In the healthcare field, diagnosing disease is the most concerning issue. Various diseases including cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) significantly influence illness or death. On the other hand, early and precise diagnosis of CVDs can decrease chances of death, resulting in a better and healthier life for patients. Researchers have used traditional machine learning (ML) techniques for CVD prediction and classification. However, many of them are inaccurate and time-consuming due to the unavailability of quality data including imbalanced samples, inefficient data preprocessing, and the existing selection criteria. These factors lead to an overfitting or bias issue towards a certain class label in the prediction model. Therefore, an intelligent system is needed which can accurately diagnose CVDs. We proposed an automated ML model for various kinds of CVD prediction and classification. Our prediction model consists of multiple steps. Firstly, a benchmark dataset is preprocessed using filter techniques. Secondly, a novel arithmetic optimization algorithm is implemented as a feature selection technique to select the best subset of features that influence the accuracy of the prediction model. Thirdly, a classification task is implemented using a multilayer perceptron neural network to classify the instances of the dataset into two class labels, determining whether they have a CVD or not. The proposed ML model is trained on the preprocessed data and then tested and validated. Furthermore, for the comparative analysis of the model, various performance evaluation metrics are calculated including overall accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. As a result, it has been observed that the proposed prediction model can achieve 88.89% accuracy, which is the highest in a comparison with the traditional ML techniques.

The diversity and quality of high-quality and diverse-solution external memory of the hybrid Elitist-Ant System is examined in this study. The Elitist-Ant System incorporates an external memory for preserving search diversity while exploiting the solution space. Using this procedure, the effectiveness and efficiency of the search may be guaranteed which could consequently improve the performance of the algorithm and it could be well generalized across diverse problems of combinatorial optimization. The generality of this algorithm through its consistency and efficiency is tested using a Nurse-Rostering Problem. The outcomes demonstrate the competitiveness of the hybrid Elitist-Ant System’s performance within numerous datasets as opposed to those by other systems. The effectiveness of the external memory usage in search diversification is evidenced in this work. Subsequently, such usage improves the performance of the hybrid Elitist-Ant System over diverse datasets and problems.

The university course timetabling is a complex optimization problem which is difficult to solve for optimality. It involves assigning lectures to a fixed number of timeslots and rooms; while satisfying some constraints. The goal is to construct a feasible timetable and satisfy soft constraints as much as possible. In this study, we apply two hybrids ant colony systems, namely the simulated annealing with ant colony system (ACS-SA), and tabu search with ant colony system (ACS-TS) to solve the university course timetabling, a number of ants in the ACS construct a complete assignment of courses to timeslots. Based on a pre-ordered list of courses, the ants probabilistically choose the timeslot for the given course, guided by heuristic information and stigmergic information. We test both ACS algorithms over the Socha's benchmark course timetabling problem. We also compare our results with those obtained by other methodologies recent literature has illustrated. Experimental results showed that both ACS-SA and ACS-TS produces good quality solutions and outperforms previously applied Ant algorithms; they also outperform other methodologies tested on Socha's benchmark test instances, and approaches on some benchmark instances. We believe that these hybrid ACS algorithms are also valid for other types of combinational optimization problems.