It is recognized that the performance of any prediction model is a function of several factors. One of the most significant factors is the adopted preprocessing techniques. In other words, preprocessing is an essential process to generate an effective and efficient classification model. This paper investigates the impact of the most widely used preprocessing techniques, with respect to numerical features, on the performance of classification algorithms. The effect of combining various normalization techniques and handling missing values strategies is assessed on eighteen benchmark datasets using two well-known classification algorithms and adopting different performance evaluation metrics and statistical significance tests. According to the reported experimental results, the impact of the adopted preprocessing techniques varies from one classification algorithm to another. In addition, a statistically significant difference between the considered data preprocessing techniques is demonstrated.

Chest and lung diseases are among the most serious chronic diseases in the world, and they occur as a result of factors such as smoking, air pollution, or bacterial infection, which would expose the respiratory system and chest to serious disorders. Chest diseases lead to a natural weakness in the respiratory system, which requires the patient to take care and attention to alleviate this problem. Countries are interested in encouraging medical research and monitoring the spread of communicable diseases. Therefore, they advised researchers to perform studies to curb the diseases’ spread and urged researchers to devise methods for swiftly and readily detecting and distinguishing lung diseases. In this paper, we propose a hybrid architecture of contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) and deep convolutional network for the classification of lung diseases. We used X-ray images to create a convolutional neural network (CNN) for early identification and categorization of lung diseases. Initially, the proposed method implemented the support vector machine to classify the images with and without using CLAHE equalizer. The obtained results were compared with the CNN networks. Later, two different experiments were implemented with hybrid architecture of deep CNN networks and CLAHE as a preprocessing for image enhancement. The experimental results indicate that the suggested hybrid architecture outperforms traditional methods by roughly 20% in terms of accuracy.

Teaching and exam proctoring represent key pillars of the education system. Human proctoring, which involves visually monitoring examinees throughout exams, is an important part of assessing the academic process. The capacity to proctor examinations is a critical component of educational scalability. However, such approaches are time-consuming and expensive. In this paper, we present a new framework for the learning and classification of cheating video sequences. This kind of study aids in the early detection of students’ cheating. Furthermore, we introduce a new dataset, “actions of student cheating in paper-based exams”. The dataset consists of suspicious actions in an exam environment. Five classes of cheating were performed by eight different actors. Each pair of subjects conducted five distinct cheating activities. To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, we conducted experiments on action recognition tasks at the frame level using five types of well-known features. The findings from the experiments on the framework were impressive and substantial.

Data in many application domains is imbalanced. In machine learning, addressing imbalanced data is crucial to prevent bias towards the dominant class label and ensure that prediction models can learn and predict the minority class proficiently. This paper proposes a hybrid imbalanced classification model (HICD) to address the multiclass imbalanced data problem. The primary idea is to combine effective methods to construct a classification model that can handle multiclass imbalanced data effectively. Four methods are employed: an oversampling method to balance the data, a decomposition method to convert the multiclass problem into a set of binary problems, ensemble classification to integrate base classifiers to improve prediction, and a boosting method to encourage the classifier to pay more attention to misclassified samples. To evaluate the proposed model, seventeen imbalanced datasets from various application domains, featuring different numbers of classes, instances, features, and imbalance ratios, are assessed. The experimental results and statistical significance tests demonstrate that the proposed hybrid model significantly outperforms the standard one-vs-one (OVO) approach and the OVO combined with oversampling technique (SMOTE), both considered state-of-the-art for addressing imbalanced multiclass datasets, in terms of F1-score.