Banking risk measurement and management remain one of many challenges for managers and policymakers. This study contributes to the banking literature and practice in two ways by (a) proposing a risk ranking index based on the Mahalanobis Distance (MD) between a multidimensional point representing a bank’s risk measures and the corresponding critical ratios set by the banking authorities and (b) determining the relative importance of a bank’s risk ratios in affecting its financial standing using an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System. In this study, ten financial ratios representing five risk areas were considered, namely: Capital Adequacy, Credit, Liquidity, Earning Quality, and Operational risk. Data from 45 Gulf banks for the period 2016–2020 was used to develop the model. Our findings indicate that a bank is in a sound risk position at the 99%, 95%, and 90% confidence level if its Mahalanobis distance exceeds 4.82, 4.28, and 4.0, respectively. The maximum distance computed for the banks in this study was 9.31; only five out of the forty-five banks were below the 4.82 and one below the 4.28 and 4.0 thresholds at 3.96. Sensitivity analysis of the risks indicated that the Net Interest Margin is the most significant factor in explaining variations in a bank’s risk position, followed by Capital Adequacy Ratio, Common Equity Tier1, and Tier1 Equity in order. The remaining financial ratios: Non-Performing Loans, Equity Leverage, Cost Income Ratio, Loans to Total Assets, and Loans to Deposits have the least influence in the order given; the Provisional Loans Ratio appears to have no influence.

Predicting students’ academic performance and the factors that significantly influence it can improve students’ completion and graduation rates, as well as reduce attrition rates. In this study, we examine the factors influencing student academic achievement. A fuzzy-neural approach is adopted to build a model that predicts and explains variations in course grades among students, based on course category, student course attendance rate, gender, high-school grade, school type, grade point average (GPA), and course delivery mode as input predictors. The neuro-fuzzy system was used because of its ability to implicitly capture the functional form between the dependent variable and input predictors. Our results indicate that the most significant predictors of course grades are student GPA, followed by course category. Using sensitivity analysis, student attendance was determined to be the most significant factor explaining the variations in course grades, followed by GPA, with course delivery mode ranked third. Our findings also indicate that a hybrid course delivery mode has positively impacted course grades as opposed to online or face-to-face course delivery alone.

Predicting student’s successful completion of academic programs and the features that influence their performance can have a significant effect on improving students’ completion, and graduation rates and reduce attrition rates. Therefore, identifying students are at risk, and the courses where improvements in content, delivery mode, pedagogy, and assessment activities can improve students’ learning experience and completion rates. In this work, we have developed a prediction and explanatory model using adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) methodology to predict the grade point average (GPA), at graduation time, of students enrolled in the information technology program at Ajman University. The approach adopted uses students’ grades in introductory and fundamental IT courses and high school grade point average (HSGPA) as predictors. Sensitivity analysis was performed on the model to quantify the relative significance of each predictor in explaining variations in graduation GPA. Our findings indicate HSGPA is the most influential factor in predicting graduation GPA, with data structures, operating systems, and software engineering coming closely in second place. On the explanatory side, we have found that discrete mathematics was the most influential course causing variations in graduation GPA, followed by software engineering, information security, and HSGPA. When we ran the model on the testing data, 77% of the predicted values fell within one root mean square error (0.29) of the actual GPA, which has a maximum of four. We have also shown that the ANFIS approach has better predictive accuracy than commonly used techniques such as multilinear regression. We recommend that IT programs at other institutions conduct comparable studies and shed some light on our findings.

Summary: Predicting stock price remains one of the challenges for investors' investment strategies. This study helps with accurate prediction and the main factors affecting variations in stock prices. It applies an adaptive neuro‐fuzzy model on 58 listed firms from both the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange and the Dubai Financial Market for the period 2014–2018 to estimate the predictive power of corporate performance measures and their significance. After examining four performance predictors—return on asset (ROA), return on equity (ROE), earning per share (EPS), and profit margin (PM)—the study finds that ROE is the most significant predictor and ROA is the least. EPS is the most influential profitability measure and PM the least.

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced unprecedented challenges for people and governments. Vaccines are an available solution to this pandemic. Recipients of the vaccines are of different ages, gender, and religion. Muslims follow specific Islamic guidelines that prohibit them from taking a vaccine with certain ingredients. This study aims at analyzing Facebook and Twitter data to understand the discourse related to halal vaccines using aspect-based sentiment analysis and text emotion analysis. We searched for the term “halal vaccine” and limited the timeline to the period between 1 January 2020, and 30 April 2021, and collected 6037 tweets and 3918 Facebook posts. We performed data preprocessing on tweets and Facebook posts and built the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model to identify topics. Calculating the sentiment analysis for each topic was the next step. Finally, this study further investigates emotions in the data using the National Research Council of Canada Emotion Lexicon. Our analysis identified four topics in each of the Twitter dataset and Facebook dataset. Two topics of “COVID-19 vaccine” and “halal vaccine” are shared between the two datasets. The other two topics in tweets are “halal certificate” and “must halal”, while “sinovac vaccine” and “ulema council” are two other topics in the Facebook dataset. The sentiment analysis shows that the sentiment toward halal vaccine is mostly neutral in Twitter data, whereas it is positive in Facebook data. The emotion analysis indicates that trust is the most present emotion among the top three emotions in both datasets, followed by anticipation and fear.

This study aims to rate the impact of the three major risks (credit, capital adequacy, and liquidity) on three financial performance measures (return on equity (ROE), earnings per share (EPS), and price-earnings ratio (PER)). This study stands out as one of the few in its field, and the only one focusing on banks in the Middle East and Africa, to employ the adaptive neural network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) that combines neural networks and fuzzy logic systems. The significance of this study lies in its comprehensive coverage of major risks and performance variables and its application of highly technical, sophisticated, and precise AI techniques (ANFIS). The main findings indicate that credit risk, as measured by the non-performing loans (NPL) has significant impact on both ROE and EPS. Liquidity risk comes second in importance for ROE and EPS, with the loan-deposit ratio (LDR) being the dominant component. In contrast, liquidity risk is the most significant determinant of PER, followed by capital adequacy. Our results also show that CAR, LDR, and NPL are the most significant risk components of capital adequacy, liquidity, and credit risks, respectively. The study contributes to business knowledge by applying the ANFIS technique as an accurate predictor of risk rating. Future research will explore the relationship between risks and macroeconomic indicators and differences among countries.