Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has increased the importance of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) instigating students to study from their homes. Every day a tremendous amount of data is generated when students interact with VLEs to perform different activities and access learning material. To make the generated data useful, it must be processed and managed by the proper machine learning (ML) algorithm. ML algorithms’ applications are many folds with Education Data Mining (EDM) and Learning Analytics (LA) as their major fields. ML algorithms are commonly used to process raw data to discover hidden patterns and construct a model to make future predictions, such as predicting students’ performance, dropouts, engagement, etc. However, in VLE, it is important to select the right and most applicable ML algorithm to give the best performance results. In this study, we aim to improve those ML and DL algorithms’ performance that give an inferior performance in terms of performance, accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. Several ML algorithms were applied on Open University Learning Analytics (OULA) dataset to reveal which one offers the best results in terms of performance, accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. Two popular ML algorithms called Decision Tree (DT) and Feed-Forward Neural Network (FFNN) provided unsatisfactory results. They were selected and experimented with various techniques such as grid search cross-validation, adaptive boosting, extreme gradient boosting, early stopping, feature engineering, and dropping inactive neurons to improve their performance scores. Moreover, we also determined the feature weights/importance in predicting the students’ study performance, leading to the design and development of the adaptive learning system. The ML techniques and the methods used in this research study can be used by instructors/administrators to optimize learning content and provide informed guidance to students, thus improving their learning experience and making it exciting and adaptive.

Distributed network attacks are referred to, usually, as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks take advantage of specific limitations that apply to any arrangement asset, such as the framework of the authorized organization’s site. In the existing research study, the author worked on an old KDD dataset. It is necessary to work with the latest dataset to identify the current state of DDoS attacks. This paper, used a machine learning approach for DDoS attack types classification and prediction. For this purpose, used Random Forest and XGBoost classification algorithms. To access the research proposed a complete framework for DDoS attacks prediction. For the proposed work, the UNWS-np-15 dataset was extracted from the GitHub repository and Python was used as a simulator. After applying the machine learning models, we generated a confusion matrix for identification of the model performance. In the first classification, the results showed that both Precision (PR) and Recall (RE) are $\sim 89$ % for the Random Forest algorithm. The average Accuracy (AC) of our proposed model is ~89% which is superb and enough good. In the second classification, the results showed that both Precision (PR) and Recall (RE) are approximately 90% for the XGBoost algorithm. The average Accuracy (AC) of our suggested model is ~90%. By comparing our work to the existing research works, the accuracy of the defect determination was significantly improved which is approximately 85% and 79%, respectively.

Internet of Things (IoT) is producing an extraordinary volume of data daily, and it is possible that the data may become useless while on its way to the cloud, due to long distances. Fog/edge computing is a new model for analysing and acting on time-sensitive data, adjacent to where it is produced. Further, cloud services provided by large companies such as Google, can also be localised to improve response time and service agility. This is accomplished through deploying small-scale datacentres in various locations, where needed in proximity of users; and connected to a centralised cloud that establish a multi-access edge computing (MEC). The MEC setup involves three parties, i.e. service-providers (IaaS), application-providers (SaaS), network-providers (NaaS); which might have different goals, therefore, making resource management difficult. Unlike existing literature, we consider resource management with-respect-to all parties; and suggest game-theoretic resource management techniques to minimise infrastructure energy consumption and costs while ensuring applications' performance. Our empirical evaluation, using Google's workload traces, suggests that our approach could reduce up to 11.95% energy consumption, and ~17.86% user costs with negligible loss in performance. Moreover, IaaS can reduce up-to 20.27% energy bills and NaaS can increase their costs-savings up-to 18.52% as compared to other methods.

Optimization is an important research field, especially in engineering, physical sciences, and economics. The main purpose of optimization is to maximize the profit and minimize the cost of production as well as the loss of the system. Evolutionary computation algorithms, such as the genetic algorithm and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm have been successfully employed in solving various optimization problems. Owing to its application potential and promising performance in discovering the optimal solution, the PSO algorithm has been recognized as a powerful optimization technique and attracted an ever-increasing interest in the evolutionary computation community. In this article, a novel $N$ -state Markovian jumping PSO (NS-MJPSO) algorithm is presented where the velocity updating equation is adjusted based on the state evolution governed by a Markov chain. The performance of the proposed NS-MJPSO algorithm is evaluated via some widely used mathematical benchmark functions. The experimental results demonstrate that the developed NS-MJPSO algorithm outperforms some currently popular PSO algorithms on the widely used benchmark functions.