Attributed graph clustering is crucial for analyzing complex networks, but integrating heterogeneous structural and attribute information remains a challenging task. Existing methods often struggle to balance these aspects, resulting in suboptimal clustering performance. To address this, we propose DV-ERNMF (Dual-View Entropy Regularized Nonnegative Matrix Factorization), a framework that decomposes the attributed network into two complementary views, structure and attributes, for separate, yet coordinated modeling. In the structural view, we introduce a Symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (SNMF) model enhanced with entropy-based regularization to yield sharper cluster assignments. For the attribute view, we construct a clustering-specific similarity matrix via subspace learning and apply SNMF to extract a structurally consistent cluster pattern. A new adaptive entropy-based regularizer is applied to enforce consistency between the partitions obtained from both views. The entire model is optimized jointly using a multiplicative update rule with theoretical convergence guarantees. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world networks demonstrate that DV-ERNMF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Reinforcement learning has been increasingly applied in monitoring applications because of its ability to learn from previous experiences and make adaptive decisions. However, existing machine learning-based health monitoring applications are mostly supervised learning algorithms, trained on labels, and they cannot make adaptive decisions in an uncertain, complex environment. This study proposes a novel and generic system, predictive deep reinforcement learning (PDRL), with multiple RL agents in a time series forecasting environment. The proposed generic framework accommodates virtual Deep Q Network (DQN) agents to monitor predicted future states of a complex environment with a well-defined reward policy so that the agent learns existing knowledge while maximizing their rewards. In the evaluation process of the proposed framework, three DRL agents were deployed to monitor a subject’s future heart rate, respiration, and temperature predicted using a BiLSTM model. With each iteration, the three agents were able to learn the associated patterns, and their cumulative rewards gradually increased. It outperformed the baseline models for all three monitoring agents. The proposed PDRL framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in time series forecasting by effectively integrating reinforcement learning agents with deep learning-based prediction. The proposed DRL agents and deep learning model in the PDRL framework are customized to enable transfer learning in other forecasting applications like traffic and weather, and monitor their states. The PDRL framework is able to learn the future states of the traffic and weather forecasting, and the cumulative rewards are gradually increasing over each episode.

Abstract Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related morbidity worldwide, underscoring the need for advanced diagnostic tools to improve early detection and treatment outcomes. This study introduces MammoSegNet, a novel convolutional neural network architecture optimized for precisely segmenting mammographic images. The proposed MammoSegNet incorporates Inception-ResNet blocks, Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) modules, and dilated convolutions to enable multi-scale feature extraction and efficient attention refinement while maintaining low computational complexity. MammoSegNet performance was rigorously evaluated on BCDR-D01 and INbreast datasets to examine its robustness and generalization. Using stratified fivefold cross-validation, the model was trained on BCDR-D01 and tested on the unseen INbreast dataset through Monte Carlo cross-validation. Preprocessing techniques, including Region of Interest (ROI) Isolation to concentrate on relevant areas, Normalization to standardized pixel intensities, and Data Augmentation to expand the dataset and enhance the model’s robustness, were employed. Additionally, a specialized image enhancement method called peak feature intensity transformation (PFIT) was designed to amplify diagnostic features while preserving structural integrity. Comparative evaluations confirmed MammoSegNet’s superior performance across metrics, achieving 97% accuracy on BCDR-D01 and 95% on INbreast. Statistical t-tests validated these improvements, and visual heatmaps demonstrated the model’s effectiveness in isolating tumor regions. These findings establish MammoSegNet as a promising tool for enhancing breast cancer diagnostic accuracy and reliability in medical applications.

Federated Learning (FL) is currently one of the most popular technologies in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) due to its collaborative learning and ability to preserve client privacy. However, it faces challenges such as non-identically and non-independently distributed (non-IID) data with imbalanced labels among local clients. To address these limitations, the research community has explored various approaches such as using local model parameters, federated generative adversarial learning, and federated representation learning. In our study, we propose a novel Clustered FedStack framework based on the previously published Stacked Federated Learning (FedStack) framework. Here, the local clients send their model predictions and output layer weights to a server, which then builds a robust global model. This global model clusters the local clients based on their output layer weights using a clustering mechanism. We adopt three clustering mechanisms, namely K-Means, Agglomerative, and Gaussian Mixture Models, into the framework and evaluate their performance. Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) is used with the maximum likelihood function to determine the number of clusters. Our results show that Clustered FedStack models outperform baseline models with clustering mechanisms. To estimate the convergence of our proposed framework, we use Cyclical learning rates.

