesdropper acquiring the key and recovering the message is high as he/she can distinguish a correct key from incorrect keys based on the output of the decryption. This is because a message has some structure-texts, pictures, and videos. Thus, an attempt at decrypting with a wrong key yields random gibberish that does not comply with the expected structure. Furthermore, the consistent increase in computational power implies that stolen encrypted data may gradually debilitate to a brute-force attack. Thus, causing the eavesdropper to learn the content of the message. To this end, the objective of this research is to reinforce the current encryption measures with a decoy-based deception model where the eavesdropper is discouraged from stealing encrypted message by confounding his resources and time. Our proposed model leverages its foundation from decoys, deception, and artificial intelligence. An instant messaging application was developed and integrated with the proposed model as a proof of concept. Further details regarding the design, analysis, and implementation of the proposed model are substantiated. The result shows that the proposed model reinforces state-of-the-art encryption schemes and will serve as an effective component for discouraging eavesdropping and curtailing brute-force attack on encrypted messages.

Conventional encryption schemes are susceptible to brute-force attacks. This is because bytes encode utf8 (or ASCII) characters. Consequently, an adversary that intercepts a ciphertext and tries to decrypt the message by brute-forcing with an incorrect key can filter out some of the combinations of the decrypted message by observing that some of the sequences are a combination of characters which are distributed non-uniformly and form no plausible meaning. Honey encryption (HE) scheme was proposed to curtail this vulnerability of conventional encryption by producing ciphertexts yielding valid-looking, uniformly distributed but fake plaintexts upon decryption with incorrect keys. However, the scheme works for only passwords and PINS. Its adaptation to support encoding natural language messages (e-mails, human-generated documents) has remained an open problem. Existing proposals to extend the scheme to support encoding natural language messages reveals fragments of the plaintext in the ciphertext, hence, its susceptibility to chosen ciphertext attacks (CCA). In this paper, we modify the HE schemes to support the encoding of natural language messages using Natural Language Processing techniques. Our main contribution was creating a structure that allowed a message to be encoded entirely in binary. As a result of this strategy, most binary string produces syntactically correct messages which will be generated to deceive an attacker who attempts to decrypt a ciphertext using incorrect keys. We evaluate the security of our proposed scheme.

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