The reported work aims to improve the performance of LSTM-based (Long Short-Term Memory) forecasting algorithms in cases of NARX (Nonlinear Autoregressive with eXogenous input) models by using evolutionary search. The proposed approach, ES-LSTM, combines a two-membered ES local search procedure (2MES) with an ADAM optimizer to train more accurate LSTMs. The accuracy is measured from both error and trend prediction points of view. The method first computes the learnable parameters of an LSTM, using a subset of the training data, and applies a modified version of 2MES optimization to tune them. In the second stage, all available training data are used to update the LSTM’s weight parameters. The performance of the resulting algorithm is assessed versus the accuracy of a standard trained LSTM in the case of multiple financial time series. The tests are conducted on both training and test data, respectively. The experimental results show a significant improvement in the forecasting of the direction of change without damaging the error measurements. All quality measures are better than in the case of the standard algorithm, while error measures are insignificantly higher or, in some cases, even better. Together with theoretical consideration, this proves that the new method outperforms the standard one.

The work reported in this paper aims at the development of evolutionary algorithms to register images for signature recognition purposes. We propose and develop several registration methods in order to obtain accurate and fast algorithms. First, we introduce two variants of the firefly method that proved to have excellent accuracy and fair run times. In order to speed up the computation, we propose two variants of Accelerated Particle Swarm Optimization (APSO) method. The resulted algorithms are significantly faster than the firefly-based ones, but the recognition rates are a little bit lower. In order to find a trade-off between the recognition rate and the computational complexity of the algorithms, we developed a hybrid method that combines the ability of auto-adaptive Evolution Strategies (ES) search to discover a global optimum solution with the strong quick convergence ability of APSO. The accuracy and the efficiency of the resulted algorithms have been experimentally proved by conducting a long series of tests on various pairs of signature images. The comparative analysis concerning the quality of the proposed methods together with conclusions and suggestions for further developments are provided in the final part of the paper.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of death globally. Detecting this kind of disease represents the principal concern of many scientists, and techniques belonging to various fields have been developed to attain accurate predictions. The aim of the paper is to investigate the potential of the classical, evolutionary, and deep learning-based methods to diagnose CVDs and to introduce a couple of complex hybrid techniques that combine hyper-parameter optimization algorithms with two of the most successful classification procedures: support vector machines (SVMs) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks. The resulting algorithms were tested on two public datasets: the data recorded by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation for Heart Disease together with its extension Statlog, two of the most significant medical databases used in automated prediction. A long series of simulations were performed to assess the accuracy of the analyzed methods. In our experiments, we used F1 score and MSE (mean squared error) to compare the performance of the algorithms. The experimentally established results together with theoretical consideration prove that the proposed methods outperform both the standard ones and the considered statistical methods. We have developed improvements to the best-performing algorithms that further increase the quality of their results, being a useful tool for assisting the professionals in diagnosing CVDs in early stages.

Image registration is one of the most important image processing tools enabling recognition, classification, detection and other analysis tasks. Registration methods are used to solve a large variety of real-world problems, including remote sensing, computer vision, geophysics, medical image analysis, surveillance, and so on. In the last few years, nature-inspired algorithms and metaheuristics have been successfully used to address the image registration problem, becoming a solid alternative for direct optimization methods. The aim of this paper is to investigate and summarize a series of state-of-the-art works reporting evolutionary-based registration methods. The papers were selected using the PRISMA 2020 method. The reported algorithms are reviewed and compared in terms of evolutionary components, fitness function, image similarity measures and algorithm accuracy indexes used in the alignment process.

The main aim of the reported work is to solve the registration problem for recognition purposes. We introduce two new evolutionary algorithms (EA) consisting of population-based search methods, followed by or combined with a local search scheme. We used a variant of the Firefly algorithm to conduct the population-based search, while the local exploration was implemented by the Two-Membered Evolutionary Strategy (2M-ES). Both algorithms use fitness function based on mutual information (MI) to direct the exploration toward an appropriate candidate solution. A good similarity measure is the one that enables us to predict well, and with the symmetric MI we tie similarity between two objects A and B directly to how well A predicts B, and vice versa. Since the search landscape of normalized mutual information proved more amenable for evolutionary computation algorithms than simple MI, we use normalized mutual information (NMI) defined as symmetric uncertainty. The proposed algorithms are tested against the well-known Principal Axes Transformation technique (PAT), a standard evolutionary strategy and a version of the Firefly algorithm developed to align images. The accuracy and the efficiency of the proposed algorithms are experimentally confirmed by our tests, both methods being excellently fitted to registering images.