Optical character recognition is gaining immense importance in the domain of deep learning. With each passing day, handwritten digits (0–9) data are increasing rapidly, and plenty of research has been conducted thus far. However, there is still a need to develop a robust model that can fetch useful information and investigate self-build handwritten digit data efficiently and effectively. The convolutional neural network (CNN) models incorporating a sigmoid activation function with a large number of derivatives have low efficiency in terms of feature extraction. Here, we designed a novel CNN model integrated with the extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm. In this model, the sigmoid activation function is upgraded as the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function, and the CNN unit along with the ReLU activation function are used as a feature extractor. The ELM unit works as the image classifier, which makes the perfect symmetry for handwritten digit recognition. A deeplearning4j (DL4J) framework-based CNN-ELM model was developed and trained using the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) database. Validation of the model was performed through self-build handwritten digits and USPS test datasets. Furthermore, we observed the variation of accuracies by adding various hidden layers in the architecture. Results reveal that the CNN-ELM-DL4J approach outperforms the conventional CNN models in terms of accuracy and computational time.

The demand for recommender systems in E-commerce industry has increased tremendously. Efficient recommender systems are being proposed by different E-business companies with the intention to give users accurate and most relevant recommendation of products from huge amount of information. To improve the performance of recommender systems, various stochastic variants of gradient descent based algorithms have been reported. The scalability requirement of recommender systems needs algorithms with fast convergence to generate recommendations of specific items. Using the concepts of fractional calculus, an efficient variant of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) was developed for fast convergence. Such fractional SGD (F-SGD) is further accelerated by adding a momentum term, thus termed as momentum fractional stochastic gradient descent (mF-SGD). The proposed mF-SGD method is shown to offer improved estimation accuracy and convergence rate, as compared to F-SGD and standard momentum SGD for different proportions of previous gradients, fractional orders, learning rates and number of features.

An accurate and efficient Large-for-Gestational-Age (LGA) classification system is developed to classify a fetus as LGA or non-LGA, which has the potential to assist paediatricians and experts in establishing a state-of-the-art LGA prognosis process. The performance of the proposed scheme is validated by using LGA dataset collected from the National Pre-Pregnancy and Examination Program of China (2010–2013). A master feature vector is created to establish primarily data pre-processing, which includes a features’ discretization process and the entertainment of missing values and data imbalance issues. A principal feature vector is formed using GridSearch-based Recursive Feature Elimination with Cross-Validation (RFECV) + Information Gain (IG) feature selection scheme followed by stacking to select, rank, and extract significant features from the LGA dataset. Based on the proposed scheme, different features subset are identified and provided to four different machine learning (ML) classifiers. The proposed GridSearch-based RFECV+IG feature selection scheme with stacking using SVM (linear kernel) best suits the said classification process followed by SVM (RBF kernel) and LR classifiers. The Decision Tree (DT) classifier is not suggested because of its low performance. The highest prediction precision, recall, accuracy, Area Under the Curve (AUC), specificity, and F1 scores of 0.92, 0.87, 0.92, 0.95, 0.95, and 0.89 are achieved with SVM (linear kernel) classifier using top ten principal features subset, which is, in fact higher than the baselines methods. Moreover, almost every classification scheme best performed with ten principal feature subsets. Therefore, the proposed scheme has the potential to establish an efficient LGA prognosis process using gestational parameters, which can assist paediatricians and experts to improve the health of a newborn using computer aided-diagnostic system.

In recent years, information security has become a very important topic for researchers as well as military and government officials. For secure communication, it is necessary to develop novel ways to hide information. For this purpose, steganography is commonly used to send secret information to its destination using different techniques. In this article, our main focus is on text-based steganography. Hidden information in text files is difficult to discover as text data has low redundancy in comparison to other mediums of steganography. Hence, we use Arabic text to hide secret information using a combination of Unicode character's zero-width-character and zero-width-joiner in our proposed algorithm. The experimental results show hidden data capacity per word is significantly increased in comparison to the recently proposed algorithms. The major advantage of our proposed algorithm over previous research is the high visual similarity in both cover and stego-text that can reduce the attention of intruders.