An adaptable and personalized framework for top-N course recommendations in online learning

In recent years, the proliferation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) platforms on a global scale has been remarkable. Learners can now meet their learning demands with the help of MOOC. However, learners might not understand the course material well if they have access to a lot of information due to their inadequate expertise and cognitive ability. Personalized Recommender Systems (RSs), a cutting-edge technology, can assist in addressing this issue. It greatly increases resource acquisition through personalized availability for various people of all ages. Intelligent learning methods, such as machine learning and Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used in RS challenges. However, machine learning needs supervised data and classical RL is not suitable for multi-task recommendations in online learning platforms. To address these challenges, the proposed framework integrates a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and multi-agent approach. This adaptive system personalizes the learning experience by considering key factors such as learner sentiments, learning style, preferences, competency, and adaptive difficulty levels. We formulate the interactive RS problem using a DRL-based Actor-Critic model named DRR, treating recommendations as a sequential decision-making process. The DRR enables the system to provide top-N course recommendations and personalized learning paths, enriching the student's experience. Extensive experiments on a MOOC dataset such as the 100 K Coursera course review validate the proposed DRR model, demonstrating its superiority over baseline models in major evaluation metrics for long-term recommendations. The outcomes of this research contribute to the field of e-learning technology, guiding the design and implementation of course RSs, to facilitate personalized and relevant recommendations for online learning students.

DEBCM: Deep Learning-Based Enhanced Breast Invasive Ductal Carcinoma Classification Model in IoMT Healthcare Systems

Accurate breast cancer (BC) diagnosis is a difficult task that is critical for the proper treatment of BC in IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) healthcare systems. This paper proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based diagnosis method for detecting early-stage breast cancer. In developing the proposed method, we incorporated the CNN model for the invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) classification using breast histology image data. We have incorporated transfer learning (TL) and data augmentation (DA) mechanisms to improve the CNN model's predictive outcomes. For the fine-tuning process, the CNN model was trained with breast histology image data. Furthermore, the held-out cross-validation method for best model selection and hyper-parameter tuning was incorporated. In addition, various performance evaluation metrics for model performance assessment were computed. The experimental results confirmed that the proposed model outperformed the baseline models across all evaluation metrics, achieving 99.04% accuracy. We recommend the proposed method for early recognition of BC in IoMT healthcare systems due to its high performance.

MCNN: a multi-level CNN model for the classification of brain tumors in IoT-healthcare system

The classification of brain tumors is significantly important for diagnosing and treating brain tumors in IoT healthcare systems. In this work, we have proposed a robust classification model for brain tumors employing deep learning techniques. In the design of the proposed method, an improved Convolutional neural network is used to classify Meningioma, Glioma, and Pituitary types of brain tumors. To test the multi-level convolutional neural network model, brain magnetic resonance image data is utilized. The MCNN model classification results were improved using data augmentation and transfer learning methods. In addition, hold-out and performance evaluation metrics have been employed in the proposed MCNN model. The experimental results show that the proposed model obtained higher outcomes than the state-of-the-art techniques and achieved 99.89% classification accuracy. Due to the higher results of the proposed approach, we recommend it for the identification of brain cancer in IoT-healthcare systems.

Impact analysis of keyword extraction using contextual word embedding

A document's keywords provide high-level descriptions of the content that summarize the document's central themes, concepts, ideas, or arguments. These descriptive phrases make it easier for algorithms to find relevant information quickly and efficiently. It plays a vital role in document processing, such as indexing, classification, clustering, and summarization. Traditional keyword extraction approaches rely on statistical distributions of key terms in a document for the most part. According to contemporary technological breakthroughs, contextual information is critical in deciding the semantics of the work at hand. Similarly, context-based features may be beneficial in the job of keyword extraction. For example, simply indicating the previous or next word of the phrase of interest might be used to describe the context of a phrase. This research presents several experiments to validate that context-based key extraction is significant compared to traditional methods. Additionally, the KeyBERT proposed methodology also results in improved results. The proposed work relies on identifying a group of important words or phrases from the document's content that can reflect the authors' main ideas, concepts, or arguments. It also uses contextual word embedding to extract keywords. Finally, the findings are compared to those obtained using older approaches such as Text Rank, Rake, Gensim, Yake, and TF-IDF. The Journals of Universal Computer (JUCS) dataset was employed in our research. Only data from abstracts were used to produce keywords for the research article, and the KeyBERT model outperformed traditional approaches in producing similar keywords to the authors' provided keywords. The average similarity of our approach with author-assigned keywords is 51%.

