Nowadays, quantum machine learning is attracting great interest in a wide range of fields due to its potential superior performance and capabilities. The massive increase in computational capacity and speed of quantum computers can lead to a quantum leap in the healthcare field. Heart disease seriously threatens human health since it is the leading cause of death worldwide. Quantum machine learning methods can propose effective solutions to predict heart disease and aid in early diagnosis. In this study, an ensemble machine learning model based on quantum machine learning classifiers is proposed to predict the risk of heart disease. The proposed model is a bagging ensemble learning model where a quantum support vector classifier was used as a base classifier. Furthermore, in order to make the model’s outcomes more explainable, the importance of every single feature in the prediction is computed and visualized using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) framework. In the experimental study, other stand-alone quantum classifiers, namely, Quantum Support Vector Classifier (QSVC), Quantum Neural Network (QNN), and Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) are applied and compared with classical machine learning classifiers such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The experimental results on the Cleveland dataset reveal the superiority of QSVC compared to the others, which explains its use in the proposed bagging model. The Bagging-QSVC model outperforms all aforementioned classifiers with an accuracy of 90.16% while showing great competitiveness compared to some state-of-the-art models using the same dataset. The results of the study indicate that quantum machine learning classifiers perform better than classical machine learning classifiers in predicting heart disease. In addition, the study reveals that the bagging ensemble learning technique is effective in improving the prediction accuracy of quantum classifiers.

Education is crucial for the growth of effective life skills and the allocation of needed resources. Higher education institutions are adopting advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), to enhance traditional teaching methods. Predicting academic performance has become increasingly important, improving university rankings and expanding student opportunities. This study addresses challenges in performance analysis, quality education delivery, and student evaluation through machine learning (ML) models. Ten regression models including K-Nearest Neighbors Regressor, Linear Regression, CatBoost, XGBoost, AdaBoost, and ensemble voting regression (VR) algorithm based on the top five heterogeneous regressors as base models are employed to predict academic outcomes. Two datasets with distinct feature sets and sizes were used to evaluate the generalizability of the models. The first dataset comprises 10,000 samples and six features focused on study behaviors, prior performance, and extracurricular activities. The second dataset includes 6,607 records and 20 features encompassing academic habits, demographic attributes, and institutional factors such as attendance, teacher quality, and parental involvement. Best model performance goes to the linear regression in standalone ML models. Then, the proposed ensemble VR model was built using weighted averages based on the performances of the base models. The local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) are then used to explain the predictions produced by the proposed ensemble VR model. For the first dataset, the VR model achieved an RMSE of 0.1050, MAE of 0.0837, and R² of 0.9890. On the second, more complex dataset, the VR model also performed best with an R² of 0.7716 using the full feature set, highlighting its robustness and adaptability across diverse academic contexts. These results offer actionable insights for educators, administrators, and policymakers to better understand student performance drivers and support data-informed educational strategies.

With the help of machine learning, many of the problems that have plagued mammography in the past have been solved. Effective prediction models need many normal and tumor samples. For medical applications such as breast cancer diagnosis framework, it is difficult to gather labeled training data and construct effective learning frameworks. Transfer learning is an emerging strategy that has recently been used to tackle the scarcity of medical data by transferring pre-trained convolutional network knowledge into the medical domain. Despite the well reputation of the transfer learning based on the pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for medical imaging, several hurdles still exist to achieve a prominent breast cancer classification performance. In this paper, we attempt to solve the Feature Dimensionality Curse (FDC) problem of the deep features that are derived from the transfer learning pre-trained CNNs. Such a problem is raised due to the high space dimensionality of the extracted deep features with respect to the small size of the available medical data samples. Therefore, a novel deep learning cascaded feature selection framework is proposed based on the pre-trained deep convolutional networks as well as the univariate-based paradigm. Deep learning models of AlexNet, VGG, and GoogleNet are randomly selected and used to extract the shallow and deep features from the INbreast mammograms, whereas the univariate strategy helps to overcome the dimensionality curse and multicollinearity issues for the extracted features. The optimized key features via the univariate approach are statistically significant (p-value ≤ 0.05) and have good capability to efficiently train the classification models. Using such optimal features, the proposed framework could achieve a promising evaluation performance in terms of 98.50% accuracy, 98.06% sensitivity, 98.99% specificity, and 98.98% precision. Such performance seems to be beneficial to develop a practical and reliable computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) framework for breast cancer classification.

