Feature selection is a well-known prepossessing procedure, and it is considered a challenging problem in many domains, such as data mining, text mining, medicine, biology, public health, image processing, data clustering, and others. This paper proposes a novel feature selection method, called AOAGA, using an improved metaheuristic optimization method that combines the conventional Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm (AOA) with the Genetic Algorithm (GA) operators. The AOA is a recently proposed optimizer; it has been employed to solve several benchmark and engineering problems and has shown a promising performance. The main aim behind the modification of the AOA is to enhance its search strategies. The conventional version suffers from weaknesses, the local search strategy, and the trade-off between the search strategies. Therefore, the operators of the GA can overcome the shortcomings of the conventional AOA. The proposed AOAGA was evaluated with several well-known benchmark datasets, using several standard evaluation criteria, namely accuracy, number of selected features, and fitness function. Finally, the results were compared with the state-of-the-art techniques to prove the performance of the proposed AOAGA method. Moreover, to further assess the performance of the proposed AOAGA method, two real-world problems containing gene datasets were used. The findings of this paper illustrated that the proposed AOAGA method finds new best solutions for several test cases, and it got promising results compared to other comparative methods published in the literature.

Instead of the cloud, the Internet of things (IoT) activities are offloaded into fog computing to boost the quality of services (QoSs) needed by many applications. However, the availability of continuous computing resources on fog computing servers is one of the restrictions for IoT applications since transmitting the large amount of data generated using IoT devices would create network traffic and cause an increase in computational overhead. Therefore, task scheduling is the main problem that needs to be solved efficiently. This study proposes an energy‐aware model using an enhanced arithmetic optimization algorithm (AOA) method called AOAM, which addresses fog computing’s job scheduling problem to maximize users’ QoSs by maximizing the makespan measure. In the proposed AOAM, we enhanced the conventional AOA searchability using the marine predators algorithm (MPA) search operators to address the diversity of the used solutions and local optimum problems. The proposed AOAM is validated using several parameters, including various clients, data centers, hosts, virtual machines, tasks, and standard evaluation measures, including the energy and makespan. The obtained results are compared with other state‐of‐the‐art methods; it showed that AOAM is promising and solved task scheduling effectively compared with the other comparative methods.