IIMFCBM : Intelligent Integrated Model for Feature Extraction and Classification of Brain Tumors Using MRI Clinical Imaging Data in IoT-Healthcare

Accurate classification of brain tumors is vital for detecting brain cancer in the Medical Internet of Things. Detecting brain cancer at its early stages is a tremendous medical problem, and many researchers have proposed various diagnostic systems; however, these systems still do not effectively detect brain cancer. To address this issue, we proposed an automatic diagnosing framework that will assist medical experts in diagnosing brain cancer and ensuring proper treatment. In developing the proposed integrated framework, we first integrated a Convolutional Neural Networks model to extract deep features from Magnetic resonance imaging. The extracted features are forwarded to a Long Short Term Memory model, which performs the final classification. Augmentation techniques were applied to increase the data size, thereby boosting the performance of our model. We used the hold-out Cross-validation technique for training and validating our method. In addition, we used various metrics to evaluate the proposed model. The results obtained from the experiments show that our model achieved higher performance than previous models. The proposed model is strongly recommended to be used to diagnose brain cancer in Medical Internet of Things healthcare systems due to its higher predictive outcomes.

Utilizing grid search cross-validation with adaptive boosting for augmenting performance of machine learning models

Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has increased the importance of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) instigating students to study from their homes. Every day a tremendous amount of data is generated when students interact with VLEs to perform different activities and access learning material. To make the generated data useful, it must be processed and managed by the proper machine learning (ML) algorithm. ML algorithms' applications are many folds with Education Data Mining (EDM) and Learning Analytics (LA) as their major fields. ML algorithms are commonly used to process raw data to discover hidden patterns and construct a model to make future predictions, such as predicting students' performance, dropouts, engagement, etc. However, in VLE, it is important to select the right and most applicable ML algorithm to give the best performance results. In this study, we aim to improve those ML and DL algorithms' performance that give an inferior performance in terms of performance, accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. Several ML algorithms were applied on Open University Learning Analytics (OULA) dataset to reveal which one offers the best results in terms of performance, accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. Two popular ML algorithms called Decision Tree (DT) and Feed-Forward Neural Network (FFNN) provided unsatisfactory results. They were selected and experimented with various techniques such as grid search cross-validation, adaptive boosting, extreme gradient boosting, early stopping, feature engineering, and dropping inactive neurons to improve their performance scores. Moreover, we also determined the feature weights/importance in predicting the students' study performance, leading to the design and development of the adaptive learning system. The ML techniques and the methods used in this research study can be used by instructors/administrators to optimize learning content and provide informed guidance to students, thus improving their learning experience and making it exciting and adaptive.

Optimal policy learning for COVID-19 prevention using reinforcement learning

COVID-19 has changed the lifestyle of many people due to its rapid human-to-human transmission. The spread started at the end of January 2020, and different countries used different approaches in terms of testing, sanitization, lock down and quarantine centres to control the spread of the virus. People are getting back to working and routine life activities with new normal standards of testing, sanitization, social distancing and lock down. People are regularly tested to identify those who are infected with COVID-19 and isolate them from general public. However, testing all people unnecessarily is an expensive operation in terms of resources usage. There must be an optimal policy to test only those who have higher chances of being COVID-19 positive. Similarly, sanitization is used for individuals and streets to disinfect people and places. However, sanitization is also an expensive operation in terms of resources, and it is not possible to disinfect each and every individual and street. Social separating or lock down or quarantine centres focuses are different methodologies that are utilised to control the human-to-human transmission of the infection and separate the individuals who are contaminated with COVID-19. However, lock down and quarantine centres are expensive operations in terms of resources as it disturbs the affairs of state and the growth of economy. At the same time, it negatively affects the quality of life of a society. It is also not possible to provide resources to all citizens by locking them inside homes or quarantine centres for infinite time. All these parameters are expensive in terms of resources and have an effect on controlling the spread of the virus, quality of life of human, resources and economy. In this article, a novel intelligent method based on reinforcement learning (RL) is built up that quantifies the unique levels of testing, disinfection and lock down alongside its impact on the spread of the infection, personal satisfaction or quality of life, resource use and economy. Different RL algorithms are actualized and agents are prepared with these algorithms to interact with the environment to gain proficiency with the best strategy. The examinations exhibit that deep learning–based algorithms, for example, DQN and DDPG are performing better than customary RL algorithms, for example, Q-Learning and SARSA.

Reversible data hiding techniques with high message embedding capacity in images

Reversible Data Hiding (RDH) techniques have gained popularity over the last two decades, where data is embedded in an image in such a way that the original image can be restored. Earlier works on RDH was based on the Image Histogram Modification that uses the peak point to embed data in the image. More recent works focus on the Difference Image Histogram Modification that exploits the fact that the neighbouring pixels of an image are highly correlated and therefore the difference of image makes more space to embed large amount of data. In this paper we propose a framework to increase the embedding capacity of reversible data hiding techniques that use a difference of image to embed data. The main idea is that, instead of taking the difference of the neighboring pixels, we rearrange the columns (or rows) of the image in a way that enhances the smooth regions of an image. Any difference based technique to embed data can then be used in the transformed image. The proposed method is applied on different types of images including textures, patterns and publicly available images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method not only increases the message embedding capacity of a given image by more than 50% but also the visual quality of the marked image containing the message is more than the visual quality obtained by existing state-of-the-art reversible data hiding technique. The proposed technique is also verified by Pixel Difference Histogram (PDH) Stegoanalysis and results demonstrate that marked images generated by proposed method is undetectable by PDH analysis.