Schizophrenia is a severe neurological disease where a patient’s perceptions of reality are disrupted. Its symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, and profoundly strange thinking and behavior, which make the patient’s daily functions difficult. Despite identifying genetic variations linked to Schizophrenia, causative genes involved in pathogenesis and expression regulations remain unknown. There is no particular way in life sciences for diagnosing Schizophrenia. Commonly used machine learning and deep learning are data-oriented. They lack the ability to deal with uncertainty in data. Belief Rule Based Expert System (BRBES) methodology addresses various categories of uncertainty in data with evidential reasoning. Previous researches showed the association of DNA methylation (DNAm) with risk of Schizophrenia. Whole blood DNAm data, hence, is useful for smart diagnosis of Scizophrenia. However, to our knowledge, no previous studies have investigated the performance of BRBES to diagnose Schizophrenia. Therefore, in this study, we explore BRBES’ performance in diagnosing Schizophrenia using whole blood DNAm data. BRBES was optimized by gradient-free algorithms due to the limitations of gradient-based optimization. Classification thresholds were optimized to yield better results. Finally, we compared performance to two machine learning models after 5-fold cross-validation where our model achieved the highest average sensitivity (76.8%) among the three.

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is a standard network architecture for edge computing, which is proposed to handle enormous computation demands from emerging resource-intensive and latency-sensitive applications and services as well as accommodate Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for ever-growing users through computation offloading. Since the demand of end-users is unknown in a rapidly changing dynamic environment, processing offloaded tasks in a non-optimal server can deteriorate QoS due to high latency and increasing task failures. In order to deal with such a challenge in MEC, a two-stage Belief Rule-Based (BRB) workload orchestrator is proposed to distribute the workload of end-users to optimum computing units, support strict QoS requirements, ensure efficient utilization of computational resources, minimize task failures, and reduce the overall service time. The proposed BRB workload orchestrator decides the optimal execution location for each offloaded task from User Equipment (UE) within the overall MEC architecture based on network conditions, computational resources, and task requirements. EdgeCloudSim simulator is used to conduct comprehensive simulation experiments for evaluating the performance of the proposed BRB orchestrator in contrast to four workload orchestration approaches from the literature with different types of applications. Based on the simulation experiments, the proposed workload orchestrator outperforms state-of-the-art workload orchestration approaches and ensures efficient utilization of computational resources while minimizing task failures and reducing the overall service time.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a degenerative neurological disease that is the most common cause of dementia. It is also the fifth-greatest reason for death in adults aged 65 and over. However, there is no accurate way of diagnosing neurological Alzheimer’s disorders in medical research. Blood gene expression analysis offers a realistic option for identifying those at risk of AD. Blood gene expression patterns have previously proved beneficial in diagnosing several brain disorders, despite the blood-brain barrier’s restricted permeability. The most extensively used statistical machine learning and deep learning algorithms are data-driven and do not address data uncertainty. Belief Rule-Based Expert System (BRBES) is an approach that can identify various forms of uncertainty in data and reason using evidential reasoning. No previous research studies have examined BRBES’ performance in diagnosing AD. As a result, this study aims to identify how effective BRBES is at diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease from blood gene expression data. We used a gradient-free technique to optimize the BRBES because prior research had shown the limits of gradient-based optimization. We have also attempted to address the class imbalance problem using BRBES’ consequent utility parameters. Finally, after 5-fold cross-validation, we compared our model to three classic ML models, finding that our model had a greater specificity than the other three models across all folds. The average specificity of our models for all folds was 32%

In the prevailing COVID-19 pandemic, accurate diagnosis plays a vital role in preventing the mass transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Especially patients with pneumonia need correct diagnosis for proper treatment of their respiratory distress. However, the current standard diagnosis method, RT-PCR testing has a significant false negative and false positive rate. As alternatives, diagnosis methods based on artificial intelligence can be applied for faster and more accurate diagnosis. Currently, various machine learning and deep learning techniques are being researched on to develop better COVID-19 diagnosis system. However, these approaches do not consider the uncertainty in data. Deep learning approaches use backpropagation. It is an unexplainable black box approach and is prone to problems like catastrophic forgetting. This article applies a belief rule-based expert system (BRBES) for diagnosis of COVID-19 on hematological data and CT scan data of lung tissue infection of adult pneumonia patients. The system is optimized with nature-inspired optimization algorithm—BRBES-based adaptive differential evolution (BRBaDE). This model has been evaluated on a real-world dataset of COVID-19 patients published in a previous work. Also, performance of the BRBaDE has been compared with BRBES optimized with genetic algorithm and MATLAB’s fmincon function where BRBaDE outperformed genetic algorithm and fmincon and showed best accuracy of 73.91%. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

The enormous use of facial expression recognition in various sectors of computer science elevates the interest of researchers to research this topic. Computer vision coupled with deep learning approach formulates a way to solve several real-world problems. For instance, in robotics, to carry out as well as to strengthen the communication between expert systems and human or even between expert agents, it is one of the requirements to analyze information from visual content. Facial expression recognition is one of the trending topics in the area of computer vision. In our previous work, a facial expression recognition system is delivered which can classify an image into seven universal facial expressions—angry, disgust, fear, happy, neutral, sad, and surprise. This is the extension of our previous research in which a real-time facial expression recognition system is proposed that can recognize a total of ten facial expressions including the previous seven facial expressions and additional three facial expressions—mockery, think, and wink from video streaming data. After model training, the proposed model has been able to gain high validation accuracy on a combined facial expression dataset. Moreover, the real-time validation of the proposed model is also promising.