Recommender Systems are mainly used in various e-commerce applications, especially online stores threatening users’ privacy. The privacy issues can be overcome by using security solutions, which include blockchain technology for privacy applications. The fusion of the Internet of Things and blockchain technology has fully improved modern distributed systems. The combination guarantees the safety and scalability of the recommender system. We aim to create an authorized secure exchange device using blockchain-enabled multiparty computation by adding smart contracts to the core blockchain protocol. The recommendation structure and Blockchain technology make online shopping more convenient and private. We propose a blockchain-related recommender system using the “movielens” data. The case study includes a smart contract model that recommends movies to buyers. Initially, we tested the model on a small “movielens dataset” and extended it to a 3M movielens dataset. We developed a classifier model for movielens and proposed a Dual light graph convolutional network for movielens data classification. Our results, including ablation analysis, show that blockchain strategies and Dual light graph convolutional networks can effectively improve recommender systems’ privacy. Furthermore, the suggested blockchain technique can be stretched by similar procedures.

From the planting base to the consumer’s table, agricultural products must go through multiple links such as planting, processing, transportation, warehousing, and sales. The quality and safety of agricultural products have received extensive attention from all walks of life. Based on the block chain technology, this paper will build a traceability system for the quality and safety of agricultural products, refine the research objects, and design solutions from the aspects of overall structure, role authority, operating process, and functional modules according to the characteristics of planted agricultural products, so as to realize the whole process of agricultural product supply chain tracking, traceability to ensure the quality and safety of agricultural products.

Recent advances in remote patient monitoring (RPM) systems can recognize various human activities to measure vital signs, including subtle motions from superficial vessels. There is a growing interest in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to this area of healthcare by addressing known limitations and challenges such as predicting and classifying vital signs and physical movements, which are considered crucial tasks. Federated learning is a relatively new AI technique designed to enhance data privacy by decentralizing traditional machine learning modeling. However, traditional federated learning requires identical architectural models to be trained across the local clients and global servers. This limits global model architecture due to the lack of local models’ heterogeneity. To overcome this, a novel federated learning architecture, FedStack, which supports ensembling heterogeneous architectural client models was proposed in this study. This work offers a protected privacy system for hospitalized in-patients in a decentralized approach and identifies optimum sensor placement. The proposed architecture was applied to a mobile health sensor benchmark dataset from 10 different subjects to classify 12 routine activities. Three AI models, artificial neural network (ANN), convolutional neural network (CNN), and bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) were trained on individual subject data. The federated learning architecture was applied to these models to build local and global models capable of state-of-the-art performances. The local CNN model outperformed ANN and Bi-LSTM models on each subject data. Our proposed work has demonstrated better performance for heterogeneous stacking of the local models compared to homogeneous stacking. Further analysis of the global heterogeneous CNN model determined that the optimum placement of the sensors on human limbs resulted in better activity recognition. This work sets the stage to build an enhanced RPM system that incorporates client privacy to assist with clinical observations for patients in an acute mental health facility and ultimately help to prevent unexpected death.

Abstract Coronary artery disease (CAD) is one of the major causes of mortality worldwide. Knowledge about risk factors that increase the probability of developing CAD can help to understand the disease better and assist in its treatment. Recently, modern computer‐aided approaches have been used for the prediction and diagnosis of diseases. Swarm intelligence algorithms like particle swarm optimization (PSO) have demonstrated great performance in solving different optimization problems. As rule discovery can be modelled as an optimization problem, it can be mapped to an optimization problem and solved by means of an evolutionary algorithm like PSO. An approach for discovering classification rules of CAD is proposed. The work is based on the real‐world CAD data set and aims at the detection of this disease by producing the accurate and effective rules. The proposed algorithm is a hybrid binary‐real PSO, which includes the combination of categorical and numerical encoding of a particle and a different approach for calculating the velocity of particles. The rules were developed from randomly generated particles, which take random values in the range of each attribute in the rule. Two different feature selection methods based on multi‐objective evolutionary search and PSO were applied on the data set, and the most relevant features were selected by the algorithms. The accuracy of two different rule sets were evaluated. The rule set with 11 features obtained more accurate results than the rule set with 13 features. Our results show that the proposed approach has the ability to produce effective rules with highest accuracy for the detection of CAD.

