No abstract

Purpose -Business process redesign (BPR) is undertaken to achieve order-of-magnitude improvements over "old" forms of the organization. Practitioners in academia and the business world have developed a number of methodologies to support this competitive restructuring that forms the current focus of concern, many of which have not been successful. The purpose of this paper is to suggest the use of data mining (DM) as a technique to support the process of redesigning a business by extracting the much needed knowledge hidden in large volumes of data maintained by the organization through the DM models. Design/methodology/approach -The paper explains how the DM/BPR tool will extract and transfer the much-needed knowledge necessary for implementing the new business. Findings -The process of extracting knowledge hidden from large volumes of data (DM) has proved very successful in solving many business or scientific problems to achieve competitive advantage. As suggested in the DM/BPR framework, the DM model can be deployed on the massive data collected from past business processes of the organization which then yields the previously unknown knowledge and trends needed by top managers or decision makers in the organization for effective business process redesigning. Originality/value -The proposed DM/BPR framework transforms the old business into a new prospect-oriented business organization by carefully re-engineering the old system incorporating the new discovered knowledge which helps the manager to make wise and informed business decisions in the area of accountability, business change management expertise, business process analysis, business model design, business model implementation and others.

The study examined the detection of attacks against computer networks, which is becoming a harder problem to solve in the field of Network security. A problem with current intrusion detection systems is that they have many false positive and false negative events. Most of the existing Intrusion detection systems implemented depend on rule-based expert systems where new attacks are not detectable. In this study, optimization algorithms were added to intrusion detection system to make them more efficient. Self Organizing Migrating Genetic Algorithm (SOMGA) was integrated into intrusion detection system to obtain a more efficient intrusion detection system called ID-SOMGA. This study provides an equally efficient method to implement an intrusion detection system that returns very low false positives. Due to the complexities involved in security issues, and the implementation of the work, selected values of the network log was used to implement the system in order to reduce some of these complexities. The Self Organizing Migrating Genetic Algorithm -Intrusion Detection System was tested and values of the result were compared with that of an IDS with Genetic Algorithm Intrusion Detection System. In terms of detection rates, ID-SOMGA was found to be slower than an IDS with GA, the false positives in ID-SOMGA was lower than what obtains with genetic algorithm. Both schemes were able to identify new patterns almost in the same way. The ID-SOMGA system that was developed improved the security of systems in networked settings allowing for confidentiality, integrity and availability of system resources.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-Coronavirus-2 or SARS-CoV-2), which came into existence in 2019, is a viral pandemic that caused coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) illnesses and death. Research showed that relentless efforts had been made to improve key performance indicators for detection, isolation, and early treatment. This paper used Deep Transfer Learning Model (DTL) for the classification of a real-life COVID-19 dataset of chest X-ray images in both binary (COVID-19 or Normal) and three-class (COVID-19, Viral-Pneumonia or Normal) classification scenarios. Four experiments were performed where fine-tuned VGG-16 and VGG-19 Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with DTL were trained on both binary and three-class datasets that contain X-ray images. The system was trained with an X-ray image dataset for the detection of COVID-19. The fine-tuned VGG-16 and VGG-19 DTL were modelled by employing a batch size of 10 in 40 epochs, Adam optimizer for weight updates, and categorical cross-entropy loss function. The results showed that the fine-tuned VGG-16 and VGG-19 models produced an accuracy of 99.23% and 98.00%, respectively, in the binary task. In contrast, in the multiclass (three-class) task, the fine-tuned VGG-16 and VGG-19 DTL models produced an accuracy of 93.85% and 92.92%, respectively. Moreover, the fine-tuned VGG-16 and VGG-19 models have MCC of 0.98 and 0.96 respectively in the binary classification, and 0.91 and 0.89 for multiclass classification. These results showed strong positive correlations between the models’ predictions and the true labels. In the two classification tasks (binary and three-class), it was observed that the fine-tuned VGG-16 DTL model had stronger positive correlations in the MCC metric than the fine-tuned VGG-19 DTL model. The VGG-16 DTL model has a Kappa value of 0.98 as against 0.96 for the VGG-19 DTL model in the binary classification task, while in the three-class classification problem, the VGG-16 DTL model has a Kappa value of 0.91 as against 0.89 for the VGG-19 DTL model. This result is in agreement with the trend observed in the MCC metric. Hence, it was discovered that the VGG-16 based DTL model classified COVID-19 better than the VGG-19 based DTL model. Using the best performing fine-tuned VGG-16 DTL model, tests were carried out on 470 unlabeled image dataset, which was not used in the model training and validation processes. The test accuracy obtained for the model was 98%. The proposed models provided accurate diagnostics for both the binary and multiclass classifications, outperforming other existing models in the literature in terms of accuracy, as shown in this work.

Extracting texts from images with complex backgrounds is a major challenge today. Many existing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems could not handle this problem. As reported in the literature, some existing methods that can handle the problem still encounter major difficulties with extracting texts from images with sharp varying contours, touching word and skewed words from scanned documents and images with such complex backgrounds. There is, therefore, a need for new methods that could easily and efficiently extract texts from these images with complex backgrounds, which is the primary reason for this work. This study collected image data and investigated the processes involved in image processing and the techniques applied for data segmentation. It employed an adaptive thresholding algorithm to the selected images to properly segment text characters from the image's complex background. It then used Tesseract, a machine learning product, to extract the text from the image file. The images used were coloured images sourced from the internet with different formats like jpg, png, webp and different resolutions. A custom adaptive algorithm was applied to the images to unify their complex backgrounds. This algorithm leveraged on the Gaussian thresholding algorithm. The algorithm differs from the conventional Gaussian algorithm as it dynamically generated the blocksize to apply threshing to the image. This ensured that, unlike conventional image segmentation, images were processed area-wise (in pixels) as specified by the algorithm at each instance. The system was implemented using Python 3.6 programming language. Experimentation involved fifty different images with complex backgrounds. The results showed that the system was able to extract English character-based texts from images with complex backgrounds with 69.7% word-level accuracy and 81.9% character-level accuracy. The proposed method in this study proved to be more efficient as it outperformed the existing methods in terms of the character level percentage accuracy.