Online media has an increasing presence on the restaurants’ activities through social media websites, coinciding with an increase in customers’ reviews of these restaurants. These reviews become the main source of information for both customers and decision-makers in this field. Any customer who is seeking such places will check their reviews first, which usually affect their final choice. In addition, customers’ experiences can be enhanced by utilizing other customers’ suggestions. Consequently, customers’ reviews can influence the success of restaurant business since it is considered the final judgment of the overall quality of any restaurant. Thus, decision-makers need to analyze their customers’ underlying sentiments in order to meet their expectations and improve the restaurants’ services, in terms of food quality, ambiance, price range, and customer service. The number of reviews available for various products and services has dramatically increased these days and so has the need for automated methods to collect and analyze these reviews. Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a field of machine learning that helps analyze and predict the sentiments underlying these reviews. Usually, SA for customers’ reviews face imbalanced datasets challenge, as the majority of these sentiments fall into supporters or resistors of the product or service. This work proposes a hybrid approach by combining the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and different oversampling techniques to handle the imbalanced data problem. SVM is applied as a machine learning classification technique to predict the sentiments of reviews by optimizing the dataset, which contains different reviews of several restaurants in Jordan. Data were collected from Jeeran, a well-known social network for Arabic reviews. A PSO technique is used to optimize the weights of the features, as well as four different oversampling techniques, namely, the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), SVM-SMOTE, Adaptive Synthetic Sampling (ADASYN) and borderline-SMOTE were examined to produce an optimized dataset and solve the imbalanced problem of the dataset. This study shows that the proposed PSO-SVM approach produces the best results compared to different classification techniques in terms of accuracy, F-measure, G-mean and AUC, for different versions of the datasets.

The world has witnessed recently a global outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19). This pandemic has affected many countries and has resulted in worldwide health concerns, thus governments are attempting to reduce its spread and impact on different aspects of life such as health, economics, education, and politics by making emergent decisions and policies (e.g., lockdown and social distancing). These new regulations influenced people’s daily life and cast significant burdens, concerns, and disparities on various population groups. Taking the wrong actions and enforcing bad decisions by some countries result in increasing the contagion rate and more catastrophic results. People start to post their opinions and feelings about their government’s decisions on different social media networks, and the data received through these platforms present a very useful source of information that affects how governments perceive and cope with the current the pandemic. Jordan was one of the top affected countries. In this paper, we proposed a decision support system based on the sentiment analysis mechanism by combining support vector machines with a whale optimization algorithm for automatically tuning the hyperparameters and performing feature weighting. The work is based on a hybrid evolutionary approach that aims to perform sentiment analysis combined with a decision support system to study people’s posts on Facebook to investigate their attitudes and feelings toward the government’s decisions during the pandemic. The government regulations were divided into two periods: the first and latter regulations. Studying public sentiments during these periods allows decision-makers in the government to sense people’s feelings, alert them in case of possible threats, and help in making proactive actions if needed to better handle the current pandemic situation. Five different versions were generated for each of the two collected datasets. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed Whale Optimization Algorithm & Support Vector Machines (WOA-SVM) against other metaheuristic algorithms and standard classification models as WOA-SVM has achieved 78.78% in terms of accuracy and 84.64% in term of f-measure, while other standard classification models such as NB, k-NN, J84, and SVM achieved an accuracy of 69.25%, 69.78%, 70.17%, and 69.29%, respectively, with 64.15%, 62.90%, 60.51%, and 59.09% F-measure. Moreover, when comparing our proposed WOA-SVM approach with other metaheuristic algorithms, which are GA-SVM, PSO-SVM, and MVO-SVM, WOA-SVM proved to outperform the other approaches with results of 78.78% in terms of accuracy and 84.64% in terms of F-measure. Further, we investigate and analyze the most relevant features and their effect to improve the decision support system of government decisions.

Biometric based access control is becoming increasingly popular in the current era because of its simplicity and user-friendliness. This eliminates identity recognition manual work and enables automated processing. The fingerprint is one of the most important biometrics that can be easily captured in an uncontrolled environment without human cooperation. It is important to reduce the time consumption during the comparison process in automated fingerprint identification systems when dealing with a large database. Fingerprint classification enables this objective to be accomplished by splitting fingerprints into several categories, but it still poses some difficulties because of the wide intraclass variations and the limited interclass variations since most fingerprint datasets are not categories. In this paper, we propose a classification and matching fingerprint model, and the classification classifies fingerprints into three main categories (arch, loop, and whorl) based on a pattern mathematical model using GoogleNet, AlexNet, and ResNet Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture and matching techniques based on bifurcation minutiae extraction. The proposed model was implemented and tested using MATLAB based on the FVC2004 dataset. The obtained result shows that the accuracy for classification is 100%, 75%, and 43.75% for GoogleNet, ResNet, and AlexNet, respectively. The time required to build a model is 262, 55, and 28 seconds for GoogleNet, ResNet, and AlexNet, respectively.

Due to the accelerated growth of symmetrical sentiment data across different platforms, experimenting with different sentiment analysis (SA) techniques allows for better decision-making and strategic planning for different sectors. Specifically, the emergence of COVID-19 has enriched the data of people’s opinions and feelings about medical products. In this paper, we analyze people’s sentiments about the products of a well-known e-commerce website named Alibaba.com. People’s sentiments are experimented with using a novel evolutionary approach by applying advanced pre-trained word embedding for word presentations and combining them with an evolutionary feature selection mechanism to classify these opinions into different levels of ratings. The proposed approach is based on harmony search algorithm and different classification techniques including random forest, k-nearest neighbor, AdaBoost, bagging, SVM, and REPtree to achieve competitive results with the least possible features. The experiments are conducted on five different datasets including medical gloves, hand sanitizer, medical oxygen, face masks, and a combination of all these datasets. The results show that the harmony search algorithm successfully reduced the number of features by 94.25%, 89.5%, 89.25%, 92.5%, and 84.25% for the medical glove, hand sanitizer, medical oxygen, face masks, and whole datasets, respectively, while keeping a competitive performance in terms of accuracy and root mean square error (RMSE) for the classification techniques and decreasing the computational time required for classification.

The internet of things (IoT) is a network of connected devices, enabling the exchange and collection of data from various environments. The routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) is a protocol for routing IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks, commonly used in IoT applications. However, RPL has several security and privacy issues that make it vulnerable to various attacks, including rank attacks (RA), which can lead to denial-of-service (DoS) scenarios. This research aims to address the impact of RA on RPL networks by conducting simulations using the Contiki/Cooja simulator with two topology types, random and grid, along with three RA scenarios and a normal network scenario. The study compares the performance of RPL network OF0 and MRHOF in terms of throughput, packet delivery ratio (PDR), hop count (HC) and delay. The results demonstrate that RA significantly degrades network performance and reduces network lifetime, thus draining its limited resources. Some possible solutions are also suggested to mitigate these attacks by focusing on core components of the network like objective function (OF) and node behavior. Future work will focus on studying security mechanisms for RPL against RA.