This paper proposes a new approach to produce classification rules based on evolutionary computation with novel crossover and mutation operators customized for execution on graphics processing unit (GPU). Also, a novel method is presented to define the fitness function, i.e. the function which measures quantitatively the accuracy of the rule. The proposed fitness function is benefited from parallelism due to the parallel execution of data instances. To this end, two novel concepts; coverage matrix and reduction vectors are used and an altered form of the reduction vector is compared with previous works. Our CUDA program performs operations on coverage matrix and reduction vector in parallel. Also these data structures are used for evaluation of fitness function and calculation of genetic operators in parallel. We proposed a vector called average coverage to handle crossover and mutation properly. Our proposed method obtained a maximum accuracy of 99.74% for Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) dataset, 95.73% for Poker dataset, and 100% for COVID-19 dataset. Our speedup is higher than 20% for HCV and COVID-19, and 50% for Poker, compared to using single core processors.

This paper reports on research to design an ensemble deep learning framework that integrates fine-tuned, three-stream hybrid deep neural network (i.e., Ensemble Deep Learning Model, EDLM), employing Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract facial image features, detect and accurately classify the pain. To develop the approach, the VGGFace is fine-tuned and integrated with Principal Component Analysis and employed to extract features in images from the Multimodal Intensity Pain database at the early phase of the model fusion. Subsequently, a late fusion, three layers hybrid CNN and recurrent neural network algorithm is developed with their outputs merged to produce image-classified features to classify pain levels. The EDLM model is then benchmarked by means of a single-stream deep learning model including several competing models based on deep learning methods. The results obtained indicate that the proposed framework is able to outperform the competing methods, applied in a multi-level pain detection database to produce a feature classification accuracy that exceeds 89 %, with a receiver operating characteristic of 93 %. To evaluate the generalization of the proposed EDLM model, the UNBC-McMaster Shoulder Pain dataset is used as a test dataset for all of the modelling experiments, which reveals the efficacy of the proposed method for pain classification from facial images. The study concludes that the proposed EDLM model can accurately classify pain and generate multi-class pain levels for potential applications in the medical informatics area, and should therefore, be explored further in expert systems for detecting and classifying the pain intensity of patients, and automatically evaluating the patients' pain level accurately.

In an opinionated long review, there may be several targets described by different potential terms. Traditional review-level techniques for Persian sentiment analysis addressed the problem using a one-method-fits-all solution in which the overall polarity of a review is calculated using all its opinionated words without considering their target. In this article, a new method is proposed, which first decomposes a long review into its constituent sentences and then detects the main target of each sentence. In the next step, five policies, including most occurring first (MOF), most general first (MGF), most specific first (MSF), first occurring first (FOF), and last occurring first (LOF), are proposed to come up with the main target of the review. Finally, using the part-of-speech (POS) tags, potential terms in the sentences are specified and a comprehensive sentiment lexicon is employed to compute the polarity of the sentences. In order to evaluate the proposed method, three data sets of user reviews about different topics, including digital equipment, hotels, and movies, are created as no previous study addressed the problem of target identification in the Persian language. The results of comparing the proposed method with a state-of-the-art lexicon-based method show that specifying the main targets of reviews can improve the performance of the systems about 17% and 12% in terms of accuracy and F1-measure. Moreover, the proposed method using the MGF policy achieves the best performance in finding the main target of reviews, while for finding the ultimate polarity of reviews, the MOF outperforms other policies.

Text classification (a.k.a text categorisation) is an effective and efficient technology for information organisation and management. With the explosion of information resources on the Web and corporate intranets continues to increase, it has being become more and more important and has attracted wide attention from many different research fields. In the literature, many feature selection methods and classification algorithms have been proposed. It also has important applications in the real world. However, the dramatic increase in the availability of massive text data from various sources is creating a number of issues and challenges for text classification such as scalability issues. The purpose of this report is to give an overview of existing text classification technologies for building more reliable text classification applications, to propose a research direction for addressing the challenging problems in text mining.

As China’s agricultural output has improved, the national and local monitoring system of agricultural product safety has become much better, and monitoring standards have become increasingly strict. Despite this, there are agricultural product safety incidents which have caused consumer panic. One way to address this is by properly establishing tracking systems so that agricultural product logistics in China can be tracked and monitored. We explored this research objective with agricultural traceability and security in mind. One option that could be considered is the blockchain technology. Blockchain could also be used to ascertain the provenance of agricultural products to increase the quality and safety of the Chinese agricultural supply chain. In this context, this research converged on big data and technology, platforms and other means for product quality and safety of agricultural products traceability. In order to verify the accuracy of these three convergence, regression analysis were used to construct five models for verification of three hypothesis. The results show that based on “Internet+”, using big data, big technology and big platform can significantly increase the accuracy of agricultural products traceability system hence improve consumer acceptance of the safety of agricultural products.