Due to their limited computation capabilities and battery life, Internet of Things (IoT) networks face significant challenges in executing delay-sensitive and computation-intensive mobile applications and services. Therefore, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm offers low latency communication, computation, and storage capabilities, which makes it an attractive way to mitigate these limitations by offloading them. Nevertheless, the majority of the offloading schemes let IoT devices send their intensive tasks to the connected edge server, which predictably limits the performance gain due to overload. Therefore, in this paper, besides integrating task offloading and load balancing, we study the resource allocation problem for multi-tier UAV-aided MEC systems. First, an efficient load-balancing algorithm is designed for optimizing the load among ground MEC servers through the handover process as well as hovering UAVs over the crowded areas which are still loaded due to the fixed location of the ground base stations server (GBSs). Moreover, we formulate the joint task offloading, load balancing, and resource allocation as an integer problem to minimize the system cost. Furthermore, an efficient task offloading algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning techniques is proposed to derive the offloading solution. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed approach not only has a fast convergence performance but also has a significantly lower system cost when compared to the benchmark approaches.

Machine learning (ML) is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that has been successfully applied in a variety of remote sensing applications, including geophysical information retrieval such as soil moisture content (SMC). Deep learning (DL) is a subfield of ML that uses models with complex structures to solve prediction problems with higher performance than traditional ML. In this study, a framework based on DL was developed for SMC retrieval. For this purpose, a sample dataset was built, which included synthetic aperture radar (SAR) backscattering, radar incidence angle, and ground truth data. Herein, the performance of five optimized ML prediction models was evaluated in terms of soil moisture prediction. However, to boost the prediction performance of these models, a DL-based data augmentation technique was implemented to create a reconstructed version of the available dataset. This includes building a sparse autoencoder DL network for data reconstruction. The Bayesian optimization strategy was employed for fine-tuning the hyperparameters of the ML models in order to improve their prediction performance. The results of our study highlighted the improved performance of the five ML prediction models with augmented data. The Gaussian process regression (GPR) showed the best prediction performance with 4.05% RMSE and 0.81 R² on a 10% independent test subset.

Person re-identification (Re-ID) is a method for identifying the same individual via several non-interfering cameras. Person Re-ID has been felicitously applied to an assortment of computer vision applications. Due to the emergence of deep learning algorithms, person Re-ID techniques, which often involve the attention module, have gained remarkable success. Moreover, people’s traits are mostly similar, which makes distinguishing between them complicated. This paper presents a novel approach for person Re-ID, by introducing a multi-part feature network, that combines the position attention module (PAM) and the efficient channel attention (ECA). The goal is to enhance the accuracy and robustness of person Re-ID methods through the use of attention mechanisms. The proposed multi-part feature network employs the PAM to extract robust and discriminative features by utilizing channel, spatial, and temporal context information. The PAM learns the spatial interdependencies of features and extracts a greater variety of contextual information from local elements, hence enhancing their capacity for representation. The ECA captures local cross-channel interaction and reduces the model’s complexity, while maintaining accuracy. Inclusive experiments were executed on three publicly available person Re-ID datasets: Market-1501, DukeMTMC, and CUHK-03. The outcomes reveal that the suggested method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, and the rank-1 accuracy can achieve 95.93%, 89.77%, and 73.21% in trials on the public datasets Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, and CUHK03, respectively, and can reach 96.41%, 94.08%, and 91.21% after re-ranking. The proposed method demonstrates a high generalization capability and improves both quantitative and qualitative performance. Finally, the proposed multi-part feature network, with the combination of PAM and ECA, offers a promising solution for person Re-ID, by combining the benefits of temporal, spatial, and channel information. The results of this study evidence the effectiveness and potential of the suggested method for person Re-ID in computer vision applications.