Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a common complication of long-term diabetes, affecting the human eye and potentially leading to permanent blindness. The early detection of DR is crucial for effective treatment, as symptoms often manifest in later stages. The manual grading of retinal images is time-consuming, prone to errors, and lacks patient-friendliness. In this study, we propose two deep learning (DL) architectures, a hybrid network combining VGG16 and XGBoost Classifier, and the DenseNet 121 network, for DR detection and classification. To evaluate the two DL models, we preprocessed a collection of retinal images obtained from the APTOS 2019 Blindness Detection Kaggle Dataset. This dataset exhibits an imbalanced image class distribution, which we addressed through appropriate balancing techniques. The performance of the considered models was assessed in terms of accuracy. The results showed that the hybrid network achieved an accuracy of 79.50%, while the DenseNet 121 model achieved an accuracy of 97.30%. Furthermore, a comparative analysis with existing methods utilizing the same dataset revealed the superior performance of the DenseNet 121 network. The findings of this study demonstrate the potential of DL architectures for the early detection and classification of DR. The superior performance of the DenseNet 121 model highlights its effectiveness in this domain. The implementation of such automated methods can significantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of DR diagnosis, benefiting both healthcare providers and patients.

Clinical support systems are affected by the issue of high variance in terms of chronic disorder prognosis. This uncertainty is one of the principal causes for the demise of large populations around the world suffering from some fatal diseases such as chronic kidney disease (CKD). Due to this reason, the diagnosis of this disease is of great concern for healthcare systems. In such a case, machine learning can be used as an effective tool to reduce the randomness in clinical decision making. Conventional methods for the detection of chronic kidney disease are not always accurate because of their high degree of dependency on several sets of biological attributes. Machine learning is the process of training a machine using a vast collection of historical data for the purpose of intelligent classification. This work aims at developing a machine-learning model that can use a publicly available data to forecast the occurrence of chronic kidney disease. A set of data preprocessing steps were performed on this dataset in order to construct a generic model. This set of steps includes the appropriate imputation of missing data points, along with the balancing of data using the SMOTE algorithm and the scaling of the features. A statistical technique, namely, the chi-squared test, is used for the extraction of the least-required set of adequate and highly correlated features to the output. For the model training, a stack of supervised-learning techniques is used for the development of a robust machine-learning model. Out of all the applied learning techniques, support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF) achieved the lowest false-negative rates and test accuracy, equal to $99.33\%$ and $98.67\%$, respectively. However, SVM achieved better results than RF did when validated with 10-fold cross-validation.

Feature selection (FS) is commonly thought of as a pre-processing strategy for determining the best subset of characteristics from a given collection of features. Here, a novel discrete artificial gorilla troop optimization (DAGTO) technique is introduced for the first time to handle FS tasks in the healthcare sector. Depending on the number and type of objective functions, four variants of the proposed method are implemented in this article, namely: (1) single-objective (SO-DAGTO), (2) bi-objective (wrapper) (MO-DAGTO1), (3) bi-objective (filter wrapper hybrid) (MO-DAGTO2), and (4) tri-objective (filter wrapper hybrid) (MO-DAGTO3) for identifying relevant features in diagnosing a particular disease. We provide an outstanding gorilla initialization strategy based on the label mutual information (MI) with the aim of increasing population variety and accelerate convergence. To verify the performance of the presented methods, ten medical datasets are taken into consideration, which are of variable dimensions. A comparison is also implemented between the best of the four suggested approaches (MO-DAGTO2) and four established multi-objective FS strategies, and it is statistically proven to be the superior one. Finally, a case study with COVID-19 samples is performed to extract the critical factors related to it and to demonstrate how this method is fruitful in real-world applications.

Activity recognition is the process of continuously monitoring a person’s activity and movement. Human posture recognition can be utilized to assemble a self-guidance practice framework that permits individuals to accurately learn and rehearse yoga postures without getting help from anyone else. With the use of deep learning algorithms, we propose an approach for the efficient detection and recognition of various yoga poses. The chosen dataset consists of 85 videos with 6 yoga postures performed by 15 participants, where the keypoints of users are extracted using the Mediapipe library. A combination of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) has been employed for yoga pose recognition through real-time monitored videos as a deep learning model. Specifically, the CNN layer is used for the extraction of features from the keypoints and the following LSTM layer understands the occurrence of sequence of frames for predictions to be implemented. In following, the poses are classified as correct or incorrect; if a correct pose is identified, then the system will provide user the corresponding feedback through text/speech. This paper combines machine learning foundations with data structures as the synergy between these two areas can be established in the sense that machine learning techniques and especially deep learning can efficiently recognize data schemas and make them interoperable.

Sentiment Analysis on Twitter Data is indeed a challenging problem due to the nature, diversity and volume of the data. People tend to express their feelings freely, which makes Twitter an ideal source for accumulating a vast amount of opinions towards a wide spectrum of topics. This amount of information offers huge potential and can be harnessed to receive the sentiment tendency towards these topics. However, since no one can invest an infinite amount of time to read through these tweets, an automated decision making approach is necessary. Nevertheless, most existing solutions are limited in centralized environments only. Thus, they can only process at most a few thousand tweets. Such a sample is not representative in order to define the sentiment polarity towards a topic due to the massive number of tweets published daily. In this work, we develop two systems: the first in the MapReduce and the second in the Apache Spark framework for programming with Big Data. The algorithm exploits all hashtags and emoticons inside a tweet, as sentiment labels, and proceeds to a classification method of diverse sentiment types in a parallel and distributed manner. Moreover, the sentiment analysis tool is based on Machine Learning methodologies alongside Natural Language Processing techniques and utilizes Apache Spark’s Machine learning library, MLlib. In order to address the nature of Big Data, we introduce some pre-processing steps for achieving better results in Sentiment Analysis as well as Bloom filters to compact the storage size of intermediate data and boost the performance of our algorithm. Finally, the proposed system was trained and validated with real data crawled by Twitter, and, through an extensive experimental evaluation, we prove that our solution is efficient, robust and scalable while confirming the quality of our sentiment identification.