Feature selection is the procedure of extracting the optimal subset of features from an elementary feature set, to reduce the dimensionality of the data. It is an important part of improving the classification accuracy of classification algorithms for big data. Hybrid metaheuristics is one of the most popular methods for dealing with optimization issues. This article proposes a novel feature selection technique called MetaSCA, derived from the standard sine cosine algorithm (SCA). Founded on the SCA, the golden sine section coefficient is added, to diminish the search area for feature selection. In addition, a multi-level adjustment factor strategy is adopted to obtain an equilibrium between exploration and exploitation. The performance of MetaSCA was assessed using the following evaluation indicators: average fitness, worst fitness, optimal fitness, classification accuracy, average proportion of optimal feature subsets, feature selection time, and standard deviation. The performance was measured on the UCI data set and then compared with three algorithms: the sine cosine algorithm (SCA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and whale optimization algorithm (WOA). It was demonstrated by the simulation data results that the MetaSCA technique had the best accuracy and optimal feature subset in feature selection on the UCI data sets, in most of the cases.

Data are a strategic resource for industrial production, and an efficient data-mining process will increase productivity. However, there exist many missing values in data collected in real life due to various problems. Because the missing data may reduce productivity, missing value imputation is an important research topic in data mining. At present, most studies mainly focus on imputation methods for continuous missing data, while a few concentrate on discrete missing data. In this paper, a discrete missing value imputation method based on a multilayer perceptron (MLP) is proposed, which employs a momentum gradient descent algorithm, and some prefilling strategies are utilized to improve the convergence speed of the MLP. To verify the effectiveness of the method, experiments are conducted to compare the classification accuracy with eight common imputation methods, such as the mode, random, hot-deck, KNN, autoencoder, and MLP, under different missing mechanisms and missing proportions. Experimental results verify that the improved MLP model (IMLP) can effectively impute discrete missing values in most situations under three missing patterns.

Graph convolutional networks (GCN) are an important research method for intelligent transportation systems (ITS), but they also face the challenge of how to describe the complex spatio-temporal relationships between traffic objects (nodes) more effectively. Although most predictive models are designed based on graph convolutional structures and have achieved effective results, they have certain limitations in describing the high-order relationships between real data. The emergence of hypergraphs breaks this limitation. A dynamic spatio-temporal hypergraph convolutional network (DSTHGCN) model is proposed in this paper. It models the dynamic characteristics of traffic flow graph nodes and the hyperedge features of hypergraphs simultaneously, achieving collaborative convolution between graph convolution and hypergraph convolution (HGCN). On this basis, a hyperedge outlier removal mechanism (HOR) is introduced during the process of node information propagation to hyper-edges, effectively removing outliers and optimizing the hypergraph structure while reducing complexity. Through in-depth experimental analysis on real-world datasets, this method has better performance compared to other methods.

This work proposes efficient multi-scale object detection model with space-to-depth convolution and BiFPN combined with FasterNet (ES-BiCF-YOLOv8), a deep learning method, to address the problems associated with detecting steel surface defects in contemporary industrial production. The method makes innovative improvements based on the YOLOv8 algorithm and enhances the performance of the novel model mainly through the following aspects. First, the space-to-depth layer followed by a non-strided convolution layer (SPD-Conv) and the efficient multi-scale attention mechanism is introduced into the feature extraction network to enhance the model’s ability to capture fine-grained information and the fusion of multi-scale features. Second, the feature fusion network is optimized by utilizing a weighted bi-directional feature pyramid network and a lightweight network, FasterNet, to improve computational efficiency. Finally, it is shown that ES-BiCF-YOLOv8 reduces the complexity and computational requirements of the model while increasing the detection accuracy utilizing the NEU-DET dataset and deepPCB dataset with substantial experimental validation. The ES-BiCF-YOLOv8 model achieves a 5% improvement of the mean average precision value on the NEU-DET dataset, with the number of parameters and the computational amount only being the baseline 89% and 27%, and also demonstrates good generalization performance on the deepPCB dataset. Furthermore, the experiments demonstrate that ES-BiCF-YOLOv8 can be used for steel surface defect detection in industrial production because it uses less computational resources and can detect in real-time while maintaining high accuracy, in comparison to other popular object detection algorithms. The results of this work not only improve the efficiency and accuracy of steel surface defect detection but also provide ideas for the application of deep learning in the field of industrial detection.

Medical imaging technologies, as essential tools for the precise visualization of internal anatomical structures, play a crucial role in early disease detection and ensuring accurate diagnosis. Recently, semi-supervised learning has become a key strategy in medical image segmentation to reduce reliance on scarce annotated data. However, existing frameworks, such as the Mean Teacher (MT), often suffer from low-quality pseudo-labels and limited robustness due to structural homogeneity and noise amplification in complex medical scenarios. To address these issues, this study presents a novel Dual-Student Mean Teacher Network (DSMT-Net), which enhances performance through a collaborative complementary architecture and pixel-level pseudo-label optimization. First, DSMT-Net combines U-Net and Mamba-UNet as dual students, utilizing the former's local boundary accuracy and the latter's global dependency modeling via a state-space model. Second, a pixel-level pseudo-label enhancement mechanism is introduced, combining pixel-level similarity analysis, adaptive confidence threshold setting, and iterative propagation to improve pseudo-label quality while maintaining structural consistency. Third, a self-supervised contrastive loss is adopted to enforce feature consistency between the dual students, alleviating noise propagation and improving the efficiency of unsupervised learning. Comprehensive evaluations on the ACDC and LA datasets confirm the effectiveness of DSMT-Net, highlighting its substantial capability to lower annotation requirements in medical image segmentation tasks. This provides a robust and scalable framework for semi-supervised learning in medical image segmentation, advancing clinical diagnostic efficiency and accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/sunwenlong1/DSMT.git.