Recent advancements in electronic commerce and communication systems have significantly increased the use of credit cards for both online and regular transactions. However, there has been a steady rise in fraudulent credit card transactions, costing financial companies huge losses every year. The development of effective fraud detection algorithms is vital in minimizing these losses, but it is challenging because most credit card datasets are highly imbalanced. Also, using conventional machine learning algorithms for credit card fraud detection is inefficient due to their design, which involves a static mapping of the input vector to output vectors. Therefore, they cannot adapt to the dynamic shopping behavior of credit card clients. This paper proposes an efficient approach to detect credit card fraud using a neural network ensemble classifier and a hybrid data resampling method. The ensemble classifier is obtained using a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network as the base learner in the adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) technique. Meanwhile, the hybrid resampling is achieved using the synthetic minority oversampling technique and edited nearest neighbor (SMOTE-ENN) method. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using publicly available real-world credit card transaction datasets. The performance of the proposed approach is benchmarked against the following algorithms: support vector machine (SVM), multilayer perceptron (MLP), decision tree, traditional AdaBoost, and LSTM. The experimental results show that the classifiers performed better when trained with the resampled data, and the proposed LSTM ensemble outperformed the other algorithms.

Smartgrid is a paradigm that was introduced into the conventional electricity network to enhance the way generation, transmission, and distribution networks interrelate. It involves the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and other solution in fault and intrusion detection, mere monitoring of energy generation, transmission, and distribution. However, on one hand, the actual and earlier smartgrid, do not integrate more advanced features such as automatic decision making, security, scalability, self-healing and awareness, real-time monitoring, cross-layer compatibility, etc. On the other hand, the emergence of the digitalization of the communication infrastructure to support the economic sector which among them are energy generation and distribution grid with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and large-scale Machine to Machine (M2M) communication. With the future Massive Internet of Things (MIoT) as one of the pillars of 5G/6G network factory, it is the enabler to support the next generation smart grid by providing the needed platform that integrates, in addition to the communication infrastructure, the AI and IoT support, providing a multitenant system. This paper aim at presenting a comprehensive review of next smart grid research trends and technological background, discuss a futuristic next-generation smart grid driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and leverage by IoT and 5G. In addition, it discusses the challenges of next-generation smart-grids as it relate to the integration of AI, IoT and 5G for better smart grid architecture. Also, proffers possible solutions to some of the challenges and standards to support this novel trend. A corresponding future work will dwell on the implementation of the discussed integration of AI, IoT and 5G for next-generation smart grid, using Matlab, NS2/NS3, Open-daylight and Mininet as soft tools and compare with related literature.

The high prevalence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a significant public health concern globally. The condition has a high mortality rate, especially in developing countries. CKD often go undetected since there are no obvious early-stage symptoms. Meanwhile, early detection and on-time clinical intervention are necessary to reduce the disease progression. Machine learning (ML) models can provide an efficient and cost-effective computer-aided diagnosis to assist clinicians in achieving early CKD detection. This research proposed an approach to effectively detect CKD by combining the information-gain-based feature selection technique and a cost-sensitive adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) classifier. An approach like this could save CKD screening time and cost since only a few clinical test attributes would be needed for the diagnosis. The proposed approach was benchmarked against recently proposed CKD prediction methods and well-known classifiers. Among these classifiers, the proposed cost-sensitive AdaBoost trained with the reduced feature set achieved the best classification performance with an accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 99.8%, 100%, and 99.8%, respectively. Additionally, the experimental results show that the feature selection positively impacted the performance of the various classifiers. The proposed approach has produced an effective predictive model for CKD diagnosis and could be applied to more imbalanced medical datasets for effective disease detection.

Hepatitis B is a potentially deadly liver infection caused by the hepatitis B virus. It is a serious public health problem globally. Substantial efforts have been made to apply machine learning in detecting the virus. However, the application of model interpretability is limited in the existing literature. Model interpretability makes it easier for humans to understand and trust the machine-learning model. Therefore, in this study, we used SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), a game-based theoretical approach to explain and visualize the predictions of machine learning models applied for hepatitis B diagnosis. The algorithms used in building the models include decision tree, logistic regression, support vector machines, random forest, adaptive boosting (AdaBoost), and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), and they achieved balanced accuracies of 75%, 82%, 75%, 86%, 92%, and 90%, respectively. Meanwhile, the SHAP values showed that bilirubin is the most significant feature contributing to a higher mortality rate. Consequently, older patients are more likely to die with elevated bilirubin levels. The outcome of this study can aid health practitioners and health policymakers in explaining the result of machine learning models for health-related problems.

Numerous scientific studies have been conducted, and a wide range of new inorganic geopolymer composite applications have emerged as a result. This innovative material can be made from agricultural waste sources rich in aluminosilicate, which provides best substitute for traditional cement in terms of both quality and cost. This paper presents the state-of-the-art review of deploying agro-wastes as precursor for geopolymer concrete with the view to aggregating the research studies of using agro waste ash-based geopolymer as the most auspicious, durable, inexpensive, user-friendly, and eco-beneficial construction materials for the long-term use. This paper thoroughly examines the rheological, workability, chemistry, and mechanical characteristics of agro-waste ash-based geopolymer concrete with emphasis on sugarcane bagasse and banana peels ash. Sugarcane and green bananas (matooke) play vital roles in East African agriculture, economy and food security. The effects micro-structures, curing conditions, molarity of metallic alkalis, proportioning of alkaline-binder ratio, aggregates content and size fractions effects on the behavior of geopolymer concrete were critically assessed. The study highlighted the abundance of these agro products which serve as staple food in East African region, therefore, it becomes imperative to recycle its waste to produce durable concrete by way of waste management strategy. As a vital component of the readily available building materials, they have a crucial role to play in providing the construction sector with a sustainable outlook while concluding that agro-wastes are potential material that could be a game changer for geopolymer concrete, a number of research gaps that worthy for further study were identified. The findings of this review further demonstrates that agro-waste derivatives when used as binder materials in geopolymer concrete can be a viable and sustainable alternative to conventional cementitious materials.

Presently, the use of a credit card has become an integral part of contemporary banking and financial system. Predicting potential credit card defaulters or debtors is a crucial business opportunity for financial institutions. For now, some machine learning methods have been applied to achieve this task. However, with the dynamic and imbalanced nature of credit card default data, it is challenging for classical machine learning algorithms to proffer robust models with optimal performance. Research has shown that the performance of machine learning algorithms can be significantly improved when provided with optimal features. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised feature learning method to improve the performance of various classifiers using a stacked sparse autoencoder (SSAE). The SSAE was optimized to achieve improved performance. The proposed SSAE learned excellent feature representations that were used to train the classifiers. The performance of the proposed approach is compared with an instance where the classifiers were trained using the raw data. Also, a comparison is made with previous scholarly works, and the proposed approach showed superior performance over other methods.