Accurate monitoring of air quality can reduce its adverse impact on earth. Ground-level sensors can provide fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations and ground images. But, such sensors have limited spatial coverage and require deployment cost. PM2.5 can be estimated from satellite-retrieved Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) too. However, AOD is subject to uncertainties associated with its retrieval algorithms and constrain the spatial resolution of estimated PM2.5. AOD is not retrievable under cloudy weather as well. In contrast, satellite images provide continuous spatial coverage with no separate deployment cost. Accuracy of monitoring from such satellite images is hindered due to uncertainties of sensor data of relevant environmental parameters, such as, relative humidity, temperature, wind speed and wind direction . Belief Rule Based Expert System (BRBES) is an efficient algorithm to address these uncertainties. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is suitable for image analytics. Hence, we propose a novel model by integrating CNN with BRBES to monitor air quality from satellite images with improved accuracy. We customized CNN and optimized BRBES to increase monitoring accuracy further. An obscure image has been differentiated between polluted air and cloud based on relationship of PM2.5 with relative humidity. Valid environmental data (temperature, wind speed and wind direction) have been adopted to further strengthen the monitoring performance of our proposed model. Three-year observation data (satellite images and environmental parameters) from 2014 to 2016 of Shanghai have been employed to analyze and design our proposed model.

Accurate monitoring of air quality can reduce its adverse impact on earth. Ground-level sensors can provide fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) concentrations and ground images. But, such sensors have limited spatial coverage and require deployment cost. PM_2.5 can be estimated from satellite-retrieved Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) too. However, AOD is subject to uncertainties associated with its retrieval algorithms and constrain the spatial resolution of estimated PM_2.5. AOD is not retrievable under cloudy weather as well. In contrast, satellite images provide continuous spatial coverage with no separate deployment cost. Accuracy of monitoring from such satellite images is hindered due to uncertainties of sensor data of relevant enviromental parameters, such as, relative humidity, temperature, wind speed and wind direction . Belief Rule Based Expert System (BRBES) is an efficient algorithm to address these uncertainties. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is suitable for image analytics. Hence, we propose a novel model by integrating CNN with BRBES to monitor air quality from satellite images with improved accuracy. We customized CNN and optimized BRBES to increase monitoring accuracy further. An obscure image has been differentiated between polluted air and cloud in our model. Valid environmental data (temperature, wind speed and wind direction) have been adopted to further strengthen the monitoring performance of our proposed model. Three-year observation data (satellite images and environmental parameters) from 2014 to 2016 of Shanghai have been employed to analyze and design our proposed model. The results conclude that the accuracy of our model to monitor PM_2.5 of Shanghai is higher than only CNN and other conventional Machine Learning methods. Real-time validation of our model on near real-time satellite images of April-2021 of Shanghai shows average difference between our calculated PM_2.5 concentrations and the actual one within ±5.51.

The novel Coronavirus-induced disease COVID-19 is the biggest threat to human health at the present time, and due to the transmission ability of this virus via its conveyor, it is spreading rapidly in almost every corner of the globe. The unification of medical and IT experts is required to bring this outbreak under control. In this research, an integration of both data and knowledge-driven approaches in a single framework is proposed to assess the survival probability of a COVID-19 patient. Several neural networks pre-trained models: Xception, InceptionResNetV2, and VGG Net, are trained on X-ray images of COVID-19 patients to distinguish between critical and non-critical patients. This prediction result, along with eight other significant risk factors associated with COVID-19 patients, is analyzed with a knowledge-driven belief rule-based expert system which forms a probability of survival for that particular patient. The reliability of the proposed integrated system has been tested by using real patient data and compared with expert opinion, where the performance of the system is found promising.

Artificial intelligence has achieved notable advances across many applications, and the field is recently concerned with developing novel methods to explain machine learning models. Deep neural networks deliver the best performance accuracy in different domains, such as text categorization, image classification, and speech recognition. Since the neural network models are black-box types, they lack transparency and explainability in predicting results. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Fake News Detection is a challenging research problem as it endangers the lives of many online users by providing misinformation. Therefore, the transparency and explainability of COVID-19 fake news classification are necessary for building the trustworthiness of model prediction. We proposed an integrated LIME-BiLSTM model where BiLSTM assures classification accuracy, and LIME ensures transparency and explainability. In this integrated model, since LIME behaves similarly to the original model and explains the prediction, the proposed model becomes comprehensible. The performance of this model in terms of explainability is measured by using Kendall’s tau correlation coefficient. We also employ several machine learning models and provide a comparison of their performances. Therefore, we analyzed and compared the computation overhead of our proposed model with the other methods because the model takes the integrated strategy.

Parkinson’s disease is a neurological disorder. It affects the structures of the central and peripheral nervous system that control movement. One of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease is difficulty in speaking. Hence, analysis of speech signal of patients may provide valuable features for diagnosing. Previous works on diagnosis based on speech data have employed machine learning and deep learning techniques. However, these approaches do not address the various uncertainties in data. Belief rule based expert system (BRBES) is an approach that can reason under various forms of data uncertainty. Thus, the main objective of this research is to compare the potential of BRBES on various speech signal features of patients of parkinson’s disease. The research took into account various types of standard speech signal features such MFCCs, TQWTs etc. A BRBES was trained on a dataset of 188 patients of parkinson’s disease and 64 healthy candidates with 5-fold cross validation. It was optimized using an exploitive version of the nature inspired optimization algorithm called BRB-based adaptive differential evolution (BRBaDE). The optimized model performed better than explorative BRBaDE, genetic algorithm and MATLAB’s FMINCON optimization on most of these features. It was also found that for speech based diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease under uncertainty, the features such as Glottis Quotient, Jitter variants, MFCCs, RPDE, DFA and PPE are relatively more suitable.