Abstract:The electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most important techniques for heart disease diagnosis. Many traditional methodologies of feature extraction and classification have been widely applied to ECG analysis. However, the effectiveness and efficiency of such methodologies remain to be improved, and much existing research did not consider the separation of training and testing samples from the same set of patients (so called inter-patient scheme). To cope with these issues, in this paper, we propose a method to classify ECG signals using wavelet packet entropy (WPE) and random forests (RF) following the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) recommendations and the inter-patient scheme. Specifically, we firstly decompose the ECG signals by wavelet packet decomposition (WPD), and then calculate entropy from the decomposed coefficients as representative features, and finally use RF to build an ECG classification model. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that WPE and RF are used to classify ECG following the AAMI recommendations and the inter-patient scheme. Extensive experiments are conducted on the publicly available MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database and influence of mother wavelets and level of decomposition for WPD, type of entropy and the number of base learners in RF on the performance are also discussed. The experimental results are superior to those by several state-of-the-art competing methods, showing that WPE and RF is promising for ECG classification.

Abstract:Crude oil, as one of the most important energy sources in the world, plays a crucial role in global economic events. An accurate prediction for crude oil price is an interesting and challenging task for enterprises, governments, investors, and researchers. To cope with this issue, in this paper, we proposed a method integrating ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), adaptive particle swarm optimization (APSO), and relevance vector machine (RVM)-namely, EEMD-APSO-RVM-to predict crude oil price based on the "decomposition and ensemble" framework. Specifically, the raw time series of crude oil price were firstly decomposed into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and one residue by EEMD. Then, RVM with combined kernels was applied to predict target value for the residue and each IMF individually. To improve the prediction performance of each component, an extended particle swarm optimization (PSO) was utilized to simultaneously optimize the weights and parameters of single kernels for the combined kernel of RVM. Finally, simple addition was used to aggregate all the predicted results of components into an ensemble result as the final result. Extensive experiments were conducted on the crude oil spot price of the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) to illustrate and evaluate the proposed method. The experimental results are superior to those by several state-of-the-art benchmark methods in terms of root mean squared error (RMSE), mean absolute percent error (MAPE), and directional statistic (Dstat), showing that the proposed EEMD-APSO-RVM is promising for forecasting crude oil price.

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Image encryption is one of the essential tasks in image security. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that integrates a hyperchaotic system, pixel-level Dynamic Filtering, DNA computing, and operations on 3D Latin Cubes, namely DFDLC, for image encryption. Specifically, the approach consists of five stages: (1) a newly proposed 5D hyperchaotic system with two positive Lyapunov exponents is applied to generate a pseudorandom sequence; (2) for each pixel in an image, a filtering operation with different templates called dynamic filtering is conducted to diffuse the image; (3) DNA encoding is applied to the diffused image and then the DNA-level image is transformed into several 3D DNA-level cubes; (4) Latin cube is operated on each DNA-level cube; and (5) all the DNA cubes are integrated and decoded to a 2D cipher image. Extensive experiments are conducted on public testing images, and the results show that the proposed DFDLC can achieve state-of-the-art results in terms of several evaluation criteria.

In the era of the Internet, image encryption plays an important role in information security. Chaotic systems and DNA operations have been proven to be powerful for image encryption. To further enhance the security of image, in this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that combines the fractional-order hyperchaotic Lorenz system and DNA computing (FOHCLDNA) for image encryption. Specifically, the algorithm consists of four parts: firstly, we use a fractional-order hyperchaotic Lorenz system to generate a pseudorandom sequence that will be utilized during the whole encryption process; secondly, a simple but effective diffusion scheme is performed to spread the little change in one pixel to all the other pixels; thirdly, the plain image is encoded by DNA rules and corresponding DNA operations are performed; finally, global permutation and 2D and 3D permutation are performed on pixels, bits, and acid bases. The extensive experimental results on eight publicly available testing images demonstrate that the encryption algorithm can achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of security and robustness when compared with some existing methods, showing that the FOHCLDNA is promising for image encryption.

Short-term load forecasting (STLF) is an essential and challenging task for power- or energy-providing companies. Recent research has demonstrated that a framework called “decomposition and ensemble” is very powerful for energy forecasting. To improve the effectiveness of STLF, this paper proposes a novel approach integrating the improved complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (ICEEMDAN), grey wolf optimization (GWO), and multiple kernel extreme learning machine (MKELM), namely, ICEEMDAN-GWO-MKELM, for STLF, following this framework. The proposed ICEEMDAN-GWO-MKELM consists of three stages. First, the complex raw load data are decomposed into a couple of relatively simple components by ICEEMDAN. Second, MKELM is used to forecast each decomposed component individually. Specifically, we use GWO to optimize both the weight and the parameters of every single kernel in extreme learning machine to improve the forecasting ability. Finally, the results of all the components are aggregated as the final forecasting result. The extensive experiments reveal that the ICEEMDAN-GWO-MKELM can outperform several state-of-the-art forecasting approaches in terms of some evaluation criteria, showing that the ICEEMDAN-GWO-MKELM is very effective for STLF.

Crude oil is one of the most important types of energy for the global economy, and hence it is very attractive to understand the movement of crude oil prices. However, the sequences of crude oil prices usually show some characteristics of nonstationarity and nonlinearity, making it very challenging for accurate forecasting crude oil prices. To cope with this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel approach that integrates complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBOOST), so-called CEEMDAN-XGBOOST, for forecasting crude oil prices. Firstly, we use CEEMDAN to decompose the nonstationary and nonlinear sequences of crude oil prices into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and one residue. Secondly, XGBOOST is used to predict each IMF and the residue individually. Finally, the corresponding prediction results of each IMF and the residue are aggregated as the final forecasting results. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments on the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil prices. The experimental results show that the proposed CEEMDAN-XGBOOST outperforms some state-of-the-art models in terms of several evaluation metrics.

As one of the most widely used media types, images play an important role in the era of the Internet. And hence how to enhance the security of images has become a hot topic in the field of information security. However, due to some intrinsic characteristics of images, image security is still a challenging task. For the purpose of coping with this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that combines a hyperchaotic system, dynamic filtering, and bit cuboid operations, namely, DFBC, for image encryption. Specifically, the proposed DFBC consists of four steps: firstly, a 7D Lorenz hyperchaotic system is utilized to generate a pseudorandom sequence; secondly, variable 1D filters are derived from the pseudorandom sequence, and dynamic filtering is conducted on each pixel of an image; thirdly, a diffusion scheme is performed and then the image is transformed to a bit cuboid; and, finally, various types of permutation (rearranging, symmetry, rotation, zigzag, and global bit permutation) are performed on the bit cuboid. The experiments on several testing images demonstrate that the DFBC achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of several evaluation criteria, showing that the DFBC is promising for image encryption.