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This research work was also supported in part by Sejong university through its faculty research program.

Skin diseases effectively influence all parts of life. Early and accurate detection of skin cancer is necessary to avoid significant loss. The manual detection of skin diseases by dermatologists leads to misclassification due to the same intensity and color levels. Therefore, an automated system to identify these skin diseases is required. Few studies on skin disease classification using different techniques have been found. However, previous techniques failed to identify multi-class skin disease images due to their similar appearance. In the proposed study, a computer-aided framework for automatic skin disease detection is presented. In the proposed research, we collected and normalized the datasets from two databases (ISIC archive, Mendeley) based on six Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC), Actinic Keratosis (AK), Seborrheic Keratosis (SK), Nevus (N), Squamous Cell Carcinoma (SCC), and Melanoma (M) common skin diseases. Besides, segmentation is performed using deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Furthermore, three types of features are extracted from segmented skin lesions: ABCD rule, GLCM, and in-depth features. AlexNet transfer learning is used for deep feature extraction, while a support vector machine (SVM) is used for classification. Experimental results show that SVM outperformed other studies in terms of accuracy, as AK disease achieved 100% accuracy, BCC 92.7%, M 95.1%, N 97.8%, SK 93.1%, SCC 91.4% with a global accuracy of 95.4%.

Respiratory sound (RS) attributes and their analyses structure a fundamental piece of pneumonic pathology, and it gives symptomatic data regarding a patient's lung. A couple of decades back, doctors depended on their hearing to distinguish symptomatic signs in lung audios by utilizing the typical stethoscope, which is usually considered a cheap and secure method for examining the patients. Lung disease is the third most ordinary cause of death worldwide, so; it is essential to classify the RS abnormality accurately to overcome the death rate. In this research, we have applied Fourier analysis for the visual inspection of abnormal respiratory sounds. Spectrum analysis was done through Artificial Noise Addition (ANA) in conjunction with different deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) to classify the seven abnormal respiratory sounds—both continuous (CAS) and discontinuous (DAS). The proposed framework contains an adaptive mechanism of adding a similar type of noise to unhealthy respiratory sounds. ANA makes sound features enough reach to be identified more accurately than the respiratory sounds without ANA. The obtained results using the proposed framework are superior to previous techniques since we simultaneously considered the seven different abnormal respiratory sound classes.

In the past few years, educational data mining (EDM) has attracted the attention of researchers to enhance the quality of education. Predicting student academic performance is crucial to improving the value of education. Some research studies have been conducted which mainly focused on prediction of students’ performance at higher education. However, research related to performance prediction at the secondary level is scarce, whereas the secondary level tends to be a benchmark to describe students’ learning progress at further educational levels. Students’ failure or poor grades at lower secondary negatively impact them at the higher secondary level. Therefore, early prediction of performance is vital to keep students on a progressive track. This research intended to determine the critical factors that affect the performance of students at the secondary level and to build an efficient classification model through the fusion of single and ensemble-based classifiers for the prediction of academic performance. Firstly, three single classifiers including a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), J48, and PART were observed along with three well-established ensemble algorithms encompassing Bagging (BAG), MultiBoost (MB), and Voting (VT) independently. To further enhance the performance of the abovementioned classifiers, nine other models were developed by the fusion of single and ensemble-based classifiers. The evaluation results showed that MultiBoost with MLP outperformed the others by achieving 98.7% accuracy, 98.6% precision, recall, and F-score. The study implies that the proposed model could be useful in identifying the academic performance of secondary level students at an early stage to improve the learning outcomes.

Generating intuitions from data using data mining and machine learning algorithms to predict outcomes is useful area of computing. The application area of data mining techniques and machine learning is wide ranging including industries, healthcare, organizations, academics etc. A continuous improvement is witnessed due to an ongoing research, as seen particularly in healthcare. Several researchers have applied machine learning to develop decision support systems, perform analysis of dominant clinical factors, extraction of useful information from hideous patterns in historical data, making predictions and disease classification. Successful researches created opportunities for physicians to take appropriate decision at right time. In current study, we intend to utilize the learning capability of machine learning methods towards the classification of birth data using bagging and boosting classification algorithms. It is obvious that differences in living styles, medical assistances, religious implications and the region you live in collectively affect the residents of that society. This motive has encouraged the researchers to conduct studies at regional levels to comprehensively explore the associated medical factors that contribute towards complications among women during pregnancy. The current study is a comprehensive comparison of bagging and boosting classification algorithms performed on birth data collected from the government hospitals of city Muzaffarabad, Kashmir. The experimental tasks are carried out using caret package in R which is considered an inclusive framework for building machine learning models. Accuracy based results with different evaluation measures are presented. Bagging functions including Adabag and BagFda performed marginally better in terms of accuracy, precision and recall. Improvements are observed in comparison to previous study performed on same dataset.

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Ad-hoc social networks (ASNETs) represent a special type of traditional ad-hoc network in which a user's social properties (such as the social connections and communications metadata as well as application data) are leveraged for offering enhanced services in a distributed infrastructureless environments. However, the wireless medium, due to limited bandwidth, can easily suffer from the problem of congestion when social metadata and application data are exchanged among nodes-a problem that is compounded by the fact that some nodes may act selfishly and not share its resources. While a number of congestion control schemes have been proposed for the traditional ad-hoc networks, there has been limited focus on incorporating social awareness into congestion control schemes. We revisit the existing traditional ad-hoc congestion control and data distribution protocols and motivate the need for embedding social awareness into these protocols to improve performance. We report that although some work is available in opportunistic network that uses sociallyaware techniques to control the congestion issue, this area is largely unexplored and warrants more research attention. In this regards, we highlight the current research progress and identify multiple future directions of research.