Traffic accidents on highways are a leading cause of death despite the development of traffic safety measures. The burden of casualties and damage caused by road accidents is very high for developing countries. Many factors are associated with traffic accidents, some of which are more significant than others in determining the severity of accidents. Data mining techniques can help in predicting influential factors related to crash severity. In this study, significant factors that are strongly correlated with the accident severity on highways are identified by Random Forest. Top features affecting accidental severity include distance, temperature, wind_Chill, humidity, visibility, and wind direction. This study presents an ensemble of machine learning and deep learning models by combining Random Forest and Convolutional Neural Network called RFCNN for the prediction of road accident severity. The performance of the proposed approach is compared with several base learner classifiers. The data used in the analysis include accident records of the USA from February 2016 to June 2020. Obtained results demonstrate that the RFCNN enhanced the decision-making process and outperformed other models with 0.991 accuracy, 0.974 precision, 0.986 recall, and 0.980 F-score using the 20 most significant features in predicting the severity of accidents.

An invisibility cloak that can hide an arbitrary object external to the cloak itself has not been devised before. In this Letter, we introduce a novel way to design a remote cloaking device that makes any object located at a certain distance invisible. This is accomplished using multi-folded transformation optics to remotely generate a hidden region around the object that no field can penetrate and that does not disturb the far-field scattering electromagnetic field. As a result, any object in the hidden region can stay in position or move freely within that region and remain invisible. Our idea is further extended in order to design a remote illusion optics that can transform any arbitrary object into another one. Unlike other cloaking methods, this method would require no knowledge of the details of the object itself. The proposed multi-folded transformation optics will be crucial in the design of remote devices in a variety of contexts.

Rapid expansion of the world’s population has negatively impacted the environment, notably water quality. As a result, water-quality prediction has arisen as a hot issue during the last decade. Existing techniques fall short in terms of good accuracy. Furthermore, presently, the dataset available for analysis contains missing values; these missing values have a significant effect on the performance of the classifiers. An automated system for water-quality prediction that deals with the missing values efficiently and achieves good accuracy for water-quality prediction is proposed in this study. To handle the accuracy problem, this study makes use of the stacked ensemble H${}_2$O AutoML model; to handle the missing values, this study makes use of the KNN imputer. Moreover, the performance of the proposed system is compared to that of seven machine learning algorithms. Experiments are performed in two scenarios: removing missing values and using the KNN imputer. The contribution of each feature regarding prediction is explained using SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations). Results reveal that the proposed stacked model outperforms other models with 97% accuracy, 96% precision, 99% recall, and 98% F1-score for water-quality prediction.