Different automated decision support systems based on artificial neural network (ANN) have been widely proposed for detection of heart disease in previous studies. However, most of these techniques focus on preprocessing of features only. In this paper, we focus on both i.e., refinement of features and elimination of the problems posed by the predictive model i.e., the problems of underfitting and overfitting. By avoiding the model from overfitting and underfitting, it can show good performance on both the datasets i.e., training data and testing data. Inappropriate network configuration and irrelevant features often result in overfitting the training data. To eliminate irrelevant features, we propose to use χ2 statistical model while the optimally configured deep neural network (DNN) is searched by using exhaustive search strategy. The strength of the proposed hybrid model named χ2-DNN is evaluated by comparing its performance with conventional ANN and DNN models, other state of the art machine learning models and previously reported methods for heart disease prediction. The proposed model achieves prediction accuracy of 93.33%. The obtained results are promising compared to the previously reported methods. The findings of the study suggest that the proposed diagnostic system can be used by physicians to accurately predict heart disease.

About half of the people who develop heart failure (HF) die within five years of diagnosis. Over the years, researchers have developed several machine learning-based models for the early prediction of HF and to help cardiologists to improve the diagnosis process. In this paper, we introduce an expert system that stacks two support vector machine (SVM) models for the effective prediction of HF. The first SVM model is linear and $L_{1}$ regularized. It has the capability to eliminate irrelevant features by shrinking their coefficients to zero. The second SVM model is $L_{2}$ regularized. It is used as a predictive model. To optimize the two models, we propose a hybrid grid search algorithm (HGSA) that is capable of optimizing the two models simultaneously. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated using six different evaluation metrics: accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), ROC charts, and area under the curve (AUC). The experimental results confirm that the proposed method improves the performance of a conventional SVM model by 3.3%. Moreover, the proposed method shows better performance compared to the ten previously proposed methods that achieved accuracies in the range of 57.85%–91.83%. In addition, the proposed method also shows better performance than the other state-of-the-art machine learning ensemble models.

Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have successfully provided automated solutions to numerous real-world problems. Healthcare is one of the most important research areas for ML researchers, with the aim of developing automated disease prediction systems. One of the disease detection problems that AI and ML researchers have focused on is dementia detection using ML methods. Numerous automated diagnostic systems based on ML techniques for early prediction of dementia have been proposed in the literature. Few systematic literature reviews (SLR) have been conducted for dementia prediction based on ML techniques in the past. However, these SLR focused on a single type of data modality for the detection of dementia. Hence, the purpose of this study is to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of ML-based automated diagnostic systems considering different types of data modalities such as images, clinical-features, and voice data. We collected the research articles from 2011 to 2022 using the keywords dementia, machine learning, feature selection, data modalities, and automated diagnostic systems. The selected articles were critically analyzed and discussed. It was observed that image data driven ML models yields promising results in terms of dementia prediction compared to other data modalities, i.e., clinical feature-based data and voice data. Furthermore, this SLR highlighted the limitations of the previously proposed automated methods for dementia and presented future directions to overcome these limitations.

Objective: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a serious neurodegenerative disorder. It is reported that most of PD patients have voice impairments. But these voice impairments are not perceptible to common listeners. Therefore, different machine learning methods have been developed for automated PD detection. However, these methods either lack generalization and clinically significant classification performance or face the problem of subject overlap. Methods: To overcome the problems discussed above, we attempt to develop a hybrid intelligent system that can automatically perform acoustic analysis of voice signals in order to detect PD. The proposed intelligent system uses linear discriminant analysis (LDA) for dimensionality reduction and genetic algorithm (GA) for hyperparameters optimization of neural network (NN) which is used as a predictive model. Moreover, to avoid subject overlap, we use leave one subject out (LOSO) validation. Results: The proposed method namely LDA-NN-GA is evaluated in numerical experiments on multiple types of sustained phonations data in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and Matthew correlation coefficient. It achieves classification accuracy of 95% on training database and 100% on testing database using all the extracted features. However, as the dataset is imbalanced in terms of gender, thus, to obtain unbiased results, we eliminated the gender dependent features and obtained accuracy of 80% for training database and 82.14% for testing database, which seems to be more unbiased results. Conclusion: Compared with the previous machine learning methods, the proposed LDA-NN-GA method shows better performance and lower complexity. Clinical Impact: The experimental results suggest that the proposed automated diagnostic system has the potential to classify PD patients from healthy subjects. Additionally, in future the proposed method can also be exploited for prodromal and differential diagnosis, which are considered challenging tasks.

Recent advances in computer vision have allowed broad applications in every area of life, and agriculture is not left out. For the agri-food industry, the use of advanced technology is essential. Owing to deep learning’s capability to learn robust features from images, it has witnessed enormous application in several fields. Fruit detection and classification remains challenging due to the form, color, and texture of different fruit species. While studying the impact of computer vision on fruit detection and classification, we pointed out that till 2018 many conventional machine learning methods were utilized while a few methods exploited the application of deep learning methods for fruit detection and classification. This has prompted us to pursue an extensive study on surveying and implementing deep learning models for fruit detection and classification. In this article, we intensively discussed the datasets used by many scholars, the practical descriptors, the model’s implementation, and the challenges of using deep learning to detect and categorize fruits. Lastly, we summarized the results of different deep learning methods applied in previous studies for the purpose of fruit detection and classification. This review covers the study of recently published articles that utilized deep learning models for fruit identification and classification. Additionally, we also implemented from scratch a deep learning model for fruit classification using the popular dataset “Fruit 360” to make it easier for beginner researchers in the field of agriculture to understand the role of deep learning in the agriculture domain.