Determining the key factors that affect student engagement will assist academics to improve the student motivation. The Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT) reports have shown low engagement levels in higher education students [21, 22, 23]. While factors such as online education, lack of attendance and poor design of course content have been attributed to this cause, it is still not clear as to the determination of those factors influencing student engagement in a higher education setting. In the modern tertiary settings, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays an essential role in disseminating the course related information with a Learning Management System (LMS) which become the platform to communicate crucial course-related information. Academics can develop course materials on these LMS' to engage students beyond the classrooms and students need to interact with those LMS' to get apprehend the transmitted knowledge. Since LMS' are operated on a computer platform, academics and students require strong ICT skills which are further utilized in preparation of course materials. Their relevance, appropriateness, the way various tasks are prepared, how communication is facilitated, the role and utilization of discussion forums and other social media structures available to students to interact with, and the way in which assessments are conducted, providing a Just in Time (JIT) type of knowledge students require. The investigation into these major factors forms the basis of this study. Thus, understanding how various factors related to LMS' in a tertiary setting influence student engagement and then determining those factors that contribute to this engagement are the main objective of this study. To pursue the main objective of this study, a hybrid method mainly involving a pseudo meta-analysis to unearth additional evidence required for the study, a comprehensive qualitative component to understand the sector factors and perhaps a small quantitative component to confirm the sector views will be employed.

Based on our ongoing work, this work in progress project aims to develop an automated system to detect distress in people to enable early referral for interventions to target anxiety and depression, to mitigate suicidal ideation and to improve adherence to treatment. The project will utilize either use existing voice data to assess people into various scales of distress, or will collect voice data as per existing standards of distress measurement, to develop basic computing algorithms required to detect various attributes associated with distress, detected through a person's voice in a telephone call to a helpline. This will be then matched with the already available psychological assessment instruments such as the Distress Thermometer for these persons. In order to trigger interventions, organizational contexts are essential as interventions rely on the type of distress. Therefore, the model will be tested on various organizational settings such as the Police, Emergency and Health along with the Distress detection instruments normally used in a psychological assessment for accuracy and validation. The outcome of the project will culminate in a fully automated integrated system, and will save significant resources to organizations. The translation of the project will be realized in step-change improvements to quality of life within the gamut of public policy.

The emergence of knowledge-based economies has emphasised the importance of interactive knowledge management technologies, which have manifested themselves in the form of social networking tools. Organization's ability to leverage and manage the relevant knowledge is a sustainable strategic tool. This research focus on the ways in which social technologies facilitate knowledge sharing in the workplace. Findings uncovers key drivers of three dimensions of knowledge management, individual, organization and technology and suggest to connect them along with a knowledge process architecture for leveraging knowledge.

Although the smaller quantization parameter has smaller coding distortion of message source, the overall distortion rate at the receiver does not necessarily decrease as its quantization parameter decreases. The reason is that a smaller quantization parameter often means a long transmission queue, and a long transmission queue means a bigger loss rate and channel distortion. In this paper, we propose a packet loss-distortion driven cross-layer optimization of video transmission for H.264 video applications in 802.11e wireless networks. Firstly, we analyzed the relationship between quantization parameter and quantization distortion and built an estimation model of transmission distortion. Then the total distortions in the received station are estimated according to the packet loss rate of different video data partition. Secondly, a selection algorithm of optimal quantization parameter based on the total distortion is presented. Our experimental results demonstrate that, at certain loss rates, the proposed method not only outperforms the up-bottom cross-layer optimization with various queue priorities for video data partitions, but also outperforms the bottom-up cross-layer with an adaptive quantization step selection both in terms of received-end destination and video traffic.

Many of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter make it easy for everyone to share their thoughts on literally anything. Topic and opinion detection in social media facilitates the identification of emerging societal trends, analysis of public reactions to policies and business products. In this paper, we proposed a new method that combines the opining mining and context-based topic modelling to analyse public opinions on social media data. Context based topic modelling is used to categorise data in groups and discover hidden communities in data group. The unwanted data group discovered by the topic model then will be discarded. A lexicon based opinion mining method will be applied to the remaining data groups to spot out the public sentiment about the entities. A set of Tweets data on Australian Federal Election 2010 was used in our experiments. Our experimental results demonstrate that, with the help of topic modelling, our social media analysis model is accurate and effective.

