The rapid development to accommodate population growth has a detrimental effect on water quality, which is deteriorating. Consequently, water quality prediction has emerged as a topic of great interest during the past decade. Existing water quality prediction approaches lack the desired accuracy. Moreover, the available datasets have missing values, which reduces the performance efficiency of classifiers. This study presents an automatic water quality prediction method that resolves the issue of missing values from the data and obtains a higher water quality prediction accuracy. This study proposes a nine-layer multilayer perceptron (MLP) which is used with a K-nearest neighbor (KNN) imputer to deal with the problem of missing values. Experiments are performed, and performance is compared with seven machine learning algorithms. Performance is further analyzed regarding two scenarios: deleting missing values and the use of a KNN imputer to deal with missing values. Results suggest that the proposed nine-layer MLP model can achieve an accuracy of 0.99 for water quality prediction with the KNN imputer. K-fold cross-validation further corroborates this performance.

Objective: Cervical cancer ranks among the top causes of death among females in developing countries. The most important procedures that should be followed to guarantee the minimizing of cervical cancer’s aftereffects are early identification and treatment under the finest medical guidance. One of the best methods to find this sort of malignancy is by looking at a Pap smear image. For automated detection of cervical cancer, the available datasets often have missing values, which can significantly affect the performance of machine learning models. Methods: To address these challenges, this study proposes an automated system for predicting cervical cancer that efficiently handles missing values with SMOTE features to achieve high accuracy. The proposed system employs a stacked ensemble voting classifier model that combines three machine learning models, along with KNN Imputer and SMOTE up-sampled features for handling missing values. Results: The proposed model achieves 99.99% accuracy, 99.99% precision, 99.99% recall, and 99.99% F1 score when using KNN imputed SMOTE features. The study compares the performance of the proposed model with multiple other machine learning algorithms under four scenarios: with missing values removed, with KNN imputation, with SMOTE features, and with KNN imputed SMOTE features. The study validates the efficacy of the proposed model against existing state-of-the-art approaches. Conclusions: This study investigates the issue of missing values and class imbalance in the data collected for cervical cancer detection and might aid medical practitioners in timely detection and providing cervical cancer patients with better care.

The availability of educational data obtained by technology-assisted learning platforms can potentially be used to mine student behavior in order to address their problems and enhance the learning process. Educational data mining provides insights for professionals to make appropriate decisions. Learning platforms complement traditional learning environments and provide an opportunity to analyze students’ performance, thus mitigating the probability of student failures. Predicting students’ academic performance has become an important research area to take timely corrective actions, thereby increasing the efficacy of education systems. This study proposes an improved conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) in combination with a deep-layer-based support vector machine (SVM) to predict students’ performance through school and home tutoring. Students’ educational datasets are predominantly small in size; to handle this problem, synthetic data samples are generated by an improved CGAN. To prove its effectiveness, results are compared with and without applying CGAN. Results indicate that school and home tutoring combined have a positive impact on students’ performance when the model is trained after applying CGAN. For an extensive evaluation of deep SVM, multiple kernel-based approaches are investigated, including radial, linear, sigmoid, and polynomial functions, and their performance is analyzed. The proposed improved CGAN coupled with deep SVM outperforms in terms of sensitivity, specificity, and area under the curve when compared with solutions from the existing literature.

Leukemia is a deadly disease caused by the overproduction of immature white blood cells (WBS) in the bone marrow. If leukemia is detected at the initial stages, the chances of recovery are better. Typically, morphological analysis for the identification of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is performed manually on blood cells by skilled medical personnel, which has several disadvantages, including a lack of medical personnel, sluggish analysis, and prediction that is dependent on the medical personnel’s expertise. Therefore, we proposed the Multi-Attention EfficientNetV2S and EfficientNetB3 state-of-the-art deep learning architectures using transfer learning-based fine-tuning approach to distinguish the normal and blast cells from microscopic blood smear images that both are pretrained on large-scale ImageNet database. We simply modified the last block of both models and added additional layers to both models. After including this Multi-Attention Mechanism, it not only reduces the model’s complexities but also generalizes its network quite well. By using the proposed technique, the accuracy has improved and the overall loss is also minimized. Our Multi-Attention EfficientNetV2S and EfficientNetB3 models achieved 99.73% and 99.25% accuracy, respectively. We have further compared the proposed model’s performance to other individual and ensemble models. Upon comparison, the proposed model outclassed the existing literature and other benchmark models, thus proving its efficiency.

A cyber-physical system (CPS) integrates various interconnected physical processes, computing resources, and networking units, as well as monitors the process and applications of the computing systems. Interconnection of the physical and cyber world initiates threatening security challenges, especially with the increasing complexity of communication networks. Despite efforts to combat these challenges, it is difficult to detect and analyze cyber-physical attacks in a complex CPS. Machine learning-based models have been adopted by researchers to analyze cyber-physical security systems. This paper discusses the security threats, vulnerabilities, challenges, and attacks of CPS. Initially, the CPS architecture is presented as a layered approach including the physical layer, network layer, and application layer in terms of functionality. Then, different cyber-physical attacks regarding each layer are elaborated, in addition to challenges and key issues associated with each layer. Afterward, deep learning models are analyzed for malicious URLs and intrusion detection in cyber-physical systems. A multilayer perceptron architecture is utilized for experiments using the malicious URL detection dataset and KDD Cup99 dataset, and its performance is compared with existing works. Lastly, we provide a roadmap of future research directions for cyber-physical security to investigate attacks concerning their source, complexity, and impact.

Breast cancer is a common cause of female mortality in developing countries. Screening and early diagnosis can play an important role in the prevention and treatment of these cancers. This study proposes an ensemble learning-based voting classifier that combines the logistic regression and stochastic gradient descent classifier with deep convoluted features for the accurate detection of cancerous patients. Deep convoluted features are extracted from the microscopic features and fed to the ensemble voting classifier. This idea provides an optimized framework that accurately classifies malignant and benign tumors with improved accuracy. Results obtained using the voting classifier with convoluted features demonstrate that the highest classification accuracy of 100% is achieved. The proposed approach revealed the accuracy enhancement in comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches.