Selection hyper-heuristics have emerged as high level general-purpose search methodologies that mix and control a set of low-level (meta)heuristics. Previous empirical studies over a range of single objective optimisation problems have shown that the number and type of low-level (meta)heuristics used are influential to the performance of selection hyper-heuristics. In addition, move acceptance strategies play an important role and can significantly affect the overall performance of a hyper-heuristic. In this paper, we introduce an adapted variant of an existing learning automata based multiobjective hyper-heuristic from the literature. We investigate the performance and generality level of the proposed method, and another learning automata based selection hyper-heuristic, operating over a search space of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) across two well-known multiobjective optimisation benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that, regardless of the number and type of low-level metaheuristics available, the learning automata based hyper-heuristics outperform each constituent MOEA individually, and an online learning and random choice selection hyper-heuristic from the literature. This performance and generality is shown to be consistent across a number of different move acceptance strategies.

Abstract Ultrasound imaging (US) is one of the most common diagnostic imaging tools for producing images of the human body in clinical practice. This work is devoted to studying ultrasound images collected from gynaecological tests for medical purposes regarding ovarian and breast defects. The study revolves around (i) Enhancing the texture of the image by applying a new effective framework that can help in reducing the speckle noise from the image while preserving the most important information; (ii) Extracting the most prominent features using the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) and; (iii) Fusing the features that are produced by the edge operators and using them as an input to the ANN classifier to generate three trained classifiers. The fusion technique has been used to get an effective decision by using the whole features. The experimental results of the proposed method for the breast cancer and ovarian tumour using the second experiment achieved 97.96% accuracy, 96.05% sensitivity, and 99.17% specificity by utilizing the breast cancer information set. Overall, 95.87% precision, 97.01% sensitivity, and 93.33% specificity have been achieved for the ovarian tumour data collection. Consequently, the proposed method has been improved to validate the output of modern computerized and automated technologies. This method analyzes the gynaecological ultrasound images to identify suspicious objects or cases with health consequences for women.

Parkinson's disease (PD) diagnostics includes numerous analyses related to the neurological, physical, and psychical status of the patient. Medical teams analyze multiple symptoms and patient history considering verified genetic influences. The proposed method investigates the voice symptoms of this disease. The voice files are processed, and the feature extraction is conducted. Several machine learning techniques are used to recognize Parkinson's and healthy patients. This study focuses on examining PD diagnosis through voice data features. A new multi-agent feature filter (MAFT) algorithm is proposed to select the best features from the voice dataset. The MAFT algorithm is designed to select a set of features to improve the overall performance of prediction models and prevent over-fitting possibly due to extreme reduction to the features. Moreover, this algorithm aims to reduce the complexity of the prediction, accelerate the training phase, and build a robust training model. Ten different machine learning methods are then integrated with the MAFT algorithm to form a powerful voice-based PD diagnosis model. Recorded test results of the PD prediction model using the actual and filtered features yielded 86.38% and 86.67% accuracies on average, respectively. With the aid of the MAFT feature selection, the test results are improved by 3.2% considering the hybrid model (HM) and 3.1% considering the Naïve Bayesian and random forest. Subsequently, an HM, which comprises a binary convolutional neural network and three feature selection algorithms (namely, genetic algorithm, Adam optimizer, and mini-batch gradient descent), is proposed to improve the classification accuracy of the PD. The results reveal that PD achieves an overall accuracy of 93.7%. The HM is integrated with the MAFT, and the combination realizes an overall accuracy of 96.9%. These results demonstrate that the combination of the MAFT algorithm and the HM model significantly enhances the PD diagnosis outcomes.