Identifying and preventing malicious network behavior is a challenge for establishing a secure network communication environment or system. Malicious activities in a network system can seriously threaten users’ privacy and potentially jeopardize the entire network infrastructure and functions. Furthermore, cyber-attacks have grown in complexity and number due to the ever-evolving digital landscape of computer and network devices in recent years. Analyzing network traffic using network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs) has become an integral security measure in modern networks to identify malicious and suspicious activities. However, most intrusion detection datasets contain imbalance classes, making it difficult for most existing classifiers to achieve good performance. In this paper, we propose a double-layer feature extraction and feature fusion technique (CNN-GRU-FF), which uses a modified focal loss function instead of the traditional cross-entropy to handle the class imbalance problem in the IDS datasets. We use the NSL-KDD and UNSW-NB15 datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model. From the research findings, it is evident our CNN-GRU-FF method obtains a detection rate of 98.22% and 99.68% using the UNSW-NB15 and NSL-KDD datasets, respectively while maintaining low false alarm rates on both datasets. We compared the proposed model’s performance with seven baseline algorithms and other published methods in literature. It is evident from the performance results that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art network intrusion detection methods.

Heart failure (HF) is considered a deadliest disease worldwide. Therefore, different intelligent medical decision support systems have been widely proposed for detection of HF in literature. However, low rate of accuracies achieved on the HF data is a major problem in these decision support systems. To improve the prediction accuracy, we have developed a feature-driven decision support system consisting of two main stages. In the first stage, χ2 statistical model is used to rank the commonly used 13 HF features. Based on the χ2 test score, an optimal subset of features is searched using forward best-first search strategy. In the second stage, Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB) classifier is used as a predictive model. The performance of the newly proposed method (χ2-GNB) is evaluated by using an online heart disease database of 297 subjects. Experimental results show that our proposed method could achieve a prediction accuracy of 93.33%. The developed method (i.e., χ2-GNB) improves the HF prediction performance of GNB model by 3.33%. Moreover, the newly proposed method also shows better performance than the available methods in literature that achieved accuracies in the range of 57.85–92.22%.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurological disease that has been reported to have affected most people worldwide. Recent research pointed out that about 90% of PD patients possess voice disorders. Motivated by this fact, many researchers proposed methods based on multiple types of speech data for PD prediction. However, these methods either face the problem of low rate of accuracy or lack generalization. To develop an approach that will be free of these issues, in this paper we propose a novel ensemble approach. These paper contributions are two folds. First, investigating feature selection integration with deep neural network (DNN) and validating its effectiveness by comparing its performance with conventional DNN and other similar integrated systems. Second, development of a novel ensemble model namely EOFSC (Ensemble model with Optimal Features and Sample Dependant Base Classifiers) that exploits the findings of recently published studies. Recent research pointed out that for different types of voice data, different optimal models are obtained which are sensitive to different types of samples and subsets of features. In this paper, we further consolidate the findings by utilizing the proposed integrated system and propose the development of EOFSC. For multiple types of vowel phonations, multiple base classifiers are obtained which are sensitive to different subsets of features. These features and sample-dependent base classifiers are integrated, and the proposed EOFSC model is constructed. To evaluate the final prediction of the EOFSC model, the majority voting methodology is adopted. Experimental results point out that feature selection integration with neural networks improves the performance of conventional neural networks. Additionally, feature selection integration with DNN outperforms feature selection integration with conventional machine learning models. Finally, the newly developed ensemble model is observed to improve PD detection accuracy by 6.5%.

One of the leading causes of deaths around the globe is heart disease. Heart is an organ that is responsible for the supply of blood to each part of the body. Coronary artery disease (CAD) and chronic heart failure (CHF) often lead to heart attack. Traditional medical procedures (angiography) for the diagnosis of heart disease have higher cost as well as serious health concerns. Therefore, researchers have developed various automated diagnostic systems based on machine learning (ML) and data mining techniques. ML-based automated diagnostic systems provide an affordable, efficient, and reliable solutions for heart disease detection. Various ML, data mining methods, and data modalities have been utilized in the past. Many previous review papers have presented systematic reviews based on one type of data modality. This study, therefore, targets systematic review of automated diagnosis for heart disease prediction based on different types of modalities, i.e., clinical feature-based data modality, images, and ECG. Moreover, this paper critically evaluates the previous methods and presents the limitations in these methods. Finally, the article provides some future research directions in the domain of automated heart disease detection based on machine learning and multiple of data modalities.

In a network architecture, an intrusion detection system (IDS) is one of the most commonly used approaches to secure the integrity and availability of critical assets in protected systems. Many existing network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) utilize stand-alone classifier models to classify network traffic as an attack or as normal. Due to the vast data volume, these stand-alone models struggle to reach higher intrusion detection rates with low false alarm rates( FAR). Additionally, irrelevant features in datasets can also increase the running time required to develop a model. However, data can be reduced effectively to an optimal feature set without information loss by employing a dimensionality reduction method, which a classification model then uses for accurate predictions of the various network intrusions. In this study, we propose a novel feature-driven intrusion detection system, namely $\chi 2$-BidLSTM, that integrates a $\chi 2$ statistical model and bidirectional long short-term memory (BidLSTM). The NSL-KDD dataset is used to train and evaluate the proposed approach. In the first phase, the $\chi 2$-BidLSTM system uses a $\chi 2$ model to rank all the features, then searches an optimal subset using a forward best search algorithm. In next phase, the optimal set is fed to the BidLSTM model for classification purposes. The experimental results indicate that our proposed $\chi 2$-BidLSTM approach achieves a detection accuracy of 95.62% and an F-score of 95.65%, with a low FAR of 2.11% on NSL-KDDTest⁺. Furthermore, our model obtains an accuracy of 89.55%, an F-score of 89.77%, and an FAR of 2.71% on NSL-KDDTest⁻²¹, indicating the superiority of the proposed approach over the standard LSTM method and other existing feature-selection-based NIDS methods.

Nowadays, caesarean section (CS) is given preference over vaginal birth and this trend is rapidly rising around the globe, although CS has serious complications such as pregnancy scar, scar dehiscence, and morbidly adherent placenta. Thus, CS should only be performed when it is absolutely necessary for mother and fetus. To avoid unnecessary CS, researchers have developed different machine-learning- (ML-) based clinical decision support systems (CDSS) for CS prediction using electronic health record of the pregnant women. However, previously proposed methods suffer from the problems of poor accuracy and biasedness in ML. To overcome these problems, we have designed a novel CDSS where random oversampling example (ROSE) technique has been used to eliminate the problem of minority classes in the dataset. Furthermore, principal component analysis has been employed for feature extraction from the dataset while, for classification purpose, random forest (RF) model is deployed. We have fine-tuned the hyperparameter of RF using a grid search algorithm for optimal classification performance. Thus, the newly proposed system is named ROSE-PCA-RF and it is trained and tested using an online CS dataset available on the UCI repository. In the first experiment, conventional RF model is trained and tested on the dataset while in the second experiment, the proposed model is tested. The proposed ROSE-PCA-RF model improved the performance of traditional RF by 4.5% with reduced time complexity, while only using two extracted features through the PCA. Moreover, the proposed model has obtained 96.29% accuracy on training data while improving the accuracy of 97.12% on testing data.