Due to market deregulation and globalisation, competitive environments in various sectors continuously evolve, leading to increased customer churn. Effectively anticipating and mitigating customer churn is vital for businesses to retain their customer base and sustain business growth. This research scrutinizes 214 published articles from 2015 to 2023, delving into customer churn prediction using machine learning methods. Distinctive in its scope, this work covers key stages of churn prediction models comprehensively, contrary to published reviews, which focus on some aspects of churn prediction, such as model development, feature engineering and model evaluation using traditional machine learning-based evaluation metrics. The review emphasises the incorporation of features such as demographic, usage-related, and behavioural characteristics and features capturing customer social interaction and communications graphs and customer feedback while focusing on popular sectors such as telecommunication, finance, and online gaming when producing newer datasets or developing a predictive model. Findings suggest that research on the profitability aspect of churn prediction models is under-researched and advocates using profit-based evaluation metrics to support decision-making, improve customer retention, and increase profitability. Finally, this research concludes with recommendations that advocate the use of ensembles and deep learning techniques, and as well as the adoption of explainable methods to drive further advancements.

Around 2020, 5G began its commercialization journey, and discussions about the next-generation networks (such as 6G) emerged. Researchers predict that 6G networks will have higher bandwidth, coverage, reliability, energy efficiency, and lower latency, and will be an integrated “human-centric” network system powered by artificial intelligence (AI). This 6G network will lead to many real-time automated decisions, ranging from network resource allocation to collision avoidance for self-driving cars. However, there is a risk of losing control over decision-making due to the high-speed, data-intensive AI decision-making that may go beyond designers’ and users’ comprehension. To mitigate this risk, explainable AI (XAI) methods can be used to enhance the transparency of the black-box AI decision-making process. This paper surveys the application of XAI towards the upcoming 6G age, including 6G technologies (such as intelligent radio and zero-touch network management) and 6G use cases (such as industry 5.0). Additionally, the paper summarizes the lessons learned from recent attempts and outlines important research challenges in applying XAI for 6G use cases soon.

This overview investigates the evolution and current landscape of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in healthcare, highlighting its implications for researchers, technology developers, and policymakers. Following the PRISMA protocol, we analyzed 89 publications from January 2000 to June 2024, spanning 19 medical domains, with a focus on Neurology and Cancer as the most studied areas. Various data types are reviewed, including tabular data, medical imaging, and clinical text, offering a comprehensive perspective on XAI applications. Key findings identify significant gaps, such as the limited availability of public datasets, suboptimal data preprocessing techniques, insufficient feature selection and engineering, and the limited utilization of multiple XAI methods. Additionally, the lack of standardized XAI evaluation metrics and practical obstacles in integrating XAI systems into clinical workflows are emphasized. We provide actionable recommendations, including the design of explainability‐centric models, the application of diverse and multiple XAI methods, and the fostering of interdisciplinary collaboration. These strategies aim to guide researchers in building robust AI models, assist technology developers in creating intuitive and user‐friendly AI tools, and inform policymakers in establishing effective regulations. Addressing these gaps will promote the development of transparent, reliable, and user‐centred AI systems in healthcare, ultimately improving decision‐making and patient outcomes.

This overview investigates the evolution and current landscape of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in healthcare, highlighting its implications for researchers, technology developers, and policymakers. Following the PRISMA protocol, we analysed 89 publications from January 2000 to June 2024, spanning 19 medical domains, with a focus on Neurology and Cancer as the most studied areas. Various data types are reviewed, including tabular data, medical imaging, and clinical text, offering a comprehensive perspective on XAI applications. Key findings identify significant gaps, such as the limited availability of public datasets, suboptimal data preprocessing techniques, insufficient feature selection and engineering, and the limited utilisation of multiple XAI methods. Additionally, the lack of standardised XAI evaluation metrics and practical obstacles in integrating XAI systems into clinical workflows are emphasised. We provide actionable recommendations, including the design of explainability-centric models, the application of diverse and multiple XAI methods, and the fostering of interdisciplinary collaboration. These strategies aim to guide researchers in building robust AI models, assist technology developers in creating intuitive and user-friendly AI tools, and inform policymakers in establishing effective regulations. Addressing these gaps will promote the development of transparent, reliable, and user-centred AI systems in healthcare, ultimately improving decision-making and patient outcomes.

Social media platforms have become a forum for giving a voice to the masses with a significant proportion of those masses coming from the developing world. This was largely evidenced through the significant role played by social media platforms in the recent uprisings in the Arab world. In this paper, we take up a study of social media engagement patterns of users from the developing world through a study of Twitter's role during the recent Tunisian uprising. Motivated by the results of a user survey conducted mainly for users from the developing world who tweeted heavily during the uprisings in the Arab world, we propose a novel method for subjectivity analysis of tweets corresponding to political events in the developing world. Our proposed method differs from previous subjectivity analysis approaches in that it is the first method that takes into account social features of social media platforms for the subjectivity classification task. Through experimental evaluations, we observe the accuracy of the proposed method to be 83.3% which demonstrates a promising outcome for large-scale application of our proposed subjectivity analysis technique.