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining is an important type of text analysis that aims to support decision making by extracting and analyzing opinion oriented text, identifying positive and negative opinions, and measuring how positively or negatively an entity (i.e., people, organization, event, location, product, topic, etc.) is regarded. As more and more users express their political and religious views on Twitter, tweets become valuable sources of people's opinions. Tweets data can be efficiently used to infer people's opinions for marketing or social studies. This paper proposes a Tweets Sentiment Analysis Model (TSAM) that can spot the societal interest and general people's opinions in regard to a social event. In this paper, Australian federal election 2010 event was taken as an example for sentiment analysis experiments. We are primarily interested in the sentiment of the specific political candidates, i.e., two primary minister candidates - Julia Gillard and Tony Abbot. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the system.

This paper presents a novel two-stage information filtering model which combines the merits of term-based and pattern- based approaches to effectively filter sheer volume of infor- mation. In particular, the first filtering stage is supported by a novel rough analysis model which efficiently removes a large number of irrelevant documents, thereby addressing the overload problem. The second filtering stage is empow- ered by a semantically rich pattern taxonomy mining model which effectively fetches incoming documents according to the specific information needs of a user, thereby addressing the mismatch problem. The experiments have been conducted to compare the proposed two-stage filtering (T-SM) model with other possible "term-based + pattern-based" or "term-based + term-based" IF models. The results based on the RCV1 corpus show that the T-SM model significantly outperforms other types of "two-stage" IF models.

Mismatch and overload are the two fundamental issues regarding the effectiveness of information filtering. Both term-based and pattern (phrase) based approaches have been employed to address these issues. However, they all suffer from some limitations with regard to effectiveness. This paper proposes a novel solution that includes two stages: an initial topic filtering stage followed by a stage involving pattern taxonomy mining. The objective of the first stage is to address mismatch by quickly filtering out probable irrelevant documents. The threshold used in the first stage is motivated theoretically. The objective of the second stage is to address overload by apply pattern mining techniques to rationalize the data relevance of the reduced document set after the first stage. Substantial experiments on RCV1 show that the proposed solution achieves encouraging performance.

The amount of Web information is growing rapidly, improving the efficiency and accuracy of Web information retrieval is uphill battle. There are two fundamental issues regarding the effectiveness of Web information gathering: information mismatch and overload. To tackle these difficult issues, an integrated information filtering and sophisticated data processing model has been presented in this paper. In the first phase of the proposed scheme, an information filter that based on user search intents was incorporated in Web search process to quickly filter out irrelevant data. In the second data processing phase, a pattern taxonomy model (PTM) was carried out using the reduced data. PTM rationalizes the data relevance by applying data mining techniques that involves more rigorous computations. Several experiments have been conducted and the results show that more effective and efficient access Web information has been achieved using the new scheme.

With the explosive growth of information available on the Internet, more effective data mining and data reasoning mechanism is required to process the sheer volume of information. Belief revision logic offers the expressive power to represent information retrieval contexts, and it also provides a sound inference mechanism to model the nonmonotonicity arising in changing retrieval contexts. Contextual knowledge for information retrieval can be extracted via efficient sequential pattern mining. We present a pattern taxonomy extraction model which efficiently performs the task of discovering descriptive frequent sequential patterns by pruning the noisy associations. This paper illustrates a novel approach of integrating the sequential data mining method into the belief revision based adaptive information agents to improve the agents' learning autonomy and prediction power. Initial experiments show that our belief revision logic and sequential pattern mining based intelligent information agents outperform the vector space model based information agents. Our work opens the door to the development of next generation of intelligent information agents to alleviate the information overload problem.

It is well known that taking the Web user profiles into account can enhance the effectiveness of Web mining systems. However, due to the dynamic and complex nature of Web users, automatically acquiring worthwhile user profiles was found to be very challenging. Ontology-based user profile can possess more accurate user information. This research emphasizes on acquiring search intentions information. This paper presents a new approach of developing user profile for Web searching. The model considers the user's search intentions by the process of PTM (Pattern-Taxonomy Model). Initial experiments show that the user profile based on search intention is more useful than the generic PTM user profile. Developing user profile that contains user search intentions is essential for effective Web search and retrieval.