Feature Selection (FS) is a major preprocessing stage which aims to improve Machine Learning (ML) models’ performance by choosing salient features, while reducing the computational cost. Several approaches are presented to select the most Optimal Features Subset (OFS) in a given dataset. In this paper, we introduce an FS-based approach named Reptile Search Algorithm–Snake Optimizer (RSA-SO) that employs both RSA and SO methods in a parallel mechanism to determine OFS. This mechanism decreases the chance of the two methods to stuck in local optima and it boosts the capability of both of them to balance exploration and explication. Numerous experiments are performed on ten datasets taken from the UCI repository and two real-world engineering problems to evaluate RSA-SO. The obtained results from the RSA-SO are also compared with seven popular Meta-Heuristic (MH) methods for FS to prove its superiority. The results show that the developed RSA-SO approach has a comparative performance to the tested MH methods and it can provide practical and accurate solutions for engineering optimization problems.

Clinical methods for dementia detection are expensive and prone to human errors. Despite various computer-aided methods using electroencephalography (EEG) signals and artificial intelligence, a consistent separation of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and normal-control (NC) subjects remains elusive. This paper proposes a low-complexity EEG-based AD detection CNN called LEADNet to generate disease-specific features. LEADNet employs spatiotemporal EEG signals as input, two convolution layers for feature generation, a max-pooling layer for asymmetric spatiotemporal redundancy reduction, two fully-connected layers for nonlinear feature transformation and selection, and a softmax layer for disease probability prediction. Different quantitative measures are calculated using an open-source AD dataset to compare LEADNet and four pre-trained CNN models. The results show that the lightweight architecture of LEADNet has at least a 150-fold reduction in network parameters and the highest testing accuracy of 98.75% compared to pre-trained models. The investigation of individual layers of LEADNet showed successive improvements in feature transformation and selection for separating AD and NC subjects. A comparison with the state-of-the-art AD detection models showed that the highest accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were achieved by the LEADNet model.

Pre-trained machine learning models have recently been widely used to detect COVID-19 automatically from X-ray images. Although these models can selectively retrain their layers for the desired task, the output remains biased due to the massive number of pre-trained weights and parameters. This paper proposes a novel batch normalized convolutional neural network (BNCNN) model to identify COVID-19 cases from chest X-ray images in binary and multi-class frameworks with a dual aim to extract salient features that improve model performance over pre-trained image analysis networks while reducing computational complexity. The BNCNN model has three phases: Data pre-processing to normalize and resize X-ray images, Feature extraction to generate feature maps, and Classification to predict labels based on the feature maps. Feature extraction uses four repetitions of a block comprising a convolution layer to learn suitable kernel weights for the features map, a batch normalization layer to solve the internal covariance shift of feature maps, and a max-pooling layer to find the highest-level patterns by increasing the convolution span. The classifier section uses two repetitions of a block comprising a dense layer to learn complex feature maps, a batch normalization layer to standardize internal feature maps, and a dropout layer to avoid overfitting while aiding the model generalization. Comparative analysis shows that when applied to an open-access dataset, the proposed BNCNN model performs better than four other comparative pre-trained models for three-way and two-way class datasets. Moreover, the BNCNN requires fewer parameters than the pre-trained models, suggesting better deployment suitability on low-resource devices.