The significance of contextual data has been recognized by analysts and specialists in numerous disciplines such as customization, data recovery, ubiquitous and versatile processing, information mining, and management. While a generous research has just been performed in the zone of recommender frameworks, by far most of the existing approaches center on prescribing the most relevant items to customers. It usually neglects extra-contextual information, for example time, area, climate or the popularity of different locations. Therefore, we proposed a deep long-short term memory (LSTM) based context-enriched hierarchical model. This proposed model had two levels of hierarchy and each level comprised of a deep LSTM network. In each level, the task of the LSTM was different. At the first level, LSTM learned from user travel history and predicted the next location probabilities. A contextual learning unit was active between these two levels. This unit extracted maximum possible contexts related to a location, the user and its environment such as weather, climate and risks. This unit also estimated other effective parameters such as the popularity of a location. To avoid feature congestion, XGBoost was used to rank feature importance. The features with no importance were discarded. At the second level, another LSTM framework was used to learn these contextual features embedded with location probabilities and resulted into top ranked places. The performance of the proposed approach was elevated with an accuracy of 97.2%, followed by gated recurrent unit (GRU) (96.4%) and then Bidirectional LSTM (94.2%). We also performed experiments to find the optimal size of travel history for effective recommendations.

With rapid advancements in internet applications, the growth rate of recommendation systems for tourists has skyrocketed. This has generated an enormous amount of travel-based data in the form of reviews, blogs, and ratings. However, most recommendation systems only recommend the top-rated places. Along with the top-ranked places, we aim to discover places that are often ignored by tourists owing to lack of promotion or effective advertising, referred to as under-emphasized locations. In this study, we use all relevant data, such as travel blogs, ratings, and reviews, in order to obtain optimal recommendations. We also aim to discover the latent factors that need to be addressed, such as food, cleanliness, and opening hours, and recommend a tourist place based on user history data. In this study, we propose a cross mapping table approach based on the location’s popularity, ratings, latent topics, and sentiments. An objective function for recommendation optimization is formulated based on these mappings. The baseline algorithms are latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and support vector machine (SVM). Our results show that the combined features of LDA, SVM, ratings, and cross mappings are conducive to enhanced performance. The main motivation of this study was to help tourist industries to direct more attention towards designing effective promotional activities for under-emphasized locations.

Swarm intelligence techniques with incredible success rates are broadly used for various irregular and interdisciplinary topics. However, their impact on ensemble models is considerably unexplored. This study proposes an optimized-ensemble model integrated for smart home energy consumption management based on ensemble learning and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The proposed model exploits PSO in two distinct ways; first, PSO-based feature selection is performed to select the essential features from the raw dataset. Secondly, with larger datasets and comprehensive range problems, it can become a cumbersome task to tune hyper-parameters in a trial-and-error manner manually. Therefore, PSO was used as an optimization technique to fine-tune hyper-parameters of the selected ensemble model. A hybrid ensemble model is built by using combinations of five different baseline models. Hyper-parameters of each combination model were optimized using PSO followed by training on different random samples. We compared our proposed model with our previously proposed ANN-PSO model and a few other state-of-the-art models. The results show that optimized-ensemble learning models outperform individual models and the ANN-PSO model by minimizing RMSE to 6.05 from 9.63 and increasing the prediction accuracy by 95.6%. Moreover, our results show that random sampling can help improve prediction results compared to the ANN-PSO model from 92.3% to around 96%.

The accelerated growth rate of internet users and its applications, primarily e-business, has accustomed people to write their comments and reviews about the product they received. These reviews are remarkably competent to shape customers’ decisions. However, in crowdfunding, where investors finance innovative ideas in exchange for some rewards or products, the comments of investors are often ignored. These comments can play a markedly significant role in helping crowdfunding platforms to battle against the bitter challenge of fraudulent activities. We take advantage of the language modeling techniques and aim to merge them with neural networks to identify some hidden discussion patterns in the comments. Our objective is to design a language modeling based neural network architecture, where Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is used to predict discussion trends, i.e., either towards scam or non-scam. LSTM layers are fed with latent topic distribution learned from the pre-trained Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model. In order to optimize the recommendations, we used Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) as a baseline algorithm. This module helps investors find secure projects to invest in (with the highest chances of delivery) within their preferred categories. We used prediction accuracy, an optimal number of identified topics, and the number of epochs, as metrics of performance evaluation for the proposed approach. We compared our results with simple Neural Networks (NNs) and NN-LDA based on these performance metrics. The strengths of both integrated models suggest that the proposed model can play a substantial role in a better understanding of crowdfunding comments.

Crowdfunding has seen an enormous rise, becoming a new alternative funding source for emerging companies or new startups in recent years. As crowdfunding prevails, it is also under substantial risk of the occurrence of fraud. Though a growing number of articles indicate that crowdfunding scams are a new imminent threat to investors, little is known about them primarily due to the lack of measurement data collected from real scam cases. This paper fills the gap by collecting, labeling, and analyzing publicly available data of a hundred fraudulent campaigns on a crowdfunding platform. In order to find and understand distinguishing characteristics of crowdfunding scams, we propose to use a broad range of traits including project-based traits, project creator-based ones, and content-based ones such as linguistic cues and Named Entity Recognition features, etc. We then propose to use the feature selection method called Forward Stepwise Logistic Regression, through which 17 key discriminating features (including six original and hitherto unused ones) of scam campaigns are discovered. Based on the selected 17 key features, we present and discuss our findings and insights on distinguishing characteristics of crowdfunding scams, and build our scam detection model with 87.3% accuracy. We also explore the feasibility of early scam detection, building a model with 70.2% of classification accuracy right at the time of project launch. We discuss what features from which sections are more helpful for early scam detection on day 0 and thereafter.

In today’s world, smart buildings are considered an overarching system that automates a building’s complex operations and increases security while reducing environmental impact. One of the primary goals of building management systems is to promote sustainable and efficient use of energy, requiring coherent task management and execution of control commands for actuators. This paper proposes a predictive-learning framework based on contextual feature selection and optimal actuator control mechanism for minimizing energy consumption in smart buildings. We aim to assess multiple parameters and select the most relevant contextual features that would optimize energy consumption. We have implemented an artificial neural network-based particle swarm optimization (ANN-PSO) algorithm for predictive learning to train the framework on feature importance. Based on the relevance of attributes, our model was also capable of re-adding features. The extracted features are then applied as input parameters for the training of long short-term memory (LSTM) and optimal control module. We have proposed an objective function using a velocity boost-particle swarm optimization (VB-PSO) algorithm that reduces energy cost for optimal control. We then generated and defined the control tasks based on the fuzzy rule set and optimal values obtained from VB-PSO. We compared our model’s performance with and without feature selection using the root mean square error (RMSE) metric in the evaluation section. This paper also presents how optimal control can reduce energy cost and improve performance resulting from lesser learning cycles and decreased error rates.