Skin lesion border irregularity, which represents the B feature in the ABCD rule, is considered one of the most significant factors in melanoma diagnosis. Since signs that clinicians rely on in melanoma diagnosis involve subjective judgment including visual signs such as border irregularity, this deems it necessary to develop an objective approach to finding border irregularity. Increased research in neural networks has been carried out in recent years mainly driven by the advances of deep learning. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) or multilayer perceptrons have been shown to perform well in supervised learning tasks. However, such networks usually don't incorporate information pertaining the ambiguity of the inputs when training the network, which in turn could affect how the weights are being updated in the learning process and eventually degrading the performance of the network when applied on test data. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy multilayer perceptron (F-MLP) that takes the ambiguity of the inputs into consideration and subsequently reduces the effects of ambiguous inputs on the learning process. A new optimization function, the fuzzy gradient descent, has been proposed to reflect those changes. Moreover, a type-II fuzzy sigmoid activation function has also been proposed which enables finding the range of performance the fuzzy neural network is able to attain. The fuzzy neural network was used to predict the skin lesion border irregularity, where the lesion was firstly segmented from the skin, the lesion border extracted, border irregularity measured using a proposed measure vector, and using the extracted border irregularity measures to train the neural network. The proposed approach outperformed most of the state-of-the-art classification methods in general and its standard neural network counterpart in particular. However, the proposed fuzzy neural network was more time-consuming when training the network.

Software testing is an important task in software development activities, and it requires most of the resources, namely, time, cost and effort. To minimize this fatigue, software bug prediction (SBP) models are applied to improve the software quality assurance (SQA) processes by predicting buggy components. The bug prediction models use machine learning classifiers so that bugs can be predicted in software components in some software metrics. These classifiers are characterized by some configurable parameters, called hyperparameters that need to be optimized to ensure better performance. Many methods have been proposed by researchers to predict the defective components but these classifiers sometimes not perform well when default settings are used for machine learning classifiers. In this paper, software bug prediction model is proposed which uses machine learning classifiers in conjunction with the Artificial Immune Network (AIN) to improve bug prediction accuracy through its hyper-parameter optimization. For this purpose, seven machine learning classifiers, such as support vector machine Radial base function (SVM-RBF), K-nearest neighbor (KNN) (Minkowski metric), KNN (Euclidean metric), Naive Bayes (NB), Decision Tree (DT), Linear discriminate analysis (LDA), Random forest (RF) and adaptive boosting (AdaBoost), were used. The experiment was carried out on bug prediction dataset. The results showed that hyper-parameter optimization of machine learning classifiers, using AIN and its applications for software bug prediction, performed better than when classifiers with their default hyper-parameters were used. INDEX TERMS Artificial immune network (AIN), artificial immune system (AIS), hyper-parameter optimization, optimized artificial immune network (opt-aiNet), software bug prediction (SBP).

Coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) has had a major and sometimes lethal effect on global public health. COVID‐19 detection is a difficult task that necessitates the use of intelligent diagnosis algorithms. Numerous studies have suggested the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques to detect COVID‐19 infection in patients through chest X‐ray image analysis. The use of medical imaging with different modalities for COVID‐19 detection has become an important means of containing the spread of this disease. However, medical images are not sufficiently adequate for routine clinical use; there is, therefore, an increasing need for AI to be applied to improve the diagnostic performance of medical image analysis. Regrettably, due to the evolving nature of the COVID‐19 global epidemic, the systematic collection of a large data set for deep neural network (DNN)/ML training is problematic. Inspired by these studies, and to aid in the medical diagnosis and control of this contagious disease, we suggest a novel approach that ensembles the feature selection capability of the optimized artificial immune networks (opt‐aiNet) algorithm with deep learning (DL) and ML techniques for better prediction of the disease. In this article, we experimented with a DNN, a convolutional neural network (CNN), bidirectional long‐short‐term memory, a support vector machine (SVM), and logistic regression for the effective detection of COVID‐19 in patients. We illustrate the effectiveness of this proposed technique by using COVID‐19 image datasets with a variety of modalities. An empirical study using the COVID‐19 image dataset demonstrates that the proposed hybrid approaches, named COVID‐opt‐aiNet, improve classification accuracy by up to 98%–99% for SVM, 96%–97% for DNN, and 70.85%–71% for CNN, to name a few examples. Furthermore, statistical analysis ensures the validity of our proposed algorithms. The source code can be downloaded from Github: https://github.com/faizakhan1925/COVID-opt-aiNet.

Energy plays a pivotal role for economic development of a country. A reliable energy source is needed to improve the living standards of people. To achieve such a goal, governments and industries are trying to install a new energy infrastructure called the "Smart Grid". This helps to manage the electricity generation and distribution in an efficient manner. Buildings and other structures are the biggest consumers of electricity. There is a need to reduce the energy consumption so that the resources can be utilized efficiently. Therefore, in this paper, we give a comprehensive state-of-the-art on various recent techniques and solutions which provide energy savings in smart homes and buildings. This includes statistical models, cloud computing based solutions, fog computing and smart metering based architectures, and several other IoT (internet of things) inspired solutions. We also present a hypothetical model that treats energy supply and usage in buildings as a self-managing energy system (SES). This paper is concluded by highlighting several open issues and challenges related to energy management in buildings.INDEX TERMS Energy Management, Smart Buildings and Homes.

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