Attempting to address optimization problems in various scientific disciplines is a fundamental and significant difficulty requiring optimization. This study presents the waterwheel plant technique (WWPA), a novel stochastic optimization technique motivated by natural systems. The proposed WWPA’s basic concept is based on modeling the waterwheel plant’s natural behavior while on a hunting expedition. To find prey, WWPA uses plants as search agents. We present WWPA’s mathematical model for use in addressing optimization problems. Twenty-three objective functions of varying unimodal and multimodal types were used to assess WWPA’s performance. The results of optimizing unimodal functions demonstrate WWPA’s strong exploitation ability to get close to the optimal solution, while the results of optimizing multimodal functions show WWPA’s strong exploration ability to zero in on the major optimal region of the search space. Three engineering design problems were also used to gauge WWPA’s potential for improving practical programs. The effectiveness of WWPA in optimization was evaluated by comparing its results with those of seven widely used metaheuristic algorithms. When compared with eight competing algorithms, the simulation results and analyses demonstrate that WWPA outperformed them by finding a more proportionate balance between exploration and exploitation.

Introduction : In pattern recognition and data mining, feature selection is one of the most crucial tasks. To increase the efficacy of classification algorithms, it is necessary to identify the most relevant subset of features in a given domain. This means that the feature selection challenge can be seen as an optimization problem, and thus meta-heuristic techniques can be utilized to find a solution. Methodology : In this work, we propose a novel hybrid binary meta-heuristic algorithm to solve the feature selection problem by combining two algorithms: Dipper Throated Optimization (DTO) and Sine Cosine (SC) algorithm. The new algorithm is referred to as bSCWDTO. We employed the sine cosine algorithm to improve the exploration process and ensure the optimization algorithm converges quickly and accurately. Thirty datasets from the University of California Irvine (UCI) machine learning repository are used to evaluate the robustness and stability of the proposed bSCWDTO algorithm. In addition, the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifier is used to measure the selected features’ effectiveness in classification problems. Results : The achieved results demonstrate the algorithm’s superiority over ten state-of-the-art optimization methods, including the original DTO and SC, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO), Multiverse Optimization (MVO), Satin Bowerbird Optimizer (SBO), Genetic Algorithm (GA), the hybrid of GWO and GA, and Firefly Algorithm (FA). Moreover, Wilcoxon’s rank-sum test was performed at the 0.05 significance level to study the statistical difference between the proposed method and the alternative feature selection methods. Conclusion : These results emphasized the proposed feature selection method’s significance, superiority, and statistical difference.

The rapid expansion of complex engineering and real-world optimization problems necessitates the development of efficient, adaptable, and computationally lightweight metaheuristic algorithms. In this study, a novel nature-inspired algorithm called glider snake optimization (GSO) is proposed, which draws behavioral inspiration from the gliding and serpentine locomotion patterns of arboreal snakes to enhance solution exploration and convergence control. The GSO algorithm incorporates a multi-segment movement mechanism, a flexible gliding path generator, and an elite guidance model to ensure effective balance between exploration and exploitation. Extensive experimental validation is conducted using a comprehensive set of 23 classical benchmark functions, high-dimensional test cases (100D, and 500D), the CEC 2019 benchmark suite, and several constrained engineering design problems. The results demonstrate that GSO outperforms or matches 13 state-of-the-art algorithms, including particle swarm optimization (PSO), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), whale optimization algorithm (WOA), and differential evolution (DE) in terms of accuracy, convergence speed, computational cost, and robustness. The algorithm also exhibits exceptional stability across parameter variations, as confirmed through sensitivity analysis and statistical significance testing. These findings highlight the potential of GSO as a powerful and efficient tool for solving complex optimization problems in both theoretical and practical domains. Additionally, GSO achieves leading performance on most benchmark functions, with error reductions of up to 90% compared with competing algorithms. GSO also demonstrates faster convergence and lower variance across repeated trials, confirming its robustness. These quantitative outcomes further reinforce the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The MATLAB and Python implementations of GSO are available at https://nimakhodadadi.com .

Self-driving car plays a crucial role in implementing traffic intelligence. Road smoothness in front of self-driving cars has a significant impact on the car’s driving safety and comfort. Having potholes on the road may lead to several problems, including car damage and the occurrence of collisions. Therefore, self-driving cars should be able to change their driving behavior based on the real-time detection of road potholes. Various methods are followed to address this problem, including reporting to authorities, employing vibration-based sensors, and 3D laser imaging. However, limitations, such as expensive setup costs and the danger of discovery, affected these methods. Therefore, it is necessary to automate the process of potholes identification with sufficient precision and speed. A novel method based on adaptive mutation and dipper throated optimization (AMDTO) for feature selection and optimization of the random forest (RF) classifier is presented in this paper. In addition, we propose a new adaptive method for dataset balancing, referred to as optimized hashing SMOTE, to boost the performance of the optimized model. Data on potholes in different weather conditions and circumstances were collected and augmented before training the proposed model. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown in experiments in classifying road potholes accurately. Eleven feature selection methods, including WOA, GWO, and PSO, and three machine learning classifiers were included in the conducted experiments to measure the superiority of the proposed method. The proposed method, AMDTO+RF, achieved a pothole classification accuracy of (99.795%), which outperforms the accuracy achieved by the other approaches, WOA+RF of 97.5%, GWO+RF of 98.6%, PSO+RF of 98.1%, and transfer learning approaches, AlexNet of 86.8%, VGG-19 of 87.3%, GoogLeNet of 90.4%, and ResNet-50 of 93.8%. In addition, an in-depth statistical analysis is performed on the recorded results to study the significance and stability of the proposed method.

The design of an antenna requires a careful selection of its parameters to retain the desired performance. However, this task is time-consuming when the traditional approaches are employed, which represents a significant challenge. On the other hand, machine learning presents an effective solution to this challenge through a set of regression models that can robustly assist antenna designers to find out the best set of design parameters to achieve the intended performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for accurately predicting the bandwidth of metamaterial antenna. The proposed approach is based on employing the recently emerged guided whale optimization algorithm using adaptive particle swarm optimization to optimize the parameters of the long-short-term memory (LSTM) deep network. This optimized network is used to retrieve the metamaterial bandwidth given a set of features. In addition, the superiority of the proposed approach is examined in terms of a comparison with the traditional multilayer perceptron (ML), K-nearest neighbors (K-NN), and the basic LSTM in terms of several evaluation criteria such as root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and mean bias error (MBE). Experimental results show that the proposed approach could achieve RMSE of (0.003018), MAE of (0.001871), and MBE of (0.000205). These values are better than those of the other competing models.